There’s no separating Charlie Sheen from Charles Swan, the titular representation of the male id at its most self-obsessed in Roman Coppola’s uneven A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III. But for better and decidedly worse, that’s the point.
Like Charlie Harper, the allegedly charming ladies’ man Sheen played on Two and a Half Men before his dramatic split with the show two years ago, Charles Swan is a variation on the recent Sheen type. He’s improbably successful professionally, despite drug and alcohol abuse; even more incredibly, he has to use a stick to beat back the throngs of gorgeous young women constantly falling for him.
The role of Charles Swan softens Sheen’s persona from notorious womanizer to aging cad, the kind of misguided romantic who hangs on to Polaroids of the women he’s slept with for sentimental value. Swan’s treatment of women can’t be excused, exactly, though Coppola sets the movie in a stylized ’70s Hollywood and characterizes Charles, ever behind a pair of dark-purple shades, as a product of his time and place.
And this time around, it would seem, it’s different: Charles has been dumped by a beautiful blond cipher named Ivana (Katheryn Winnick), and he’s taking it hard. His heartbreak and an ensuing car wreck land him in the hospital, where his oversexed imagination leaps to flights of fancy — fantasies of heroism, hedonism and romantic revenge, all populated by Charles’ many ex-girlfriends.
A graphic designer and absentee head of his own agency, Charles renders these vivid daydreams in a bright, cartoonish ’50s style that speaks to his superficial — even naive — conception of relationships. In one transporting moment, Charles imagines the women once in his life as mourners at his funeral, where, after rising from the grave, he dances a moonlit softshoe in the cemetery. (Ivana watches, having none of it.)