Chaplin (1992)

I'm not sure I've ever watched a Charlie Chaplin film (although I want to see The Great Dictator at some point), but I was curious to watch this. Robert Downey Jr., before Tony Stark, Ally McBeal, the rehab stint, all that jazz.

The movie presents Chaplin's life as him, via him discussing his autobiography in the 1960s with either his ghost writer or his publisher (Anthony Hopkins). Which allows the way the narratives told to offer insight into Chaplin, via what he focuses on, what he doesn't. He ignores his father entirely, and we never see the man. Hopkins notes at one point that Chaplin only devoted five sentences to his second wife, the mother of two of his children. This is while the movie is showing them working together on-set and constantly demonstrating affection for one another. 

And that's kind of how it goes. The things that mean the most to him, he keeps hidden. Either he can't find the words, or he doesn't want to share them. So he glosses over it, or makes something up, such as when he describes how he settled on "The Tramp" as a character, how the costume just called to him, and in the middle of this dramatic retelling, with Downey doing all this exaggerated gestures, Hopkins cuts in with "poppycock," and we see the real deal.

Downey plays it that way, too. When Chaplin is around people - fans, cameras, whatever - he assumes this energetic persona. The smiles, the waves, the greetings. A jovial guy. But the minute they turn away, he drops it almost instantly, and he spends a lot of time with this almost blank look. Like he's just waiting for his cue to start acting again. There's a lot of shots of him alone. Alone in a studio, on a street, in his house. Even in crowd sequences, there's often space between him and most other people, like when he visits a pub in England after WWI. The comedian who wonders if people actually like him is apparently a recurring thing, along with the comedian who wants to make films that speak on societal issues.

There's a couple of places where they apply the old style of slapstick film-making to the movie. Such as when they do a Keystone Kops bit when the police are trying to seize the film Chaplin and his studio are working on, because his first wife (played by Milla Jovovich, was not expecting her name in the credits) has listed in as an asset in their divorce. 

For that matter, the whole sequence where he first plays The Tramp was highly entertaining just for how it shows them making films. Basically, that the director (played by Dan Aykroyd, hell of a cast on this movie) shouts out instructions (like "Domino fall") and they react instantly. I guess it's just improv, but I'm used to that as people just talking, not physical comedy like pratfalls and chases.

So there were some funny bits, some sad bits, Chaplin's an interesting figure, and J. Edgar Hoover's in there, being his usual, hateable fascist self.