harlie Gordon (Robertson) is a severely retarded, though habitually cheerful, adult living in a Boston rooming house. He is very much aware of his limitations, and very much driven to improve himself as best he can, going so far as to attend night classes in reading and writing skills taught by Alice Kinnian (Bloom). But he has advanced as far as his limitations allow him; two years of sincere effort and he cannot retain so much as the proper spelling of "school."
Charlie's fellow workers at the bakery where he sweeps up see him as an object of cruel fun. They pepper him with insults he's not smart enough to recognize as abuse, and they take advantage of his gullibility to humiliate him with practical jokes and pointless errands. At one point they tell him to wait on a street corner, late at night, for snow to start falling. The ever-helpful Charlie obliges, waiting in vain for hours even after his loitering attracts the attention of a passing police car.
Miss Kinnian has brought Charlie to the attention of two medical researchers, Anna Strauss (Skala) and Richard Nemur (Janney). Their tests, which confirm his cruelly limited intelligence but a boundless drive to learn, establish Charlie as an excellent candidate for an experimental surgical procedure that has already succeeded in increasing the IQ of the white mouse Algernon. The operation, which involves removing damaged portions of his brain and chemically stimulating the rest, soon transforms Charlie from a moron into a genius, so adept at learning that he completes elementary and high-school studies in a manner of weeks, and has soon surpassed his teachers. He is even able to turn the tables on the bullies from work.
But there are problems: Charlie's growing genius has not provided him with any matching emotional maturity. His love for Miss Kinnian develops faster than his ability to respect her own wishes in the matter. And even after he grows past that first, difficult stage and succeeds in forming a loving, adult relationship with his erstwhile teacher, his advanced mind provides him one final, terrifying insight: that the procedure was flawed, and that he will soon regress to the moron he once was.
A superb lead performance
Nobody's disputing the classic stature of Daniel Keyes' beloved original story, "Flowers For Algernon," which since its first appearance in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction has been two movies, a stage musical and the inspiration for any number of parodies and uncredited imitations. It's one of the few short stories so memorable that it cemented its author's reputation for life.
This movie version earned Cliff Robertson an Academy Award, making him one of the very few actors ever to win an Oscar for a role in a fantasy or science-fiction film. It remains a career highlight for Robertson, a perennial star whose earliest movie appearances took place in the early '40s, who became a star in the '50s and '60s, and whose career stopped dead for several years in the '80s when he was, essentially, blacklisted for blowing the whistle on check-forging studio head David Begelman. He gradually emerged from years of virtual ostracism by the industry, started working again, and is probably most familiar to today's younger audiences as
the doomed Uncle Ben from the Spider-Man movies.
Seen today, his performance as Charlie Gordon remains every bit as nuanced as it seemed at the time. The Charly of the early sections is a cheerful, childlike figure who greets the many conundrums of his daily life with baffled but game determination. But it's fairly easy for any actor to look good mugging and mumbling as a retarded person (one reason so many Academy-baiting thespians have tried it). More impressive by far is Robertson's success at maintaining that characterization through the intermediate versions of Charly, taking him through shy infatuation, to hormonal overload, to empty rebellion, to maturity and finally to the awareness that everything he's gained is about to be taken away from him. It's that progression, and not his early capering as Charly, that qualifies this as a great performance, and which earns this film most of its high letter grade here.
Alas, the movie itself has not aged nearly as well. Some sections are so dated that they're downright laughable. Charlie's brief rebellious period, a drug-fueled descent into biker gangs and the psychedelic film editing styles of the period, is now downright quaint, not to mention ludicrous. The film fails to sell his successful romance of Alice Kinnian, following a prior incident of frenzied groping that a modern audience will recognize as a sexual assault. Her arrival at his door, weeks later, seems more a development that arises for the convenience of the movie than something the Alice Kinnian we've met would actually do. The romance sequences seem more generic than persuasive. (The Keyes story carries this plot point much more effectively.) And a dream sequence, depicting the smart Charlie's terror at being pursued through a white maze by the retarded Charlie, goes on way too long, to diminishing effect, taking away valuable screen time that could have been devoted to the actual human tragedy of Charlie's regression. The movie barely touches on that, most heartbreaking, part of Charlie's story at all: It shows him searching for a cure, realizing that there isn't one, banishing Alice from his life, and then, in the very next scene, happily cavorting around a playground again. The effect may be startling, but it shortchanges the drama. Myopic as it often is to criticize any movie for not being exactly like the book it came from, the shift in emphasis honestly doesn't do the powerful source material any favors.
