I think that, if I was born a couple of decades earlier, I would have been a pretty good hippie cult leader, you know, minus all the murder; just me and a bunch of groovy runaways, kicking back on a deserted movie set and eating out of dumpsters while trying to reach universal oneness … sounds like far-out time to me.
That’s probably why I never fully understood Charles Manson or the notorious 1969 murders he was behind; sure, you can go with the de facto notion that he’s a fucking lunatic, but he probably would have had it so much better, possibly for the rest of his life, if he hadn’t ordered his followers to go out and kill due to a record producer not wanting to record his mostly lousy tunes.
It’s a line of thought that the mediocre flick Charlie Says could get behind, I’m sure. Starring Merritt Wever as Karlene Faith, a fully invested prison teacher who comes to know Manson’s so-called girls — Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel and Susan Atkins — and their undying devotion to Charlie, who took the classic pimp-game strategy and added a skewed version of Christianity to it to give his lost followers something to believe in.
Director Mary Harron (American Psycho) does a good job of keeping the usual histrionics of the girls to a bare minimum — something many other Manson filmmakers seem to go absolutely crazy themselves with. The real sore spot of the movie is with ol’ Charlie himself, played by the flaccid Matt Smith, complete with a laughable beard and wig, but maybe that was the point.
Sadly, while the ’60s are long over and so is my chance to be a cult leader, Charlie Says is thankfully the wishful-thinking flick that tells me I would probably screw it all up just as bad — if not worse, yikes — as Manson did. Believe me: Even the most minor of power corrupts, especially in me, absolutely. —Louis Fowler