Looking Back: ‘Chaplin’

I used to hate family trips to Tennessee. My idea of a good time did not include nine-hour car rides into the Appalachian countryside, often in the winter, to a place we had to not speak Spanish to avoid unwanted attention. To fill up my free time, I became fast friends with the sole satellite TV in the house. There I found a four-hour curio on AMC that caught my attention: Chaplin. I’d heard the name before and loved the leading man, Robert Downey Jr. Beyond the one-sentence synopsis, I knew nothing else.

I gave it a go bright and early the next morning, and I don’t remember ever leaving the couch through the commercial-filled feature. I lost Downey in his performance. My eyes were glued to the simplistic brilliance of the Tramp, Charles Chaplin.

For a viewer who had never seen a silent movie before, it was a revelation of the purest physical comedy involving mistaken identity, chase sequences, anarchy against authority, and pratfalls. I was swept up in the mythology of it all: Chaplin’s Dickinsonian past, his arrival at the newly-birthed film industry, the personal problems circling his career, and the crazed auteurist zeal that gave him credits as director, producer, writer, actor, and composer.

I must have completely ignored young Downey’s inability to hold a British accent on that first watch. It was his astute physical impersonation that surprised me. I’d only just rediscovered him in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, so to find him as a younger, more agile actor made him easily disappear behind the mustache and thick white makeup. Downey mimics Chaplin’s gait, bent knees, and turned-out toes while managing the fluid – almost balletic – mannerisms of his movements.

And fortunately, director Richard Attenborough didn’t seek any manipulative technology like that in Forrest Gump that would have imposed Downey onto Chaplin’s films. Most of the time, whenever you see a grainy black and white flicker on the screen, that’s the real Chaplin, often with Downey in the foreground commenting on the “rushes” of the day. It’s a gutsy move to put subject and actor next to each other, but Downey holds his own.

However, Chaplin is a product of its time and does have a few flaws. The real Chaplin had a particular fondness for younger, usually underage, girls. The film doesn’t gloss over this fact, but it romanticizes it by having the same actress, Moira Kelly, play both his first love (Hetty Kelly, from his vaudeville days) and future wife Oona O’Neill. It was like he was waiting for her all along! He was 54 when he married O’Neill, then just 17. Then there’s the production side of ’90s filmmaking: an OD of soft focus, with each sentimental note wrung out by a saxophone. Fortunately, I can think of worse offenders than Chaplin (like Cinema Paradiso, a guilty pleasure).

But the addition of a fictional character may make or break the film for you. Anthony Hopkins joins a wizened Downey as Chaplin’s faux biographer, George Hayden. He’s the perfect excuse to tell the story in chronological order and to press Chaplin on his feelings about certain celebrities and ex-wives. I’m no fan of voiceover narration, but making it into a conversation is a rather clever conceit. When Chaplin remembers creating the character of the Tramp, he claims that it found him, to which Hayden calls “Bullshit!” and presses him for the real answer.

Hopkins isn’t the only recognizable face in the group. A scenery-chewing, tabacco-spitting Dan Ackroyd plays early comedy film legend Mack Sennett; Marisa Tomei shows up as Chaplin’s first regular female co-star, the haughty Mabel Normand; Milla Jovovich crops up as Chaplin’s first wife; Kevin Klein matches Downey’s impersonation as the dashing Douglas Fairbanks; Diane Lane cameos as another Chaplin wife and co-star, Paulette Goddard; and James Woods appears as the lawyer in Chaplin’s paternity suit.

But perhaps the most memorable appearance belongs to that of Chaplin’s daughter, Geraldine. She plays her grandmother, a struggling singer who gradually falls from sanity and loses custody of young Charlie and his half-brother, Sydney. For a performance that could have gone over-the-top with emotions, her role is eerily quiet (there’s no saxophone to be heard) and subtle. She acts not for laughs or horror, but for poignancy. In one scene, the elder Chaplin breaks graham crackers over her hat while her sons sit stupefied. She calmly answers that she’s saving the food so they won’t go hungry again. It’s a shared silent sadness you see as the camera cuts from one son to the other.

Of course, the film isn’t just about family drama. The audience gets to relive the story of how Chaplin saw a traveling picture show while on a tour stop in Montana, how he learned to direct and edit at Sennett’s studio, and how he asserted himself behind the camera (and eventually, his own studio). The highlight clip reel includes moments from The Immigrant, Shoulder Arms, The Gold Rush, The Circus, City Lights, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator. I selfishly wish they spent more time on his troubled productions, like the Keystone Cops homage when he has to flee California to save the prints of The Kid from divorce court.

We leave Chaplin much like many film school textbooks: at the Oscars for his lifetime achievement award after years of exile from the U.S. I’m not sure I agree with one of the closing lines, “Time is Charlie Chaplin’s dearest and eternal friend.” That seems more the case for a fellow contemporary, Buster Keaton, as Chaplin’s trademark sentimentality and social justice themes seem to have lost some popular appeal. I would argue, like in the case of two masters of American dance, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, that Chaplin and Keaton are master comedians with vastly different styles.

For a film newbie who had never heard of most of the characters in the movie, Chaplin was a formal introduction made easy. It wasn’t a shock to see a jittery, silent film with no context as to its importance or artistic merits. When I finally sat down to watch The Kid, I knew so much more about the history and the star himself than if I had come across it any earlier. It was the right film at the right time, and for that, it will always be one I look back at with fond memories.