Charlie

The title character of “Charlie,” a film about a husband who goes on a drunken journey across New York City after discovering his wife’s affair, is an impulsive, abusive, self-destructive lout. But he’s also magnetic and funny, and more self-aware than his swagger suggests.
As conceived by the writer and director Salvatore Interlandi, Charlie is a Marlon Brando character in a John Cassavetes movie. The playwright and actor D. J. Mendel plays him with a touch of poetry. When Charlie tells his best friend, Tommy (the excellent Timothy Donovan Jr.), that he’s addicted to “the needing of the feeling,” you know just what he means.
The close-ups of Charlie imagining his wife (played with tough honesty by Denise Greber) in flagrante are dreamy and piercing, and perhaps deliberately reminiscent of “Eyes Wide Shut,” another film about a cuckolded man who goes on a Homeric nighttime odyssey, encountering women who represent aspects of the wife he fears he has lost.
“Charlie” has too much maudlin emoting, too many raggedy or redundant scenes and too many montages of Charlie wandering the streets while Matty Charles’s plaintive ballads jangle on the soundtrack. But it also has guts and soul, and a keen appreciation of grown-up pain — qualities sorely lacking in American independent film today.
Da The New York Times, 26 settembre 2007