Chaplin

Back in May, when TCM had the Month of Roberts as TCM's Star of the Month, one of the people they included was Robert Downey Jr. and his Oscar-nominated role in Chaplin. It's now in the Epix rotation, with a showing tomorrow at 2:10 PM on Epix and a couple more times over the next two weeks on various of the Epix channels.

You can probably guess from the title and the fact that Robert Downey Jr. is the star that he plays Charlie Chaplin, the famous silent film star. The nominal framing story has Chaplin in his early 70s, living in exile in Vevey, Switzerland since the Americans, or at least J. Edgar Hoover (Kevin Dunn) wouldn't let Chaplin back into the US, he never having taken American citizenshp despite his having lived in the country for 35 years or so. He's written his autobiography, and a fictional editor, George Hayden (Anthony Hopkins) is asking Chaplin about various parts of the autobiography.

Flash back in time to when Chaplin was five years old, with a mother Hannah (Geraldine Chaplin, Charlie's real-life daughter) who worked in the London music halls and was slowly losing her sanity. One night, Mom's singing gets roundly booed, and Charlie is able to finish the song. But that's not enough to keep Mom out of the asylum, or Charlie out of the workhouse. Eventually he escapes, and as an adolescent his elder brother Sydney (Paul Rhys) is able to get him a job with a vaudeville producer, Fred Karno (John Thaw). This takes Charlie to America.

It's in America in the early 1910s that Chaplin first sees moving pictures, and realizes it's something he might want to do. It's also here that word of his old-man Tramp character reached famous producer Mack Sennett (Dan Aykroyd), who telegraphs Chaplin offering him a job at Keystone Studios, not realizing that in real life, Chaplin is a much younger man.

Chaplin does get the job, however, and the rest is history. Chaplin shows talent both on screen and behind the camera, with the latter getting him a position as director on many of those two-reel silents. His is the top name on the marquee, too, and he wants to get paid commensurate to that status. Eventually, Chaplin, together with his friends Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (Kevin Kline) and Fairbanks' then wife Mary Pickford (Maria Pitillo), and director D.W. Griffith, would form United Artists.

Along the way, Chaplin finds that he has a predilection for young women. The problem is, the women are barely of legal age, and once he marries them, he doesn't seem to be able to stay married to them, at least not until his final wife, Oona O'Neill (Moira Kelly). Chaplin was married four times, with only Paulette Goddard (played by Diane Lane) being older than a teenager at the time of their marriage. There was also the disastrous relationship with Joan Barry (Nancy Travis), a woman with mental health issues who claimed Chaplin was the father of her child. Chaplin claimed to have a blood test disproving this allegation, but California law wouldn't admit it as evidence at the time.

J. Edgar Hoover hated Chaplin in no small part because he hated everybody, although Chaplin's being somewhere on the socialism spectrum was what really set Hoover off. The sexual relationships, however, especially with Barry, were the ammuntion Hoover was able to use to block Chaplin from coming back to the US when he took an ill-advised vacation to Britain. Chaplin wouldn't return until getting an honorary Oscar.

Chaplin the movie focuses more on Chaplin's difficult personal life than on Chaplin as an actor, so if you're looking for a "Hollywood on Hollywood" picture, you're only going to get some of that. This isn't to say that's a negative; Downey does quite well as Charlie Chaplin and the rest of the cast is fine in support. Some people may just prefer to know how much of a focus there is on old-time Hollywood.

The movie is also based in part on Chaplin's own biography, which obviously means that it's going to be taking Chaplin's side of the story. Again, this is neither good nor bad per se, just something that the viewer may want to know. It's only briefly mentioned at the end that Charlie was able to get his mom out of the asylum and moved to California, in a montage where director Richard Attenborough tells us what happened to each of the main characters.

If you haven't seen it before, Chaplin is absolutely worth watching.