Charlie Countryman

Shia LaBeouf plays Charlie, a young man whose mother has just died (Melissa Leo, and Vincent D'Onofrio is the stepdad, they are hardly in the movie). He has a vision of his dead mother who tells him to go to Bucharest to assuage his grief, and he does so on a whim. On the plane he meets a zestful Romanian man who tells him of his daughter, and he dies on the flight, leaving Charlie to track the daughter down, Gaby (Evan Rachel Wood). Charlie is instantly taken with her (and they also share the recent death of a parent) and is caught up in her messed up life and the crazy things that happen to him while he is in Bucharest.

Gaby is separated from her abusive and violent husband, Nigel (Mads Mikkelsen), whom she found out, after they married, was a drug dealer. Charlie by chance meets Nigel's cohort at a strip club and learns of a videotape showing them doing something illegal, which is what Gaby's father has used to keep Nigel away. But now that the father is dead, Nigel comes back to claim Gaby despite Charlie trying to unbind her from his clutches. In the several days he is here, he is always trying to save her or find a way to keep her out of Nigel's grasp.


There is some evidence of a better film here. Shia's performance is pretty good. It reminded me somewhat of Everything is Illuminated with Elijah Wood, although its tone is mixed. There is a bit of magical realism and a foreign and strange feel as befitting the Eastern European locale which I liked, including throwaway visual bits involving kids pushing a stalled car and a man witnessing a hit and run.

The story somehow has the feel of being based on a book although I can't find any evidence of that. Wood seems to have an all purpose Eastern European accent to my untrained ear, and her character and that of the bad guys are a little formulaic. There is some more broad humor in the antics of two young English men into recreational drugs and who share a room with Charlie at a youth hostel, which contrasted to the darker tone of Gaby's story and the men in her life.