Nathan Rabin's Happy Place's Definitive Guide to American Movies about the Film Industry
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Chaplin (1992)
Biopics of legendary performers have everything to offer actors and actresses. It affords them an opportunity to slip inside the skin of beloved celebrities, relive melodramatic moments of triumph and anguish and get nominated and possibly even win Academy Awards in the process. They have considerably less to offer writers and directors forced to flatten and simplify complicated and sometimes dark lives to fit the confining, comforting contours of the conventional biopic.
So it’s unsurprising that a perfectly cast Robert Downey Jr. won universal acclaim and his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor for playing the title role in 1992’s Chaplin while the film itself flopped with critics and audiences alike.
In Chaplin, Anthony Hopkins plays a fictional editor working with an elderly Chaplin on his autobiography. Hopkins’ imaginary collaborator’s questions lead to a series of flashbacks chronicling the actor and filmmaker’s rise from a childhood of Dickensian poverty and misery to the rarified heights of superstardom and finally infamy once his leftist beliefs attract the attention of corrupt FBI capo J. Edgar Hoover.
William Boyd, Bryan Forbes and William Goldman’s screenplay is a sappy, sloppy ramble through myriad failed marriages to ethereal teenagers and the expected professional highlights. It’s the usual greatest hits compilation of big moments from Chaplin’s epic life that gets lost in an overly familiar world of sentimentality and cliche.
For a movie about one of the one of the most legendary and brilliant funny people of all time Chaplin is almost perversely unfunny and devoid of mirth. Its attempts to replicate the look and feel of silent comedy are particularly embarrassing.
Downey Jr. very nearly redeems this sorry enterprise with his understanding that behind every famous clown is a deeply scarred survivor trying to process trauma.
Downey Jr. captures the surgical precision of Chaplin’s physical comedy as well as his underlying sadness and seriousness. Downey Jr’s performance rings true while everything else feels false, beginning with the film’s simple-minded deification of its title character.
Nothing is more tedious than a clown who is also an angel, a jester who is also a saint. Chaplin slaps a halo over its sinful subject’s head and admonishes us to admire his unimpeachable integrity and Christ-like concern for his fellow man.
In Chaplin Downey Jr. delivers an extraordinary performance in what is otherwise an exceedingly ordinary exercise in fawning hagiography.