Le secret de Charlie

At least Zac Efron doesn't relive his experience of the dreadful film, "The Derby Stallion" (his first), which isn't nearly as good as a random game a kid might create in his backyard. "Charlie St. Cloud" is likewise a message film, but it wisely enriches the story with quirky details, charming sidetracks, and career advice, which may be completely wasted in the present economy.

The title character's name, Charlie St. Cloud (Zac Efron), by the way, may give you a not so subtle hint as to the film's latent spirituality. Charlie enters the story winning a boat race, graduating high school, and winning a scholarship to Stanford (for boating). He's tentative about leaving his small New England fishing village (the location of the story according to Ben Sherwood's novel and website), but he has high hopes for his future with the whole summer to say goodbye to the town.

In the meantime, he promises his little brother, Sam St. Cloud (Charlie Tahan), that he won't disappear like their father, and he emphasizes his promise with another: since they don't have money for expensive baseball camps, he will help Sam improve his baseball skills everyday for the duration of the summer (up until he has to enter Stanford the following fall semester). But before they can start, a sudden car accident kills both of them, with only Charlie receiving successful resuscitation. Charlie doesn't deal with his brother's loss very well. He works at a graveyard for 5 years. The graveyard job is a kind of symbolism for wasted time, lost opportunities, and the like; it probably isn't mockery against a potentially good job.

Writing about this basic premise, however, makes the story seem more emotional than it came across in the movie. Something either went wrong in the film adaptation or the filmmakers wanted to exude the type of playfulness they did in the previous collaboration between Zac Efron and the director, Burr Steers, in "17 Again". It works just to the extent that they steer clear of "The Derby Stallion", thankfully, but it drains the film of any internal complexities.

Charlie is either very messed up in the head, or he's seeing ghosts. The reason he stays at home in the graveyard is to keep his promise to his dead brother, a promise requiring him to play baseball with his brother's memory every summer. And he fears, or his brother fears, that if he stops going to the forest as promised, he'll lose his brother. He can't let go of his brother, whether the memory of him, the ghost of him, the spirit of him, or the something of him.

Talking to yourself in a forest and a graveyard has to mean something more than just the slightly corny, cute, and charming way it plays on screen. At times it seems more important for Zac Efron to get out of his shirt or, at least, get dripping wet (whether by jumping in a lake to avoid a duck attack, sliding on trashcan covers with his dead bro, or diving deep underwater to save his love interest). All his friends, or memories of them or something of them, are also good looking. Consequently, it has a few quickly developed romance scenes, but they seem like a minor focus.

Speaking of quirky little details, now to the most important question: What about those ducks? Are they still infesting the graveyard and dirtying the headstones? (Charlie battles ducks with trashcan covers and a toy airplane.) We never find out, and this has to be a rare case to waste such a comical plot point and not come back to it. As you see, the film has energy and fun, but perhaps the writers are desirous to channel the success of "The Sixth Sense" or other psychological thrillers ("A Beautiful Mind") while being afraid they might scare away a key demographic if they indulge too much. Dead people aren't the point of the movie either, though. They seem so minor they become like a mere plot gimmick. The story is about overcoming loss and finding your purpose. The tagline gives away the moral of the story: "Life is for living." (George Carlin liked to phrase it in the negative: "Life is about not dying", but he's an atheist materialist, so that won't work here.) Is Charlie's purpose to go back to boating and try to get in at Stanford? Is it to sail around the world?

At one point, Charlie asks the man who resuscitated him (Ray Liotta as Florio Ferrente), a man now with cancer, what the point of life is. He gets the response that it's about living a full one. But, if that wasn't vague enough, the man tells Charlie to do something more with his life. His divine purpose isn't to work in a graveyard, wage war with ducks, and talk to his dead/undead brother.

The movie doesn't make any definite recommendations about his future. It's either a stupid suggestion to, well, do something (perhaps following "Dead Poets Society"), or a smart suggestion to make his own choices about what to do. And specifically to accept the loss of his dead brother and not let his recurrent grief dictate his future. What if Charlie chooses to keep working in the graveyard in this bad economy? This question contains an interesting paradox, but he's not likely to make such a choice, judging from his inventive boat designs floating around his workroom.

The only problem is that not much of the discussion takes center stage in the movie. It exchanges depth for charming little details, career tips, minor romance elements, and something about ghosts/spirits/memories. It certainly isn't due to a fearful director, judging from his highly original and daring first film, "Igby Goes Down". But, in this case, we're just left wondering: What about those ducks?

I like movies that are exactly as they claim to be. "Charlie St. Cloud" is just that, a romantic drama, nothing more and nothing less.

There is nothing profound, although with a few thoughtful dynamics, it's just the story of a young man (Zac Efron) unable to overcome the tragic death of his younger brother until he meets a beautiful girl who shares his same passion for sailing.

The problems are plentiful, with cringe-worthy dialogue, supporting actors who haven't yet learned how to act, no affecting drama producing few tears, and there just isn't enough to completely hold your attention. But yet, because it's a simple love story that doesn't pretend to be grandiose and doesn't force out-of-place tears, I liked "Charlie St. Cloud". I found it to be sweet, subdued and modest.

It was also the perfect choice for Zac Efron as he matures in his acting career. Sure, there are probably a few too many shots of Efron standing in his jeans and t-shirts staring into the sunset with his longing, blue eyes, but that is, of course, partly why we would watch it in the first place.

I enjoyed this movie, for what it tries to do. It's not trying to be an art-house Oscar-bait film. It's basically a story about a good man who loses himself to grief and how he recovers. The core message of letting go and moving on is a good one.

