"Charlie St. Cloud," the Hollywood Reporter and the attack on meaning

Charlie St. Cloud, the spiritually-themed drama starring High School Musical graduate Zac Ephron failed to achieve lofty heights in its debut weekend at the box office — finishing in 6th place with a total take of about $12.1 million.

The movie no doubt wasn’t helped by overwhelmingly poor critical reception. Rotten Tomatoes counted 74 reviews of the film, 55 of which were mostly negative. The Consensus according to Rotten Tomatoes: Zac Efron gives it his all, but Charlie St. Cloud is too shallow and
cloying to offer much more than eye candy for his fans.

Now, I’m not here to vouch for the film — which, BTW, is about a young man who is so overcome with a sense grief and guilt over a car crash that killed his younger brother that he takes a job at the cemetery where his brother is buried and apparently communicates with his ghost. When Charlie eventually falls in love with a young woman he must make a choice between holding on the past and moving on. The movie is base on the 2004 novel by Ben Sherwood called The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud.

Charlie St. Cloud, the motion picture, may indeed be as cloying and overly-sentimental as the critics say. Schmaltziness is certainly a trap that is easy to fall into when attempting to tell life-affirming, emotional stories. Not having seen the movie myself, I can’t say how well (or not the filmmakers have avoided that hazard.

But one particular review struck me not for what it said about the movie itself but for what it may reveal about the mindset of many mainstream movie critics — and filmmakers who live to be labeled geniuses by those same critics.

Written by Kirk Honeycutt for the Hollywood Reporter, it contained this paragraph:

Every now and then a
brave filmmaker can’t resist the temptation of making a metaphysical film that
somehow will manage to portray everlasting love on the screen, that will somehow
show a romantic idealism so great that it transcends even the boundaries between
the living and dead. This is a temptation filmmakers need seriously to resist.

Now, it’s one thing not to like a particular movie about romance and idealism and transcending earthly boundaries (execution, of course, matters), but it’s quite another to declare that filmmakers should stay away from the subject matter entirely.

Do we really want writers and directors to avoid the entire idea of love that transcends worldly existence? Has that concept become too banal for our sophisticated times?

I don’t think so — but, when it comes to making movies, TV shows or music that support traditional notions of a personal God who loves us all, there really does seem be almost a campaign from critics and certain sectors within the industry to discourage artists from going there.

And it’s one that seems to have picked up in momentum even in the years since Jim Carrey last went over the $200 million box office mark with Bruce Almighty in 2003.

Movies and TV shows deemed insufficiently edgy when dealing with subject of God and faith are routinely dismissed by critics as just so much fluff. Though, it should be noted, the public often holds a different opinion. Films about faith (though perhaps not in Charlie St. Cloud‘s case) often defy the critics.

And, on TV, while no one seems to be trying the find the next Touched by an Angel, you have to wonder why. The show ran for nine seasons — ending in 2003. For several of those seasons it was one of the most popular shows on television. But no one’s looking for another one.

Ratings wise, the most popular show in the history of the late WB Network was not Buffy the Vampire Slayer but 7th Heaven. But which show received the magazine buzz?

Personally, I’d like to encourage writers, directors, actors and musicians not to fear exploring the transcendent and to be brave enough to forthrightly tell positive stories reaffirming the value of a faith in a God who loves us all.

It may not be easy to accomplish (edge and snark are much easier to pull off) but, when done with the right touch, you’ll have created something of value that speaks to people’s hearts and transcends our cynical times.

Read Previous Post

Dream Jam Band creates music for both kids and their parents