CHAPLIN
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1993 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: A very long overdue cinematic tribute
to one of the great screen comics of all time. CHAPLIN may
spend too little time on some chapters of Chaplin's life and
too much time on others, but it still manages to be funny
where it needs to be and also manages some historic sweep.
Rating: +2 (-4 to +4).
In 1931 Charlie Chaplin invited Albert Einstein to see a private screening of Chaplin's new CITY LIGHTS. When passersby cheered the two men, Chaplin turned to Einstein and said, "The people are applauding you because none of them understands you and applauding me because everybody understands me." Getting an understanding of a good, simple man was Richard Attenborough's goal in CHAPLIN much as it was in his GANDHI. CHAPLIN is, of course, a long overdue cinematic tribute to the man most easily pointed to as the greatest screen comic of all time. In 144 minutes Attenborough attempts to cover the entire career of Chaplin from about age four to age eighty-three. Eighty is a lot to cover. This leads to some problems with pacing in which some periods are covered much too quickly and others, less interesting, are shown in too much detail.
The biography is told mostly in flashback that opens with the Chaplin family's grinding poverty in London at the end of the 19th Century. Charlie's mother supports the two of them and Charlie's older brother by a failing career singing in music halls. When she is no longer young enough to please an audience, Charlie finds he has some talent in front of an audience, but not enough talent to earn what it would take to keep his family together, nor enough to keep himself out of the workhouse. In his suffering and despair the film makes only too clear the roots of Chaplin's bittersweet comedy. The film tracks his music hall career, his first love, and his trip to America to try to prosper. It is, perhaps, a weakness of the screenplay by William Boyd, Bryan Forbes, and William Goldman that Chaplin is so incredibly understandable and so obviously a product of this early existence. His efforts to ease suffering and his womanizing all seem to come from attempts to recapture what little was good in his youth and to help others avoid the suffering he had experienced.
The scene shifts to America with Dan Aykroyd playing an extremely vulgar Mack Sennett. There Chaplin invents his tramp character. (The film takes some liberties here. The tramp actually first showed up in a humorous documentary about a children's auto race. Supposedly a funny-looking observer keeps walking in front of the camera. Within two years that funny little pest would be one of the most famous people in the world.) After all that Charlie has been through it would be nice to see how he reacts as success starts coming to him. What should have been the most exciting part of the film was covered in two or three scenes in which Chaplin goes from being a clever new comic to "the most famous man in the world."
Now scandalously rich, as perhaps the screen's first real star and certainly the first superstar, Charlie tries to make everything that went wrong in his youth now go right, only to find that dream impossible. The film traces the rest of his career, his many marriages, and his friendship with Douglas Fairbanks (whose natural flamboyance actor Kevin Kline can only barely reflect). Particularly interesting is the discussion over how to make the transition to sound and why Chaplin insisted on making what were essentially silent films well into the sound era. Also we see why he made THE GREAT DICTATOR and why he insisted it would be the final film for his tramp. Chaplin's conflict with J. Edgar Hoover also gets attention.
Attenborough's Chaplin is every bit as tragic as the character he played. Robert Downey, Jr., plays him as a man of terrible self-doubts, a man who can have a room full of admiring fans and if one drunk does not like him, he will fall into depression. He is a man who had many dreams and of them the only one that came true was his wish for success.
CHAPLIN is one of those films where major stars are satisfied with small roles just to part of the tribute. Among them are Anthony Hopkins, Penelope Ann Miller, James Woods, and Robert Stephens. Geraldine Chaplin plays her own grandmother, Hannah Chaplin. Downey is surprisingly satisfying as Chaplin. One does not really expect Downey to make Chaplin's slapstick funny for a 1990s audience. Downey appears to be fully up to the physical demands of Chaplin's humor and somehow manages to make silent film gags still very funny. In make-up he really looks like Chaplin's tramp. (Of course, people have different ideas of exactly what the tramp looks like. Once when Chaplin was in Monte Carlo they were having a Charlie Chaplin look-a-like contest. He entered the contest incognito but was only able to cop third place.) Playing an older Chaplin, however, Downey's make-up lets him down. Also, a segment of the film shot in the style of a Keystone Cops film does not work well.
It is very difficult in judging a tribute film to separate the quality of the film itself from the appropriateness of the tribute. If one likes what Malcolm X or Gandhi stood for, it is difficult not to like their biographical films more for that reason. However, even if it is just Robert Downey, Jr., playing Chaplin, he can kick a bully with a panache and a class that Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Segal can barely even dream of. With that warning about my subjectivity, I will rate this one a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
att!mtgzfs3!leeper
leeper@mtgzfs3.att.com
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews