Charlie Says

Matt Smith in Charlie Says

Mary Harron's Charlie Says disappeared without a trace after a brief theatrical release in 2019. A film about the Manson family and their murders, it was rendered anonymous in the wake of Quentin Tarantino's splashier and more mythic take on the same topic, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Both film used the same Spahn Ranch set, but Harron's film is a more realistic and ambivalent version of the subject. Charlie Says screenwriter Guinevere Turner, who also collaborated with Harron on American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page, used Ed Sanders' The Family (still the best book on Manson) as a basis for her script. Turner uses the recruitment and grooming of Leslie Van Houten into the "family" as the focus of her tale. The film is told largely in flashback. A graduate student, well played by Merritt Wever, is assigned to the incarcerated women so they can overcome their brainwashing and face up to the havoc they have wrought. 

To my mind, Ms. Harron has never made a completely satisfying film, but Charlie Says is her most accomplished to date. Charlie Says pick up on the feminist themes that have always percolated in her (and Turner's) work, but does not attempt to deny the culpability of Manson's deluded young women. Portraits of psychopaths has dominated Harron's work (Valerie Solanas, Patrick Bateman and, now, Manson), but she is too committed to realism and ambivalence to paint them as monstrous embodiments of evil. The contrast to Tarantino is striking in this respect. Tarantino is all too happy to have his mythic embodiments of evil be flambeed or carved up in order to satisfy his rather Old Testament moral sense and the audience's need for catharsis. However, though I respect Harron's moral sense more, I do feel Tarantino is the more talented filmmaker. Though not a flashy visual director, Tarantino's camera set-ups are more striking than Harron's. A good comparison between the two are the entrances of cars and cycles into the Spahn Ranch. Tarantino's framing gives these moments more thematic impact than Harron's does.

I also think Tarantino is more gifted with actors, though Charlie Says contains the best ensemble work yet in a Harron film. Chace Crawford and Kayli Carter are both superb as, respectively, Tex Watson and Squeaky Fromme. Matt Smith is suitably creepy as Manson, but lacks the charisma Steve Railsback displayed in Helter Skelter. This, through true to the film's intent, strips it of a bit of excitement and danger. Hannah Murphy, most famous for her Gilly in Game of Thrones, overplays her callowness.

Neither a whitewash nor a rancid exploitation, Charlie Says tries to present these perpetrators as rounded individuals led astray by a psychedelic pied piper. Harron's ambivalence towards her subjects was a turn off for audience and critics, but Charlie Says stands as her most fully focused film.