Summer Hearthrobs and Numbskulls

Charlie St. Cloud Directed by Burr Steers Runtime: 109 min.

Dinner for Schmucks Directed by Jay Roach Runtime: 110 min.

In Dinner for Schmucks, Steve Carell plays a moronic artist who makes miniature dioramas with dead mice. Paul Rudd plays the executive who humiliates him at his boss’ snarky dinner party. Only the opening credit sequence of box-art (“mouseterpieces,” Carell’s character Barry explains) are of note; they’re the first and last we see of carefully composed imagery. Director Jay Roach forces the actors to mug and then pulls the camera in close—so that their embarrassment is even plainer. The desperation to be funny is as cruel as the dinner party itself. Actors are paid to be embarrassing, and audiences pay to get embarrassed. That’s the lesson to learn from Dinner for Schmucks, an idiot-comedy for idiots.

Zac Efron’s tween audience is also susceptible to Hollywood’s hard-sell. They don’t know that Charlie St. Cloud’s maudlin plot, in which Charlie (Efron) mourns his kid brother Sam (Charlie Tahan), rips off Timothy Hutton’s dilemma in Ordinary People from 30 years ago. Its metaphysical love story between Charlie and his high school classmate Tess (Amanda Crew) goes back 20 years to Ghost. And only 11 years ago, The Sixth Sense originated Charlie’s visions of dead people. All this shows how the makers of Charlie St. Cloud calculate its effect on naive young filmwatchers. That makes this otherwise undistinguished movie an archetype of modern Hollywood product and the gullible public.

This isn’t just the teen heartthrob tradition: Troy Donahue in Parrish; Sandra Dee in A Summer Place; Coppola’s The Outsiders; even Mandy Moore in A Walk to Remember and Miley Cyrus in The Last Song—all brought intelligence and credible feeling to the sub-genre of teen melodramas. But there’s as little genuine emotion in Charlie St. Cloud as there is in the two recent Twilight sequels, which the press now acclaim—jumping on the bandwagon before it’s too late. Hollywood’s exploitation of teen culture has become a matter of acquiescing to market forces regardless how shabby—and unmoving—the film.

Insincerity is apparent in the way Ray Liotta as an EMT evokes an innocuous religious belief that Charlie shifts into narcissistic self-actualization (“I can do this!”). Director Burr Steers is more maudlin than moral. Charlie’s survivor’s guilt forces him to tell Tess, “The more I’m in your world, the less I can be in his,” which is less instructive to adolescent viewers than it is simply manipulative of teen confusion. Charlie St. Cloud is so sappy it recalls Oscar Wilde’s Dickens jab: One must have a heart of stone to not laugh at it.

Efron cries tears the way a cheerleader waves pom-poms. Almost from the very beginning to the very end, he turns young manhood (older brother infatuation) into an audience-baiting gimmick. Since the original (good) High School Musical, Efron has been lab-controlled into a tween action figure, then plugged into lousy, calculated movies. When an actor struggles to emerge from his odd-blue eyes and Justin Bieber-bangs, Efron recalls young Keir Dullea, but there’s no credible dramatic context. This is just mawkishness with a shamelessly quixotic view of metaphysics. Charlie St. Cloud is Inception for girls.