FilmCritic.com: Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin
Bruce Calvert
Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin
A film review by Doug Hennessy - Copyright © 2004 filmcritic.com Search the Site
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One of the most inspiring moments in the films of Charlie Chaplin is the ending
of City Lights. Released in 1931, Chaplin was by this time well beyond fame and
fortune as a dominating force in Hollywood and assured of superhero status -- a
living, breathing icon -- not just as the Tramp, but also as writer, director,
producer, composer, and the most famous human being in the world. Now, daring to
make a silent film in the sound era, City Lights would take him even higher.
It’s the story of how the Tramp befriends a poor blind woman, the Girl, and, as
he leads her to believe he’s a well-off man about town, he entangles himself in
a series of intricately choreographed escapades that can only be called
Chaplinesque. Through it all he manages to steal enough money for the operation
to cure her, and when arrested, proudly goes off to jail. The Girl knows nothing
of this, of course. Months later, when she is no longer blind and working in a
successful flower shop, the Tramp has been released and is still, well, a tramp.
They accidentally meet. The Girl naturally expects her hero to be tall, rich,
and handsome. When she sees short, poor, and dirty, the disappointment in her
benefactor is palpable.
Naturally we expect resolution -- a neat, huggy, kissy happy ending, maybe?
Hopefully? But she just stares at him. And he stares back. All that yearning and
embarrassment, and the fear of what she thinks of him, registers on Chaplin’s
face, connecting with us in a way only the great cinematic figures find
possible. It’s a heartrending final close-up, a freeze-frame before there were
freeze-frames, and as splendid a moment as movies can offer.
Richard Schickel’s documentary Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin is
most fascinating when it explores the methods of this unique, creative genius
and how he generated such unforgettable results in front of the camera.
Schickel, once the film critic for Time magazine, is a film scholar and
writer-producer of many documentaries on the movies. He employs the standard
style here – clips interlaced with talking-head commentary. Nothing wrong with
that: You’ll get more out of watching this documentary than reading another
biography on Chaplin. Seeing the Tramp is better than writing about him, and
Schickel’s format perfectly suits his subject.
The documentary covers everything, maybe trying for a little too much. Chaplin’s
Dickensian childhood: abandoned by his father; mother institutionalized. In his
fortuitous, yet deliberately provocative, initial shenanigans as the Tramp in
1914’s Kid Auto Races at Venice, we see a man born for the movies. Then there’s
his still hard-to-believe, “no-one-rose-so-far-so-fast” climb to be the highest
paid man in the world, a meteoric three years later. And of course all the
marriages, divorces, and the dismayingly frequent affairs with teenage girls. An
over-fifty Chaplin dating, and later marrying, Eugene O’Neill’s sixteen-year-old
daughter?
But it’s the film clips and rare footage with voice-over commentary by directors
and actors that make Charlie memorable. Johnny Depp says the famous “dance of
the rolls” sequence from The Gold Rush cannot be copied (he tried in Benny and
Joon) because facial expressions and movements are beyond mime and exclusive to
Chaplin’s Tramp character. He goes on to point out that today’s audiences “have
lost their patience for comedy and a seven/eight minute gag is now impossible.”
Woody Allen calls the celebrated globe skit from The Great Dictator bland and
predictable. Martin Scorsese shifts into pure movie-lover glee discussing the
hows and whys of Chaplin’s camera angles.
There’s much, much more: Critics and biographers Andrew Sarris, David Thomson,
and David Robinson; some people who worked with Chaplin, Norman Lloyd, David
Raskin, and Claire Bloom; and his children Sydney, Geraldine, and Michael
providing their personal experiences and comparing them with public perception.
In the fifties, persecuted by the FBI for communist sympathies, Chaplin decided
to leave the United States and spent his last decades living out a self-imposed
exile in Switzerland. Here Schickel changes tone from discovering Chaplin the
cinematic master to knowing and understanding the man. And he does it with a
simple sequence of Chaplin revealing himself in his own home movies. On his
estate, the man who was arguably the first worldwide star, who invented what we
know today as the financial power of movie stars, who was “ubiquitous and
inescapable, the first movie star as a media and marketing barrage,” spent his
time puttering around making little 8mm movies of his grandchildren. Unable to
give up that compulsive need to dominate the camera and everything within its
frame even for them, he constantly jumps in, redoing Tramp antics and comic bits
as Schickel intercuts with clips from the original movies. It’s a sequence that
says all you need to know about Chaplin: the old Tramp madcapping and mugging as
he did in Kid Auto Races at Venice while his granddaughter rides by on her
tricycle.
Charlie: The Life and Times of Charlie Chaplin is not currently in wide release
but is making the rounds at some film festivals and various theaters throughout
the country. It was sponsored by Warner Home Video to coincide with new releases
and reissues of many of Chaplin’s movies on DVD. It made the final list for the
Academy Award for Best Documentary but didn’t make the top five. It’ll be
broadcast on Turner Classic Movies in March and probably be out on video and DVD
soon after.
Bruce Calvert
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