It's not a dumb, roll-your-eyes movie and it's not too clever. It sails the line between those two extremes, but manages to do so without being bland. There's a lot to enjoy here: Efron's excellent performance, Tahan's charm and chemistry with Efron, and Crew's solidity. Prew also has his moments, and although nobody manages to steal any scenes from Efron, they were all believable. I wish we could have seen a lot more of Basinger and Liotta, though, and Logue's relative lack of prettiness was actually a kind of relief.

Although the characters are clean, they still do foolish things, loose their tempers, and make poor choices about how to spend their lives. Personally, I'm not as moved by stories where the main character is a self-absorbed, self-destructive jerk who--no surprise--brings pain on him/herself and others and succumbs to the usual pitfalls: alcohol/drugs, meaningless sex, or general idiotic acting out. That might have made the movie "cooler" or made Efron seem edgier, but the story and character wouldn't have been as resonant for me. I can root for and identify with characters who are trying to do their best, to do the right thing, but it still leads them quite naturally into struggling with personal demons.

There's not much logic or explanation for Charlie's ability to interact with the dead physically. It's the conceit of the film and the whole plot falls apart without it, so if you're going to enjoy the story at all, you have to suspend that bit of disbelief. On the level of pushing emotional buttons, this film hits them pretty hard: everything from raw attraction (a nearly constant undertone) to outright laughing (I loved the running gag with the geese) to embarrassment (one scene shows how even someone as good-looking as Efron can fall completely flat on his face in an awkward blind-date situation) to aching from a sense of loss and separation and loneliness. I never actually got close to crying, but I certainly felt tugged (although more so with the Charlie/Sam relationship than with the Charlie/Tess relationship) more than once.

Clearly the main draw of this film is Efron. If you're going for Efron eye candy you'll get it in spades, but happily (despite the many reviews that sneer to the contrary), he actually spends most of the movie with his shirt on, so you have some hope of focusing on his face. Of course, easily a quarter of the scenes where he's got his shirt on, he's wet for one reason or another, so it doesn't actually help much. And even if you do manage to focus on his face, you again have to get past the "Damn, he's pretty!" reaction and focus on whatever emotions the character has. Happily, once you've invested that much effort, you find yourself caring about Charlie and responding to those emotions. The story is compelling because of Efron's acting, precisely because once you get past the pretty, there really is something there. When he finally does get around to taking off his shirt, it's not without reason, so at least you're not left laughing like you are with most of the embarrassing shirtless moments in the Twilight series.

Let me reiterate the part about the eye candy. There's lots of it. And not just the actors, but the indoor locations, the lighting, the framing, the ocean, the sailboats, the shoreline, even the sculptures in the graveyard. There's a gorgeous sculpture of a desolate angel crying on a gravestone near the end of the film. (Although there's a strange moment in the middle of the movie when the camera focuses on a child-angel gravestone for a little too long and you suddenly wonder if the movie is going to turn into a horror flick with the child-angel coming to life and terrorizing the townspeople. But the sensation passes, and you realize how clean the story is. Despite the fact that the main character talks to dead people, there's never a creepy sense of foreboding. It might have been more interesting if they'd taken it in that direction.) Perhaps the plot is a little bit predictable and the surprise twist isn't a huge surprise, but it does hit Charlie's character hard, and Efron and Crew make it work.

I gave it an 8 out of 10, because it mostly succeeds at what it tries to do. One interesting thing about it is that it tends to defy easy categorization. Is it a romance? A comedy? A tragedy? A star vehicle? A story about depression? A fable? A story about mental illness? A story about loss? A fantasy? A story about grieving? Predictable? Engaging? A thin excuse to watch pretty people standing in front of pretty things? Something with emotional resonance? The answer is yes. One thing I liked about it was the sheer variety of emotions that I experienced while I watched it. Small funny things happen alongside small moments of sadness, and vice versa. In that sense, it has resonance that dips below the pretty surface.

There are many parallels to other twisty, turning, "are they alive or dead?" films of this genre that probably do it at lot better but Burr Steers effort is undeniably entertaining. He has some great acting from Charlie Tahan in particular to raise the rating a notch or two too.

The opening is neatly crafted as back story explaining how brothers Charlie (Efron) and Sam (Tahan) are as inseparable in death as in life. Fast forward five years and we have the revelation of a gift Charlie may, or may not, have. The story takes over from there as a charmingly meandering exploration of promises, principles, reasons and deeply held beliefs. Zac Efron gives a goodish but slightly uneven presentation of the "man with a mission", his own worse enemy, but also one of his word. There are moments when Efron is very convincing but there are others when he seems to be going through the motions. What Charlie Tahan succeeds in doing is taking the simple and raw and keeping it simple and raw, something Efron needs to work on.

Amanda Crew is good as the romantic interest and there are a couple of cameos from Kim Basinger and Ray Liotta.

Now I will not plot spoil to reveal the bigger flaws in the script but I was not expecting a revelation to be made in quite the way it was, and at the time was left thinking - that's stupid it should have been done differently without spoiling the story - but that is show business for you! Overall it is a worthwhile film with a reasonable point to make. I give it seven out of ten.

Charlie is a very good looking movie, it's got style, production values, promising performances, a fairly convincing story- line (if a little odd) and a good score - although I thought Charlie, who was supposed to adore his little brother, could have appeared a little less of a bully toward him (modern 'clowning' around I suppose). Otherwise, the relationship was OK. We don't find out too much about what happened to their father and the mother (Kim Basinger) for some unexplained reason goes away early in the story, never to return. She was obviously just a star turn. The movie overall has an otherworldly, haunted feel to it and leaves us wondering if Charlie's grief has left him hallucinating or that he actually can see ghosts? It gets a bit cloying and maybe heads off-track when he sees the 'ghost' of a girlfriend who may, or may not, actually be dead.

Anyone liking Ghost-type stories with youth oriented themes should be happy with the outcome but it might not always be pleasing for many others.