Charly
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Movie Reviews of Charly
Movie Review: Charly
Summary: 4 Stars
While the film is "outdated" in its photographic methods, the message about how we tend to deal with the mentally retarded still bears our attention. And of course Cliff is superb.Movie Review: Psychedelic is the word
Summary: 4 Stars
This movie is a fun romp through the style of direction that is considered stereotypical for the 1960's.Movie Review: Another example of "never see the movie soon after reading the book."
Summary: 3 Stars
Charly (Ralph Nelson, 1968)
Any list of Hollywood's greatest screenwriters would have to include Stirling Silliphant. Village of the Damned. Nightfall. In the Heat of the Night. Telefon. The Towering Inferno. But, like most screenwriters, every once in a while, he got it wrong. The Poseidon Adventure. The Swarm. Over the Top. Yes, Over the Top, the infamous Sylvester Stallone arm wrestling movie. That was him. Where Charly falls onto this line probably depends on how you feel about the novel.
Loosely based on Daniel Keyes' classic Flowers for Algernon, Charly is the story of Charlie Gordon, a mentally retarded man who undergoes an experimental brain operation that makes him smart, and the trials and tribulations that come from getting everything you wish for. I tried to look at Charly as being an entirely separate beast from the novel, but I'm not sure that's the way to go with this one. Whether I look at it in comparison or not, the movie still suffers.
Compared to the novel, the difference is that Charlie Gordon (Cliff Robertson, who won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance) himself is an emasculated character, a passive observer of events, where the novel's Charlie was active, a participant in things. Many of the novel's subplots that made Charlie into a man of action have been removed; he's no longer the inquisitive scientist who discovers the seeds of his own downfall, but someone who's asked to help stop that downfall after it's revealed to him. His parents are gone; the complex relationship he has with his teacher Alice (here played by The Haunting's Claire Bloom) is turned into a simple, if slightly confusing, love story. (Confusing because there's a fiance mentioned who pops up nowhere in the book; he disappears again as soon as it's convenient, getting no actual screen time.) I understand that even a slim novel has to be trimmed to fit into movie form, but other things were added that brought nothing of comparable (or measurable) value to the table. Which leads me to the other option.
Taken on its own, it's an intriguing beginning that goes horribly, horribly wrong about two-thirds of the way through, when it stops being a story about a guy in an interesting situation and becomes a one-dimensional piece of political screed barely worthy of existence. (I kept thinking about Slaughterhouse-Five during the awful Q&A scene.) It does improve again after that, but that scene, sitting in the conceptual center of the film with no anchor, and indeed no reason for being there (it's a pivotal scene in the novel, though it plays out in a much different manner), is claptrap of the most nauseating kind.
I know part of my reaction to the movie is my own fault. I usually stick to my rule about not seeing a film adaptation until at least a year after I read the associated book. That said, Flowers for Algernon was such an amazing book, I wanted to see the movie ASAP. Well, the saying "the bigger they are..." applies here, most definitely. It wouldn't be an awful film, without the inclusion of that one horribly offensive scene. That, however, drags the whole thing down. ** ½
Movie Review: How good it is can be purely subjective.
Summary: 3 Stars
Unliike many reviewers, I saw this movie when first released before I read the book. Like many movies of its period this one has a distinct 60s flavor to it in many respects. Like movies from the 70s, many of the production qualities of this movie's time seem incredibly dated. But hindsight can put that kind of stamp on any time period (anyone ever watched an episode of "Miami Vice" in hindsight with a straight face?). So just when one saw "Charly" for the first time makes all the difference, as does which they did first- read the book or saw the movie. The impact it had on me when I first saw it was tremendous. I wanted to see it again but before that occurred I read the book. I probably enjoyed the book much more as a result. I agree that the two have dramatic differences, but that has always been the risk when adapting a movie from the book. Robertson gives a solid, award winnng performance that evokes pathos, though today it seems a bit over the top. The direction and camera work are reflective of the late 60s, which unwittingly seems to make this movie that much more of a time capsule, almost worth watching for that reason alone- almost! But that detracts from the film at hand. One could argue that if this movie was produced in a different decade it might still bear trademarks indigenousness to that time and place. When younger I demanded films that suited my taste buds of the age I was at that time. Since then, over the years I've watched lots of movies from different time periods that I either hadn't seen before, or now viewed differently. But generally that didn't take away from the appreciation originally instilled in me for a movie. I still find many scenes in this movie heartbreaking, particularly the sequence in which intelligent Charlie can't escape the vision of what inevitably awaits him once the experiment wears off. Just how that was accomplished by the film is irrelevant. Some movies demand remakes. Others are remade merely to add contemporary flavor in some shape or form and should never have been remade. In between those two there is a wide gap of grey, which is where I feel this movie falls. There are numerous films that don't find a contemporary audience due to the time it was released. I still know many who either haven't seen "Rosemary's Baby" or couldn't make it through it because they could taste the 60s while watching it. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a great film. Not to compare the two films directly, but it can be argued that "Charlie" suffers in the same manner. Though great movies withstand the test of time, to me, how much you enjoy "Charly" is purely subjective. How will good films from today look 20-30 years from now?Movie Review: Interesting example of 1960s camp/kitcsch, however it makes severe departures from the book!
Summary: 3 Stars
"Charly," a relatively loose adaptation of Daniel Keyes' critically-acclaimed novella Flowers for Algernon, is a 1968 movie that showcases much of that decade's tendency toward the psychadellic and the beatnik, however in doing so it makes several perhaps fatal departures from the book.
I say "fatal" not in the sense that the movie is terrible, because the movie is quite good though slow in places, but fatal in the sense that some important, fundamental elements present in the book are missing from the movie version. This was probably the intent of the director to make the movie more accessible to large audiences, and is evident in that he changed the title of the book to "Charly" for the movie. Some of the more blatant directoral liberties include:
- The relationship between Charlie and Miss Kinnian is depicted as rather wilde and tawdry in the film (with several semi-explicit scenes), where as in the book, Charlie simply develops a romantic fixation on her that is never consumated. Although the director probably felt the need to incorporate a love interest in the movie to keep viewers watching, it seemed rather unnecessary and the low-key approach of the book might have actually been more interesting.
- Dr. Strauss and Dr. Nemur are a female and a male neurologist respectively in the movie, where as in the novel both are men. While seemingly a minor discrepancy, the book implied that there was a clashing of male egos, especially as the novel showcased Dr. Nemur as feeling pressure and jealousy so as to get more credit for the experiment than Dr. Strauss, a younger man with certain fundamental differences of opinion regarding the whole procedure.
- In the movie Charlie briefly joins -- in an utterly preposterous scene -- a motorcycle gang and engages in an orgy with the female bikers, as solace for his rejection by Miss Kinnian. While this was entertaining on an "oh my, this really is so dumb it's fascinating and fun to watch" level, nothing of the sort occurred in the book, and there are probably better ways to show Charlie's difficulty in adjusting to life as an intellectual genius albeit with the hormonal instability of a sixteen year old.
While "Charly" is still an enjoyable movie, it is a bit boring if you haven't read the book first, and, considering the superior quality of the book's story, the movie seems actually worse than it really is.