'Charlie St. Cloud,' Efron's new vehicle, stalls but eventually gets us there
Somewhere out there, grim romance reaper Nicholas Sparks, who never met a character he couldn’t lovingly kill off, is screaming — "Why didn’t I think of this!" Yes, this story of death and redemption is right up his morose little alley, but alas, somebody else beat him to it. This is the story of Charlie St. Cloud (Zac Efron), who makes a promise he intends to keep, even if it means altering his life plans and working as a cemetery caretaker in his quaint seaside village. It seems Charlie sees dead people, more specifically, his dear younger brother Sam (Charlie Tahan), who was tragically killed in a car accident. Charlie gives up a sailing scholarship to Stanford. Wait a minute, Stanford has sailing scholarships? Really? What was he going to major in, ascot design? Sorry. Moving on. Before Sam’s untimely death, Charlie was an accomplished yachtsman, big man on high school campus, loved by the ladies, teased by his friends and cherished by his cameo-appearing mother (Kim Basinger). Afterward, Charlie becomes a social pariah, a recluse living in a little shed on the cemetery grounds, never touching his sailboat, but being pestered by a fellow gravedigger intended for comic relief but way too annoying for that. At every sunset, just after the harbor cannons boom the signaling of day’s end, Charlie goes to a clearing in the woods where he and Sam would have their daily ritual of playing catch. It was a promise they made to each other, and it has been going on for five years. No one knows about their little meetings. But the townspeople think Charlie’s gone over the edge. The ground rules for Charlie’s unique abilities are never clear. Does he see all dead people? Or just the ones he knows? Eventually, he develops a relationship with a young woman in his town who shares his interest in sailing. In fact, Tess (Amanda Crew) is planning a solo sailing trip around the world, and must first test her new vessel on the open seas. They will fall madly in love, but unfortunately, she’s about to go away for six months. Perfect timing, or maybe "fortuitous" is the better word. Charlie is told by the paramedic (Ray Liotta) who brought him back to life after the car accident that he should have been dead, too. But for some reason, Charlie was given a second chance at life — and it’s up to him to figure out why. Was it to play catch with his semi-departed brother? Was it to meet the girl of his dreams? Was it to give Zac a meatier role to move him beyond his high school musicals? Perhaps all three. It’s around this point the heavy-handed melodrama starts to kick in — depending on your degree of romantic hopelessness. The more emotionally invested you are, the less manipulated you’ll feel. I felt the strong undertow of the storyteller’s ocean emotion and, frankly, got a little seasick, not because Zac Efron couldn’t sell it, but because he was asked to. The kid’s better than this and he came close to proving it in "Charlie St. Cloud," a lovely film with great intentions but very little subtlety.
