'Charlie St. Cloud' a silly failure

LOS ANGELES  - Every now and then a brave filmmaker can't resist the temptation to make a metaphysical movie 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. "Charlie St. Cloud," from director Burr Steers, who made the estimable "Igby Goes Down," is the latest to take on this foolhardy task and the film doesn't just fail, it actually gets sillier by the minute.

There is little worse in movies than earnestness hitched to the wrong project. Press notes claim the source material, a novel by Ben Sherwood, received sufficient acclaim to get translated into 15 languages, so perhaps there are enough worldwide romantics to create a modest cult following around "Charlie St. Cloud."

It happened with "Somewhere in Time" (1980) and "What Dreams May Come" (1998), admittedly much different kinds of movies and much grander in their pretensions and earnestness. But the guess here is that "Charlie," more modest but therefore less cult-ready, doesn't stand a chance after it opens Friday.

One problem -- there are many but let's focus on this -- is that the metaphysical rules keep changing. Charlie St. Cloud (Zac Efron) is a small-town sailing hero of whom great things are expected. Yet he loses all ambition after an auto accident, which he "miraculously" survives but which kills his kid brother Sam (Charlie Tahan).

Afterwards, to quote from another film, Charlie sees dead people. Or does he? For the next five years, he plays catch with Sam every evening at sunset in the woods near the cemetery. He chats with a high-school buddy, killed as a Marine in the Middle East, near his gravestone. Then, later in the film, he sees another dead person who, well ... turns out, isn't really dead. So are these spectral appearances real or dreams? Only writers Craig Pearce and Lewis Colick know for sure.

Charlie's obsessive love for his late brother has caused him to turn down a university scholarship and take a job as live-in caretaker at the cemetery. He seemingly has no friends other than a fellow groundskeeper (Augustus Prew), yet the film treat this oddness as nothing more than someone marching to the (up)beat of a different drummer.

When Charlie and Sam play in a rainstorm, Rolfe Kent's music cheers them on and the editing of this montage is snappy and happy. Silly comedy is made of Charlie and his cemetery mate trying unsuccessfully to chase away the geese that inhabit the grounds but make their jobs more difficult. Charlie even meets a cute girl tending her father's grave. Isn't life just peachy here in the cemetery? In other words, there is nothing weird or creepy about a guy obsessed with a dead brother. Any more than there is when the paramedic (Ray Liotta), who rescued and miraculously revived Charlie, suddenly reappears in his life with terminal cancer and the message that Charlie was saved for "a reason."

Speaking of sudden reappearances, an old high-school classmate named Tess (Amanda Crew) abruptly appears on Charlie's radar. Where has she been for five years? Never mind, she is the one person in this small seacoast town, presumably Oregon but actually British Columbia, who doesn't think Charlie is a nut job. Must be because she is a fellow sailor. Indeed she is about to embark on a major international solo race. Despite her departure in a week, Charlie is torn between Sam the Dead and Tess the Living.

Things do get sillier but to explain would involve spoilers. Let's just say that the last movie character who had storms and atmospheric electrical charges to guide him to his destiny was played by Charlton Heston.

Efron portrays Charlie as your average young movie-star hunk. He takes off his shirt frequently, yet looks ungainly and stilted in his beefcake poses. Tahan and Crew are much more natural, although the same can't be said for Liotta and Kim Basinger in the thankless role of Charlie's mostly off-screen mother. Credits in this Universal-produced movie are studio slick but the film cries out for a grungy Sundance look that would indicate that something a little weird is going on here. Otherwise, this is a really labor-intensive and seriously ill-conceived way to win a girl's heart