Le secret de Charlie

Charlie St Cloud is the type of movie many people will love to hate. The plot is simply contrived and the script is somewhat identical to Shyamalan's film "The Sixth Sense" yet I was very much moved by the story of Charlie St. Cloud and by Zac Efron in the title role. It looks like Zac is going out of his way to shred that teenage 'High School Musical' image that he is now known for.

When we first meet Efron in the title role he looks to be a young man with a bright future. A scholarship to Stanford awaits as he graduates high school from his New England coastal town where he enjoys sailing with his younger brother Charlie Tahan. The two share some heart warming chemistry as brothers, those who have younger siblings will understand the brotherly love between the two.

However, a cruel trick of fate puts the two of them in the path of an oncoming drunk driver. Both die, but a determined, spiritual paramedic played by Ray Liotta manages to bring Efron back.

As per an agreement they made minutes before the crash, Zac and Charlie still meet in the woods every day to play catch and work on Charlie's baseball skills. It's all Efron lives for. By some trick of fate he can communicate and see his deceased brother. Efron's forgotten Stanford and he now works at the local graveyard, to be close Charlie so that He can fulfil the promise he made.

I won't go into it too much except that the climax is something that we have seen before yet it is still touching and shows that we must learn that the true value of life is to live and let live.

I came out of the cinema feeling good and that is what the film is all about- loving life. My only criticism is that Liotta and Kim Basinger(as the mother) don't have enough screen time, although i must say that Liotta still manages to impress even with this small supporting role. Zac Efron and Charlie Tahan deliver strong performances as the two brothers and Amanda Crew is pretty decent. The film is beautifully shot and the scenery is quite breathtaking at times.

We've seen quite a few romantic dramas this year(Dear John, The Last Song)- but this has to be one of the most touching(not the most original i must say) but still, it'll make you feel good inside. So my advice is go watch the movie or rent it when it comes out on DVD and don't believe those critics who's job it is to tell us how bad the movie must be just because it didn't earn $100 million at the box office.

I was much moved by Charlie St. Cloud and by Zac Efron in the title role. It looks like the young man is going out way beyond being a Walt Disney bubblegum poster boy for pubescent young ladies.

When we first meet Efron in the title role he looks to be a young man with a bright future. A scholarship to Stanford is his as he graduates high school from his New England coastal town where he enjoys sailing and the companionship of his younger brother Charles Tatan. The two are rabid Red Sox fans as all New England kids are brought up to be. Efron's boat is named the Splendid Splinter which everyone in New England knows is the nickname of Ted Williams. Being much older than Zac or his character, I actually remember seeing Ted play.

A cruel trick of fate puts the two of them in the path of an oncoming drunk driver. Both die, but a determined paramedic played by Ray Liotta brings Efron back.

As per an agreement they made minutes before the crash, Efron and Tatan still meet in the woods every day to play catch and work on Tatan's baseball skills. It's all Efron lives for. By some trick of fate he can communicate and see Tatan, in fact he sees all kinds of dead folks including a young man he graduated with from high school who was killed in Iraq. Efron's forgotten Stanford and he now works at the local graveyard, the better to be near the ones he identifies with.

I won't go into the rest except that Efron does learn to let the dead bury the dead. Meeting up with Amanda Crew, another sailing enthusiast does help. And Liotta now dying of cancer tells Zac that he was saved for some special purpose.

Two great lessons of life are to be learned in Charlie St. Cloud. First that we all have some kind of destiny, the trick is to find it and recognize it. The second is that some people die young and maybe are meant to so that the rest of us recognize how precious life is and not to waste it. Having lost any number of people including a sister at a young age, it's something that is always uppermost in my mind.

Charlie St. Cloud is beautifully filmed with some breathtaking sailing sequences. The performers are flawless, especially Zac Efron. One thing I will agree with other reviewers about is that I wish that the role of the mother of the St. Cloud brothers played by Kim Basinger was more fully developed. After the death of her younger son, she moves out of town and you never really learn why.

Despite that minor criticism, Charlie St. Cloud is a moving film that should be seen by all generations for the life lessons imparted.

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 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.

This film is about a young man who loses his younger brother to a traffic accident. He remains locked in a state of grief until he rekindles with his friend from high school.

"Charlie St. Cloud" is beautifully filmed, with great artistic scenes and amazing sceneries. Cinematography is great, and many scenes are so beautiful that they could become postcards. However, the story is not as good, it is not very engaging. I find the plot unconvincing and the story telling is rather poor. The romance Charlie and the girl develops is unconvincing and contrived, and the emotional burden and guilt of Charlie could have been explored further.