Charlie St. Cloud: How to Douche Your Mind in 2 Hours

“Unbeing dead isn't being alive” – e.e. cummings

e.e. cummings had something right when he penned that quote and tallied it to his growing milieu of laconic, self-reflective aphorisms. As acuminous as a man whose poetry became the clarion call for an American zeitgeist, I’m not sure even he knew his tragic fate as the man who spawned a generation of book prologues, embroidered pillows, and Facebook profiles. His work has been bowdlerized, bastardized, and beaten to such an insufferable degree that even he might have grave regrets for having such a big mouth.

Double “e” is also a rally flag for a character in the recent “motion picture,” Charlie St. Cloud. Now, to parse what I witnessed between the hours of 2 and 4 pm yesterday as a motion picture would be calling the restaurant condiment concoctions I made as a 7 year old on empty Ruby Tuesdays bread plates a chicken liver terrine. I consider it a lapse in time (and judgment, apparently) that took custody of my short term memory and disintegrated every sensation in my body into a mess of synesthetic chaos, in which nothing made sense and yet through some wave of interior logic, the film managed to have an ending that didn’t result in a bunch of scribbles and crumpled up pieces of paper in a garbage bin.

At the pitch of the film, we see Charlie (I use the character name and actor name interchangeably because I’m not sure which came first, the Charlie or the Efron), windsurfing with his unctuous little brother on the high seas of Cape Yuppie, Massachussetts.

In case your Nancy Drew hat isn’t screwed on tight, Charlie is good at parasailing. Not just good at it, he has a scholarship/full-ride to Stamford to be a parasailor. Charlie has an arch nemesis, Olufemi Momolu, the blackest black guy who lives within a 40 mile radius of Cape Yuppie. Olufemi is not as good at parasailing and gets at Charlie’s goat about it. But no worries, Charlie’s little brother, Sam, defends Charlie with suave insults and toothsome jabs at Olufemi. Olufemi is no match for you, Sam.

Charlie and Sam are the bestest of brothers. Charlie promises Sam to teach him how to throw a slider before he goes off to Stamford, and they make a pact to meet everyday at sunset in a part of the woods that doesn’t have gay men meeting to have anonymous sex.

Charlie and Sam’s relationship is a unique fraternal order that only comes to fruition when one is, you guessed it, the tragic product of a broken home. Their dad was a loser baseball player and so they drew the short straw it seems in having to live with their stupid, stupid mom who works around the clock as a NURSE!?!?! HOW LAME?!? WOMEN CAN’T PLAY BASEBALL!

And in a world of incompetent single mothers, Charlie defaults to being a father pro tempore-- the interim dad of all trades who cooks, cleans, mans the house, and most importantly, shoulders the task of being on “SAM DUTY.” That means no parties. HOW LAME?!? WOMEN CAN’T PLAY BASEBALL!

Yet, in spite of all the trials and tribulations that upper middle class white men who live in New England face on a daily basis, they seem to be making the best of it. That is until… t h e c a r a c c i d e n t t h a t c h a n g e d e v e r y t h i n g.

Charlie is on Sam Duty (when is he not! having a single mom and all) and he drives Sam to his friend’s house for a “playdate” (the age of the screenwriter is showing). Charlie and Sam punch each other on the shoulder whenever they feel the need to further emblazon their heterosexual “no-homo”-ness, which I guess qualifies as character development. It would be nice to actually have dialogue that tells a story, but I guess arm punching is cultural ephemera, and furthermore, the heterosexual male’s noblesse noblige.

Charlie stops at a redlight and the director calls a shot that frames Charlie’s left tire turning dramatically to the left. You think he’s laying the traps for a bad decision, but of course, it’s a redherring and Charlie actually gets double tapped by a drunk driver from behind and a four-wheeler to the right. This might’ve set the tone of the film if the director didn’t blue ball the audience by cutting to black. This undercut the entire timbre of the film and just left the audience a little nonplussed.

