Description

Everyone has a wild side, Even a legend.

1992 - 145 minutes

Directed by Sir Richard Attenborough (“Gandhi”) and staring Robert Downey, Jr. and an extraordinary cast, CHAPLIN is a loving, grand scale portrait of the Little Tramp’s amazing life and times.  His poverty-stricken child hood in the England comes to life, along with his friendships with Mack Sennett (Dan Aykroyd) and Douglas Fairbanks (Kevin Kline), his many wives and scandalous affairs, and his relentless pursuit by J. Edgar Hoover.  Chaplin is the larger-than-life story of the actor behind the icon and a stunning depiction of a bygone era when Hollywood was at its most glamorous.

With CHAPLIN, director Richard Attenborough (GANDHI) again attempted an earnest historic profile of epic proportions. Though this stodgy portrait of the great entertainer's life is never nearly as fascinating as its subject, it's worth seeing for the lead performance of Robert Downey, Jr. The actor ages almost fifty years through the course of the film and the resemblance to Chaplin, in mien and movement, is uncanny. Downey's virtuosity, thought, is stifled by the director's stultifying, encyclopedic approach to Chaplin's life.

This see-Europe-in-five-days trip through Chaplin's fifty-four-year career begins with his dirt-poor London boyhood as the son of failed vaudevillian mother, Hannah (played by Chaplin's real-life daughter, Geraldine) who has begun a slow descent into insanity. It tracks his early London vaudeville career; his arrival in the US in 1913 and phenomenal success in the early days of the American film industry; his formation, with Douglas Fairbanks (Kevin Kline), Mary Pickford (Maria Pitillo) and D.W. Griffith of the United Artists studio; his sometimes turbulent working relationship with his half-brother/manager Sydney (Paul Rhys); his scandalous liaisons with, and series of marriages to, young women; his loss of an unjust paternity suit brought against him by Joan Barry (Nancy Travis); the animosity borne him by J. Edgar Hoover (Kevin Dunn), resulting in his tainting as a "Communist" and forced exile from the US; his happy, thirty-five-year marriage to fourth wife Oona O'Neill (Moira Kelly), daughter of playwright Eugene (she bore him eight children and they lived together in Vevey, Switzerland, until his death in 1977 at the age of eighty-eight); and his triumphant return to the US in 1972 to recieve an honorary Oscar for his life's work.

CHAPLIN recreates the early days of silent moviemaking, sketching portraits of figures ranging from Mack Sennett (Dan Aykroyd) to Edna Purviance (Penelope Ann Miller) to wife #3 Paulette Goddard (Diane Lane). The speed with which these figures are paraded past our eyes, however, tends to reduce everything to a senseless blur.

Attenborough and his screenwriters fail to impose sufficient dramatic structure on the overabundance of material, and never get to grips with what it was that made Chaplin tick. The screenplay is structured as a series of flashbacks recounted by Chaplin to publisher George Hayden (Anthony Hopkins). Hayden, the film's only fictional character, is visiting the aged filmmaker at his Swiss home to discuss Chaplin's pending autobiography (on which this film is partly based). It's a thankless acting task, and the questions are baldly contrived. ("Lita [Grey] was your second wife, okay? She gave you two sons who you adored. This book is over 500 pages long. Yet you only devoted five lines to her. Why?") Cut to Lita (Deborah Maria Moore)....

It's only in those rare moments when Downey imitates Chaplin in performance, mimicking his singular waddle with trademark bowler hat, undersized waistcoat, baggy pants and Hitleresque mustache, that the screen comes alive. Few of the other actors are anything more than ciphers. Moira Kelly, for example, plays both Hetty Kelly, Chaplin's first love, and wife Oona, but is barely onscreen long enough to make an impression. The exceptions are Geraldine Chaplin, a standout playing her own pathetically crazed grandmother, and Kevin Kline as Douglas Fairbanks--a great friend of Chaplin's and the silent screen's most famous swashbuckler.

The last minutes of the film are devoted to an on-screen readout, a whatever became of appendix to the lives of the characters depicted: Fred Karno (John Thaw), the London impresario who gave Chaplin his first job in vaudeville, went bankrupt in 1926 and died penniless; Mack Sennet's reign as "King of Comedy" ended with the talkies--almost forgotten, he was awarded a special Oscar in 1937; Sennett's girlfriend Mabel Normand (Marisa Tomei) was involved in the scandal surrounding the murder of director William Desmond Taylor in 1922 and her career never fully recovered.

Cast Information

Director Information

Director:             Richard Attenborough

Producers:         Richard Attenborough, Mario Kassar

Writer:               William Boyd, Charles Chaplin, Bryan Forbes, William Goldman, Dian Hawkins,
                           David Robinson

Music:                John Barry  

Miscellaneous Information

Academy Award Nomination: 
            Best Actor - Robert Downey, Jr. 
            Best Original Score - John Barry 
            Best Art Direction-Set Decoration - Stuart Craig, Chris A. Butler

Country of origin: U.K.; U.S.

Genre: Biography; Drama

Color or b/w: Both; Both; Both

Production Co(s).: Carolco; Canal Plus; RCS Video; Lambeth Productions Ltd.

Released By: TriStar

MPAA rating: PG-13

Parental rating: Cautionary; some scenes objectionable

Running time: 144

Produced by:

        TriStar Picutures                                    

        Carolco Pictures

        Le Studio Canal+

        RCS Video