Chaplin
Directed by Richard Attenborough
Starring Robert Downey Jr, Geraldine Chaplin, Anthony Hopkins and Kevin Kline
Reviewed by David Sampson
"I love America", emotes Robert Downey as Charlie Chaplin.
A bit later, in case you might have missed it, Downey-as-Chaplin, his heart overwhelmed by love and pity, brings his mentally ill mother to the USA with these words: "This is America. It's where dreams come true, Mum."
Happen to be slumbering through that little message? No matter, later you can hear Downey-as-Chaplin solemnly intone: "It's a good country underneath".
Producer-director Richard Attenborough appears to have approached his job with a check list of points which he insists on underlining heavily, regardless of how inert it makes this formulaic bio-pic.
Chaplin's childhood of Dickensian deprivation in London's East End? Tick it off. His precocious balletic grace? Tick. His ambition? Tick. His failure to deal with emotions in his relationships with women? Tick. His perfectionism. His obsessive work practices. His anti-fascism. Tick. Tick. Tick.
But demonstrating why Chaplin was an unmatched giant in the history of cinema? Or bringing him to life as a complex, multidimensional human being? Forget it.
Attenborough's story-line is relentlessly propelled by an intrusive device which lasts through the entire film. An aged Chaplin is writing his autobiography from his mansion in Vesey, Switzerland. A fictional character, his book editor, played by Anthony Hopkins, prods Chaplin about the points Attenborough wishes to make. Chaplin addresses them in flashback.
The problem isn't just that the device is as clumsy as Leo McLeay on a bicycle. It's also that some of the heavy-handed observations made by the editor are palpable bullshit.
Most blatant is when the editor is good enough to inform Chaplin that he was exiled from the US not because of his left-wing politics but because of his lifelong sexual preference for teenage women. Remarkably, Downey-as-Chaplin does not demur, despite the consistently opposite statements of Chaplin-as-
Chaplin (but what would he know?).
It is true, the film claims, that Chaplin made a few stray injudicious political statements. But the real problem was his libido. The convenient Beelzebub of the piece, J. Edgar Hoover, is insanely determined to harass Chaplin because he slighted Hoover at a dinner party in 1918.
You see, if it weren't for Chaplin's nympholepsy and Hoover's dementia, Chaplin and the good ol' US of A could have been locked in connubial bliss forever.
The facts are entirely contrary. Firstly, Chaplin became increasingly politicised from the time of the Great Depression. Modern Times is a very political film. Then he became committed to the anti-fascist struggle. Then to the campaign to open a second front to defend the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. He got involved in Soviet-American friendship groups.
US socialists Upton Sinclair and Max Eastman befriended and influenced him. He supported Sinclair's campaign to become governor of California and publicly control the major US film studios. In the 1940s, Chaplin's views were strongly influenced by his personal and political collaboration with a coterie of leftist European emigres — nobodies like Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht, Stephen Spender, Lion Feuchtwanger and Salka Viertel (they must have been nobodies, because Attenborough does not so much as mention them among Chaplin's friends)>
In 1947, Chaplin made his savage anti-capitalist satire Monsieur Verdoux. He opposed the persecution of Paul Robeson and the deportation of Hanns Eisler and his wife, and made a number of statements defensive of communism.
All of this is omitted in the film, yet it was central to his film making, his life and his persecution by the US establishment. No, not just by J. Edgar Hoover. Any research at all would have informed Attenborough that the Internal Revenue Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the State Department, the US House of Representatives, the US Attorney General's Department and the Hearst press were all involved in the pursuit and persecution of Charlie Chaplin.
And it is not only the political and social context of Chaplin's life and work that are neglected. Sadly, and in this case it is due to incompetence rather than distortion, Chaplin's genius is not conveyed.
Any viewer of this film who has not been lucky enough to experience Chaplin masterpieces such as The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940) and Monsieur Verdoux (1947) would have to wonder what all the fuss is
about. His unique mixture of brilliant mime, heartbreaking pathos and powerful social and political observation is not conveyed in this film. It is only at the tail end, when we are given a brief glimpse of a few scenes from the original films, that a little of Chaplin's greatness makes an impression.
Robert Downey Jr is an able impersonator of both Chaplin and the little tramp. But he never really gets inside his character — admittedly, the script is no help to him. Acting honours are taken by Geraldine Chaplin (one of his daughters) as Charlie's mother and Kevin Kline as Douglas Fairbanks.
Whether you are interested in finding out about Chaplin for the first time, or renewing a fond acquaintance, ignore this sodden pudding of a film. Read David Robinson's marvellous biography, Chaplin: His Life and Art. Or Charles Maland's Chaplin and American Culture. Or get a superb video called the The Unknown Chaplin, which assembles Chaplin out-takes to illustrate the uniquely intuitive, semi-improvised, madly wasteful methods by which he arrived at his masterpieces.
Or, best of all, see Chaplin's films. Start with the unsurpassed City Lights. The whole film is wonderful, but it is the final scene which takes the breath away and reduces anyone with emotions to unashamed tears. A beaten and heroic Charlie clutches a flower to his face in extended close-up as hope and joy, terror, heartbreak and despair chase over his anguished and nakedly vulnerable features. A great and brave critic, James Agee, described it like this: "It is enough to shrivel the heart to see, and it is the greatest piece of acting and highest moment in movies".
Is it credible that Hollywood might now give Robert Downey Jr the Academy Award for best actor which it never came close to awarding Charlie Chaplin? It's possible. After all: "This is America. It's where dreams come true, Mum."