Rapid Response: Chaplin

Robert Downey Jr. shines in the biopic on the life of Charlie Chaplin and his Tramp.

chaplin-coverA lot of generic biopics about geniuses get a pass because they show an endearing side to a beloved figure. I can swallow a mediocre movie about “The Doors” because Val Kilmer is so electric as Jim Morrison on stage and I love the music.

In the case of “Chaplin,” I’m at a crossroads. I adore Charlie Chaplin and The Tramp, and Robert Downey Jr. has his mannerisms and his likeness down pat. It’s a wonderful performance, and the same goes for Kevin Kline as Douglas Fairbanks, a natural fit. But Richard Attenborough’s film has the markings of a prestige picture, a stuffy melodrama made to win Oscars and exactly the opposite of what The Tramp stood for. It doesn’t understand what made Chaplin such a gifted physical comedian or have the visual style to capture how his knack behind the camera gave each visual gag the necessary grace and style to make it funny, and it doesn’t show how he came to be truly great but rather assumes he always was.

I refer back to the most basic rules of movie biopics about geniuses: focus on an individual moment of the figure’s story, not their entire life. Drawn from Chaplin’s real-life autobiography and yet reimagined as Chaplin filling in important blanks of his life story with a fictional publisher (Anthony Hopkins), Attenborough’s film starts in Chaplin’s childhood and his complications with a mentally ill mother, then moves through his early vaudeville days before he’s swept off to America and early Hollywood. During the title cards, the black and white image of a sad, lonely Tramp removing his makeup has an unexpected poignancy, a quick glimpse of an icon as we’ve never seen him before, but Attenborough immediately signals what kind of melodramatic slog this will be. Why do we have to endure such bland, downtrodden moments of grief when we’re telling a story of one of the silver screen’s most beloved clowns?

“Chaplin” gets caught in an unfortunate middle ground, with film buffs who already know the full story disappointed at how the film chooses to treat their icon, and with newbies to Chaplin getting the wrong idea about his legacy. And while it might’ve been a wise idea to update the Tramp persona to exist in the late 20th Century, the movie forgoes a sense of classicism and feels dated as a result.

Occasionally the film shows twinkles of magic. Chaplin gets giddy and awestruck at the early magic of cinema and in how pioneer director Mack Sennett (Dan Aykroyd) walks him through the elementary simple process of movie editing in order to create something incredible. It feels quaint today, but then this was once considered a gimmick and a novelty. Another sequence with Chaplin dodging some real life cops toys with some original slapstick and zaniness, although without a classical bent, several of these Downey showcases are undercut by editing that, in Chaplin’s case, would’ve been far more economical.

Working from “The Immigrant” up through “Limelight” and through all of his tumultuous marriages and tabloid worthy affairs, everything here has moments of promise before becoming yet another footnote in his autobiography. When your only goal is to do lip service to everything and say that even the genius can feel humble and inadequate, it begs the question again, who is this movie for? What is it trying to say? The Tramp never spoke a word, and yet he spoke more volumes than the biopic bearing his name.

Rapid Response: Seven Years Bad Luck

Roger Ebert has a trivia question to test if you are worthy of telling him a piece of movie trivia: “Who was the third great silent clown?” The correct answer is Harold Lloyd, he following both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

But there’s a fourth. Maybe he’s not a “great” silent clown, but he was an important and famous figure in his time, France’s Max Linder.

I first heard Max Linder’s name thanks to Quentin Tarantino and “Inglourious Basterds.” If you haven’t seen a film of his, it’s not your fault. Of hundreds of shorts and a handful of features, not even a hundred survive and practically a dozen are even available for viewing. He came from a French vaudeville background and began acting in 1905, actually predating Chaplin and earning him the title of “The Professor” by Chaplin himself. He never achieved fame in America, but otherwise he was a global star. World War I and illnesses hampered his career, and he killed himself in a suicide pact with his wife in 1925, never knowing the pain of irrelevancy after the silent era.

Now one of his most well known films is “Seven Years Bad Luck,” where he plays a man trying to avoid bad luck after he shatters a mirror, only finding bad luck in the process.

If Chaplin was a lovable and innocent tramp, Keaton was a stone faced clown and Lloyd was a headstrong everyman, then Linder must have been the movie star of the bunch.

Linder’s character was a sociable, wealthy gentleman aptly named Max, and Linder himself was way better looking than the lot of his silent companions. He has a look that makes him resemble a grizzled Clark Gable or even Johnny Depp at times. He looks the part, whereas Chaplin and Keaton were flawless aliens and Lloyd was just lucky to be there.

