Charlie St. Cloud

(2010) ** Pg-13
109 min. Universal Pictures. Director: Burr Steers. Cast: Zac Efron, Charlie Tahan, Amanda Crew, Augustus Prew, Donal Logue.

/content/films/3807/2.jpgThough it’s hard to feel sorry for Zac Efron (even knowing that he’ll get lots of reviews like this one), it’s also hard to take the baby-blue-eyed teen idol seriously as he takes baby steps into more adult fare. Even his love interest in Charlie St. Cloud is liable to agree that he’s the prettier of the two.

In his first serious dramatic test, Efron gets a passing grade (barely), but he still seems synthetic, almost as much so as the sappy magic realism of this adaptation of Ben Sherwood’s novel The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud. There’s no other way to say it: Charlie sees dead people. Five years after the one-time golden boy’s high-school graduation and the tragic death of his eleven-year-old brother Sam (Charlie Tahan), Charlie has abandoned his plans of attending Stanford on a sailing scholarship, instead taking a job as the caretaker of Seaside Cemetery. This way, he can keep his promise to meet Sam for daily “magic hour” baseball practice sessions—after all, there’s no male-bonding like “game of catch” bonding (Enrique Chediak’s sun-dappled photography obliges the film’s dreamy tone).

Naturally, Efron is enthusiastic to show us he can act, so he sheds many a tear from his big doe eyes. Though he’s credible in these moments, the conventions of movie-star, studio-backed cinema conspire against him. Playing a character whose social development has been cripplingly halted, Efron nevertheless sports gym-refined fitness and the kind of just-so uncombed look that can only be achieved by meticulous combing. As fellow sailing buff Tess Carroll (Amanda Crew) says in one of the film’s first lines of dialogue, “God, that boy is just too good!”

Though his mom Kim Basinger once warned, “You can’t put life on hold, Charlie. It doesn’t wait for you,” Charlie has put his sailing days behind him (should he ever miss a sunset rendezvous, his brother would disappear for good). Still, from afar, Charlie has begun making goo-goo eyes at Tess, who’s planning a six-month transglobal sailing voyage. Despite clear obstacles, a date confirms the two are a perfect fit (there’s also that clinch in the graveyard…creeee-py!), which begs a question: what to do about Sam? The Nicholas Sparks-meets-Bruce Joel Rubin plot tangles up one obvious twist, then a less obvious one before the knots can be pulled taut and at last untied in the sailing-themed third act.

Efron shows equally good chemistry with Tahan and Crew, proving again that his best asset is sheer charm. But this latest middle-of-the-road vehicle—like the last, 17 Again, directed by Burr Steers—also proves that Efron doesn’t show the adventurousness of his role model, Leonardo DiCaprio (anyone remember The Basketball Diaries?). The movie’s God talk (most of it coming from…Ray Liotta?) and blatant expression of theme through platitudes make this romantic melodrama as drippy as the St. Cloud boys’ eyes.

[This review first appeared in Palo Alto Weekly.]

Share/bookmark: del.icio.us Digg Facebook Fark Furl Google Bookmarks Newsvine Reddit StumbleUpon Yahoo! My Web Permalink Permalink
Sponsored Links