Charlie St. Cloud

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.

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?

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.

I have to admit, that I never gave much thought of the phenomenon that was surrounding Zac Efron. The ladies seemed to love him and no one could have blamed him, if he just kept making the simple romantic movies, that would please his fan base.

He seems to have other things on his mind though. He is trying to act. And I have to admit, that I was surprised at how engaging and how truthful he seemed in this one. I do think he is better than the High School Musical tag he has stamped on him (which would mean, he is a bad actor, which frankly I don't think could be said of him).

His character does get a lot of attention from the female characters on display here, which seems natural. On the other hand, you do have the female lead in here, that does not seem to get any attention whatsoever, which makes you wonder if the male "population" in the movie is blind or into other things. Whatever it is, this is one of the things that do not feel right. The other being the mixture between the elements on display here. Let me just tell you, that this isn't neither your simple romantic movie, nor just pure drama. There is other aspects to it. I can see though that this might ruin the movie for quite a few people. Especially if they expected something more straight-forward.