Robert Downey, Jr.'s up and down career rose again earlier this year with his unusually nuanced superhero performance in Ironman. No one would call it Downey's greatest part, however. For that, my vote goes to his starring role in Chaplin, the 1992 biopic of the world-conquering star of the silent movie era.
Slightly overlooked at the time of its release, Chaplin is out now on a "15th Anniversary Edition" DVD. The interviews among the special features are honest and revealing. Chaplin's director Richard Attenborough (who won an Oscar for Gandhi) and one of its several screenwriters admit that their film fell short. The problem? The subject they chose was too broad to fit the constraints of a feature film.
Charlie Chaplin began in London's music halls and caught the attention of Hollywood comedy director Max Sennett. By 1920 no star shone with greater magnitude. Chaplin's recurring character, the Little Tramp, wore the world's most recognizable face. After he was driven out of America by the U.S. government during the McCarthy era, Chaplin was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and granted a special Oscar late in life by a grateful Motion Picture Academy. The span of this actor, director, song and screenwriter, political activist and inveterate womanizer was too long and varied for any one film.
As a result, Chaplin tried to do too much and accomplished not enough. Despite many brilliant moments and well-composed scenes, much of the film seems thinly drawn. A better strategy might have been to focus on one period or aspect of the star's life. How about a movie called Young Chaplin or Chaplin in Love or Chaplin in Exile?
Well, the past can't be undone. What's consistently outstanding throughout the film is Downey's performance. Charlie Chaplin was a phenomenal slapstick performer who infused his rubbery, unbreakable physical acting with cunning and pathos. He was an anarchic molecule dancing inside a closed system, a thumb in the eye of authority. Chaplin came from a soot-blackened section of London unchanged since Dickens. Poverty was his heritage. His father drank himself to death after deserting the family. His home life was precarious at best, especially when mum was sent to the madhouse. Stamped across the best performances by Chaplin's idiosyncratic outsider, the Little Tramp, were pain, tragedy and the will to hurdle all obstacles.
Downey gets it, not only replicating Chaplin's potentially bone breaking movie stunts but inhabiting the man at home and off camera. Chaplin was a poor boy who became rich playing a poor man mocking the society that produced him, and Downey's distracted gaze captures the internal conflict he felt. He seems wistful and sad, sometimes puzzled by it all. During the 1930s when the coming of sound movies left the Little Tramp behind the curve, Chaplin tinkered with a pair of hybrid films, essentially silent pictures with sound effects and minimal speech. He was adrift for many years and Downey embodies that lassitude.
One of Chaplin's recurring themes concerns the great actor's greatest nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover. According to the screenplay, the FBI director cultivated cold hatred against the star from early on, measuring him as an un-American subversive, a rootless cosmopolitan whose enormous popularity made him a dangerous influence on the public imagination. At one point Hoover's faithful adjutant awakens him with word that Chaplin is traveling to England, giving him the long awaited opportunity to have the star declared an undesirable alien and forbid his reentry to the U.S. The truth is probably not far from the dramatization. Hoover kept files on almost everyone of note and his dossier on Chaplin was unusually thick. n
