Mark Reviews Movies: I'M CHARLIE WALKER

I'm Charlie Walker, Shout! Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 9, 2022

There's almost certainly a bigger story in the 1971 oil spill that devastated the San Francisco Bay area than one man and his independent trucking company, but that's beside the point. Writer/director Patrick Gilles' I'm Charlie Walker is about that eponymous man, his role in the clean-up efforts following the spill, and the various maneuvers he, a Black man, made to ensure that his work was compensated at the same level as his white counterparts.

Watching it, one gets the feeling there's more to this man and his story than Gilles' focus on those maneuvers suggests. When we finally meet the real man and hear about his life following this story, it becomes clear that Gilles' movie barely scratches the surface of either.

Charlie is played by Mike Colter, whose effortlessly charming and disarming performance goes a long way to convince us that there is something special about this seemingly ordinary man within the context of his localized work. The guy owns a truck at the start the story, looking for contract jobs in an industry that wants nothing to do with him.

When two tankers from a fictional company (although the even itself was real) collide and spill hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the San Francisco Bay, Charlie happens to notice a convoy of trucks heading toward the beaches. All of that contaminated sand needs to loaded and taken away, and the company's CEO Mr. Bennett (Dylan Baker) sees money as no object when it comes to paying those truck companies for that work.

Charlie gets a contract for an out-of-the-way beach no other owner wants, and with that, he's out to prove himself, his business acumen, and his ability to bill as much as he can to the oil company. In particular, one oil executive, the persnickety and numbers-conscious Mr. Sharpe (Mark Leslie Ford), is all smiles and niceties in person, but that's not the case behind Charlie's back. As a counterpoint, there's the supportive Dan Wallace (Steven Wiig), who admires Charlie's talents for business, even—and perhaps especially—as he starts to realize what the small-business owner is actually doing.

In terms of what Charlie is up to, the planning and mechanics of this story—both of the clean-up and Charlie's specific scheme to keep the money coming into his company's coffers, while doing the work and keeping the oil company's suits in the dark—are a bit more complicated than one might expect. Gilles' screenplay uses Charlie's wife Ann (Safiya Fredericks) as a narrator—and almost exclusively as that, by the way—to explain her husband's every move in the moment, in order to highlight his improvisational skills, or after the fact, so that the script can fit in a twist or two for the last act. Instead of clarity, though, the running commentary feels as if it's filling in gaps and obscuring just how clever Charlie's plotting is supposed to be.

What we can gather, however, is that Charlie uses a series of loopholes and Bennett's promise of money being no object (A climactic conversation between the two men has Charlie twisting that phrase, because he certainly hasn't seen any money during his work for the oil company) to the financial advantage of his company. The point, as the real Walker points out during a brief interview segment just before the credits, is that our protagonist could be seen as stealing that money from the oil company. Until that moment with the actual Walker, that thought is never dealt with or even arisen here, because Gilles' script is so overloaded with business talk (maybe every other scene is a meeting of some kind that only serves to explain some matter of money or strategy), extraneous characters (A few hippies, who either volunteer for the clean-up or show aggression toward representatives of the oil company, are occasionally present, apparently to acknowledge their existence in the bigger picture of this story), and threats that come out of and go nowhere (Under instructions from a party who is only revealed at the end, two men, purporting to be agents of the state labor department, have it in for and, later, are out to get Charlie—going so far as to plant cocaine in his house).

As for the man himself, Colter again displays considerable charisma here, while hinting at real anger and cynicism from a lifetime of experiencing discrimination. One insightful scene has Charlie partying with Bennett and his company cronies, but a single, almost reflexive request for a kind of servitude from Charlie tells him everything he needs to know about how they really perceive him.

Beneath and beyond that, though, Gilles' screenplay for I'm Charlie Walker is too caught up in how the protagonist operates, without giving us a sense of anything but business and leaving the most intriguing element of this story—the results of his business practices and a legal battle—for a hasty text coda. In some ways, this is just the beginning of Charlie's story, and by the end of this movie, it barely feels as if our understanding of the man has even begun.

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