Grade: C
Emilia Jones, from CODA — one of my favorite movies of the decade — keeps teaming up with an actor from another one of my favorite movies of the decade. After appearing with Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) in the Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony, she stars opposite Nick Robinson (Snack Shack) in Charlie Harper. And incidentally, this is the second movie this year (after Voicemails for Isabelle) in which Robinson plays a character whose love interest is an aspiring chef.
That was an arcane and esoteric information dump, but those fun facts are more fun than anything Charlie Harper has to offer. Here’s one more worth noting: writer/co-director Tom Dean was the sole writer of the much better Carolina Caroline, from earlier this year. With that one, he was able to take a movie that we’ve seen so many times before and make it fresh, fun, sexy, and exciting. Yet somehow, he can’t work the same magic with Charlie Harper, which is as laborious as I’ve ever seen from a relationship drama.
You know the kind. It jumps around in time. The two stars are actors we usually like seeing, but they spend almost all the runtime arguing and being sad, to the point where the viewer wonders not only what they saw in each other, but whether they were ever happy. This was done as recently as two years ago with We Live in Time, starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield. Hey, come to think of it, Pugh’s character in that film was a chef. What is it about that occupation and this genre?
This movie’s title is an amalgamation of the first names of the characters played by Robinson and Jones. They are dropped into the most generic, bland plot you could expect, and put through the usual beats. Any objectives, hopes, dreams, and motivations just come across as devices from a screenwriter. I could tell you who they are, what they do, and what they want, but it would sound like I’m describing anything we see on Hallmark in the last month of the year.
Ultimately, Charlie Harper is your paint-by-numbers (pain-by-numbers?) indie-style relationship story with nothing new to say and not enough to say. If the main characters were together at the end, fine. If they broke up, whatever. I never cared what happened to them. They are shallow puppets who do a lot of yelling and crying. At one point, Harper says, “I love thinking about the way a dish is gonna make someone feel.” I’m not sure the director/screenwriting team applied that philosophy to this movie.
Grade: C
Leave a comment