The film cuts to the interior of an ambulance where we see a dogged Ray Liota trying to shock Zac Efron to life. The other ambulance technician [?], who’s in the captain’s chair driving in no hurry to the hospital, chimes, “it’s no use. He’s a flat-liner.” I’m not sure if that’s the exact purview of someone whose job description involves saving lives, but I guess everyone takes coffee breaks. That is, everyone except Ray Liota, who has… St. Judas (which is a device to really eclipse words like Jesus, God, and Joel Osteen).

Ray Liota saves Zac Efron from being a “flat-liner” when Zac Efron surges to life. Even though Ray Liota is the one that ultimately saved Zac Efron, somehow Zac Efron is seen as a saintly boon and Ray Liota seemingly discredits himself from having any agency in saving Zac’s life. This sets into motion the film’s leitmotif that Zac Efron is a vessel for impeccability. And since I guess having special powers isn’t enough cachet for Zac Efron’s character, the film makers backlight, soft light, sun-kiss, and moon-soak him in every scene (they probably had to hose him in elbow grease every other take to keep the celestial glow) to further drive home the idea that Zac Efron is impervious, apostolic, sexy, handsome, cultured, smart, charming, dreamy, and most importantly, e.e. cummings-esque

It’s not that Chafron imbues or embodies any of the traits mentioned above, because he is to acting what my asshole is to good taste-- It’s that the film tirelessly catalogues a bunch of “instances” (not scenes) in which Chafron goes through the motions of what someone who is, say, cultured might do (drink white wine and cook dinner for a girl). It’s not that this registers as remotely charming, mostly because the story’s events are so divorced from one another, it sounds like the slugline for the film was penned by an innocent game of MadLibs.

After the opening sequence, the film jumps to 5 years later and starts en medias res. We find Charlie playing catch with his dead brother in the woods, just like old times, and so this tells us that Charlie is borderline schizophrenic. He works in the graveyard where his dead brother lives and tends the gardens alongside super fuckable foreigners who do manual labor for minimum wage. Mexicans, you ask? Nope. This film goes back to a very precursory, turn-of-century notion of immigrants: the white European kind. So, Charlie’s confidante turns out to be Burt, the chimneysweep from Mary Poppins (i.e. a dirty low-rent, high-spirits Cockney mate with a mildly palatable accent that sounds like Russell Brand’s gay brother). The impossibility of such a super hot British guy working as a grounds keeper in Cape Yuppie would only have any currency if Bert’s nightjob was necrophilia. Bert’s main duty is to chase geese who shit everywhere. Newsflash: geese poop. Not that I’m an apologist for geese, but Jesus Christ. That’s no reason to shoot the fuckers.

Chafron arrives from the woods and greets one of his old buddies from high school, clad in a Marine’s uniform. One of my favorite quotes from the film came out of this scene:

CHAFRON: Yo! Man! No rubbing on the graves.
FRIEND: Charlie, if I wanted to rub one out, I wouldn’t do it in a graveyard.

This—coupled with a rather uncomfortable exchange between Zac and Sam about what Sam was intending to do with this magazine featuring a hot girl—highlights the screenwriter’s regency on what all hot, young, straight men talk about: masturbation. All of this, flanked within a series of centerfold shots of Zac Efron shirtless and pouting, seem to suggest this film must have been written by Chi Chi LaRue.



The director keeps reminding us tirelessly that Zac sees and talks to dead people by having the camera do double-takes as if we needed to be clued in that yes, Zac’s brother is still miraculously dead, as if we might be lead under the false pretense that people can take 5 year sabbaticals from the temporal world.

Of course there comes a love interest. But let’s not forget, this movie already has a lead actress and the director can’t concede any frames that don’t involve Ms. Efron and his breasts. But Girl #2 tries to play hard to get, which I think is the film’s self conscious attempt at camp, seeing Zac Efron’s sexuality is like a canvasser for ACLU … or a watered down cover of Wonderwall at a college party: it can’t be avoided.

Nonetheless, this faceless chick played by some nameless actress tries to wick Chafrom from him state of utter misery. And her success is probably only validated by Chafrom as an added excuse to take his shirt off once more.

