A rather gritty look at high school life

Rating: 6/10 (8 December 2012)

I probably would not call this a high-school romantic comedy about how a geek learns how to survive high-school because the characters within this film are not your typical cookie-cutter Hollywood characters, and also that the film is actually a lot darker and grittier than many of the other films that I have seen. For instance, there is a lot more to Charlie than your typical Hollywood character, whose only flaw, if you actually want to call it a flaw, is their geekiness.
Charlie is a character with a lot of baggage, but as is true with many people who have suffered significant trauma in their younger years, much of this baggage has been blacked out, and in fact as we move through the film, we begin to learn that Charlie himself suffers a lot of blackouts. It is done in a way that we as the viewer are unsure as to what is going on, but in a way this helps us understand the character more because, while he knows that he does suffer from some undisclosed mental illness, he is as much in the dark as we are, and for much of the film we are simply told that it is 'his problem'.
The movie is not so dark as to create a bad home life for the character though, because it is clear that his parents and his siblings do actually support him, even if it is only at home. However, it does give a very good reflection of the nature of high school in the developing world, particularly since we see how difficult it can be to actually fit in when in reality you are an outcast, and in fact Charlie himself ends up becoming connected with the outcasts themselves.
Having experienced such a culture in my younger years, I must admit that many of us who were the introverts in high-school would end up connected with those of our kin, I know I did, and these groups would end up dulling their pain through the use of drugs. I still remember discovering at university that the group that I ended up connecting with ended up being made up of those very much like myself. It is interesting in a way that some groups that I interacted with would talk about how they were outcasts but I never really felt as if I were able to truly connect with those outcasts, but others than I knew I did have a way of connecting with them.
In a way it seems to reflect so much on how our society has evolved, or should I say de-evolved. In many ways our society is becoming more and more disconnected as we speak. These days it is rare for parents, even loving and supporting parents, to be able to connect with their children, and it is very common for them to have no idea on where they are when they are no longer in the house. It can reach a point, as it does in the movie, that the child is found lying flaked out in the snow, with no idea as to how the child arrived at this point, but a discovery is still made that the child has been using drugs. In many cases it is not discovered until it is too late.