As a side note: Chafron has a stunt double for anything that involves manual labor, which includes, but is not limited to: parasailing, mowing lawns, throwing sliders, cooking food, having sex, walking up stairs, opening doors, and maybe blinking. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover Zac Efron’s crocodile tears are insured by the drop. Everything Chafron begrudgingly agrees to be in is really just a mid-length portrait shot of all things that cinematically lionize the man, the myth, the beauty that is Zac Efron. The director’s penchant for Zac Efron is so amplified by his boner for Zac Efron, the movie devolves from a potentially sad story a man in mourning into a docent guided tour of Zac Efron’s anatomy (underscored by the death of an under utilized Ray Liota). I would tell you more about Ray Liota’s character, but out of respect to him and his career, I think I’ll do him a favor and just tell the nice man in the cop car I didn’t see no-one… honest! officer.

At what point is this exactly?

I would give you a rough estimate, but let’s just say right when my soda ran out. Charlie (Zac Efron—or would it be more apropos to have Charlie in the parenthesis and Zac Efron as the character?) sits atop a lighthouse with Girl #2. They both sit at the apex of the lighthouse (where else?) looking at the boats batting to-and-fro in the distance. “’If the seas catch fire […] honour the past but welcome the future,’” flaps Charlie in what might be confused as a dramatic interpretation of a much more impressive work of art by Double “e” called Dive for Dreams. In your spare time you should look it up, but only in a setting divorced from any notion that this film informs the other.
Some deficient people might naively consider this moment as an expression of the main character’s hubris, but to have hubris, a character has have some sense of ambition outside of waxing the internet for e.e. cummings quotes as an instrument to bone chicks.

Well, this chick isn’t any chick. Girl #2 is no stranger to e.e. cummings, it turns out, seeing she dedicated her postdoctoral studies on the literary dossier of e.e. Oh wait, sorry, no, my bad. She actually took an oh-so intimidating “AP class in high school,” which therefore officiates her as a gatekeeper on all things e.e. She tables Charlie’s nascent understanding of the poem in the scene by (rhetorically) asking him if “he even knows what that poem means? [sneer]” And then answers her own self congratulatory question by informing him (and ultimately us) that it’s about “lost chances.”

The movie could’ve ended there because what happened subsequent didn’t bother justifying her profession. It just rallied a few cinematic gimmicks, a few crescendos in the overture, and then a weird montage of Sam disappearing into sunlight in a muddied attempt at a symbol.

That didn’t bother me so much because that ending didn’t bear any conceit or suggestion that it was good, or even memorable. No, it’s the damn e.e. cummings moment at the top of the lighthouse.

What e.e. cummings represents in this film is not a balcony view on the film’s spearheading themes (not to say this film has any themes outside of projecting the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Zac Efron), but the film’s ability to commodify e.e. cummings’ intellect in the absence of a story intellect. Double “e” is the only character in the film that Zac Efron places above himself, seeing Charlie is deified ad infinitum by the characters and filmmakers (and also by the wretched author who scribed the original source material, The Life and Death of Charlie St. Cloud)

It isn’t so much about what e.e. cummings has to say, but who e.e. cummings is, which is an all-American commodity that said some cool shit. And since Zac Efron is the iconography of all things cool as shit in the film, Zac Efron and e.e. cummings are transitively peers in an elite circle of people who are cool as shit, incredibly fuckable and, oh, wait, did I mention he PARASAILS!

Under what auspice is this film under, exactly, that it has to shit on e.e. cummings to maintain that the film is somehow serious-minded. It did 10 minutes of Quoteland research on top of screenings of The Great Gatsby and Beaches to thread a piece of shit story together.

Gawd. I fucking hated that movie so much. At 5 pages, I can’t impress upon you that this film is probably one of the worst things ever made. I would puke on the movie screen if I didn’t think my puke deserved a better landing strip.

Save your $12.50 for a burrito. Or to catch a showing of Marmaduke. At least that has puppies.