But what’s more, Linder often plays the straight man in all of his gags. Rather than perform stunts and prat falls, Linder is just unassuming and unlucky. He gets in trouble with his girlfriend when he transforms her living room into a surreptitious dance hall for her servants, blindly plunking away at the piano with his back turned not realizing how much trouble he’s about to get into.

He’s an exuberant and natural presence, and if he’s not as physically talented as his silent clown peers, he can arrange the camera in such a way that the payoff is the same. In one scene, Max (a fairly short guy) hides behind a burly giant to sneak onto a train, walking carefully in his stride and giving the audience a perspective that prevents us from seeing him as well. Another director would just have its audience assume the train conductor couldn’t tell where he was hiding.

Linder also recycles gags from his vaudeville roots, but he imbues his own unique style and punchline into each one. The famous example from this film is an opening mirror gag. Most will recognize it as strikingly similar to the routine performed by the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup.” One man pretends to be the other man’s reflection in a broken stand-up mirror, and the other suspiciously tries to test if he’s actually seeing himself. Something like this could only end one way, but Linder makes it special. He starts to shave in front of the mirror and lather himself with shaving cream. His reflection doesn’t have any cream in the jar beside him, so Linder assumes that, like his reflection, there’s nothing on his brush.

Another age old gag sees Linder get glue on his hand and be unable to let go of anything he touches. Hats, paper, doorknobs. These are all the usual beats such a gag can go through, but perhaps only a director from overseas would be bold enough to make it risque in the way Linder does, latching his hand onto a woman’s blouse until her entire dress pulls off as she tries to escape.

No one trying to get into silent comedy should start here. Linder does not have the pathos of Chaplin or the stunts of Keaton, but he does display roots that reveal how influential and enjoyable he once was.

Rapid Response: The Circus

There’s real terror in our eyes as Charlie Chaplin dances atop a tight rope in the closing set piece of “The Circus,” and yet the Tramp turns it into a larf. He makes this goofy looking stunt where he’s pulled skyward by a wire look effortlessly graceful, and he’s such a showman as he awkwardly gags as a monkey puts its tail in his mouth as he’s trying to stay balanced. Watch carefully in a cutaway shot of the audience, and you’ll see a guy watching intently and eating his popcorn waiting for the Tramp to fall as everyone else screams in terror. It’s this little gag that makes the scene all the more delightful.

And the added surprise? He’s really up there on that rope.

“The Circus” is the first of Chaplin’s silent stragglers, a gigantic mess of a production in between “The Gold Rush,” “City Lights” and the rise of the talkie that still managed to be an uproarious comedy gem. If it doesn’t innovate in the way that “The Gold Rush,” “City Lights” and “Modern Times” do, it’s just as good and funny, if not better, and with just as much pathos. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Circus”

The Gold Rush (1925)

It might not be the most flattering of praises to say that Charlie Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush” was the first movie to make cannibalism funny, but that’s the irreverent charm of one of the Tramp’s finest films.

Watching it can immediately reveal two things. Firstly we take notice of just how committed Chaplin is to every one of his gags. He doesn’t exactly play everything with a straight face the way Buster Keaton would, but when he aims to eat his own shoe as though his laces were spaghetti and the sole was a bony fish, he makes a point to get a laugh out of it. Not to mention he will continue walking without a proper shoe even in the most pathos filled moments.

Even his face in the film’s famed “Oceana Dance,” with two bread rolls stuck to forks acting as legs, is made so endearing thanks to his immersion and dopey charm within his miniature character. Further, Chaplin’s cinematographer isolates him in a darkly back-lit scene to allow the routine to stand on its own as a clever vaudevillian number. It’s as if he made a point to make that moment famous. Continue reading “The Gold Rush (1925)”

The Artist

“The Artist” is a whimsical, crowd pleasing film that succeeds on its style and love of the movies, not its story, but for a modern silent film, that’s wonderful.

I should be thrilled “The Artist” is such a winning, fun crowd pleaser of a movie, despite being a silent, foreign film. This movie should be box office poison, and yet it’s whimsical and well made, despite an ultimately flimsy and familiar plot that makes it overrated as a Best Picture frontrunner. Continue reading “The Artist”

Debunking Silent Film Myths

Many silent films are considered old and dated despite a number of misconceptions and a lack of viewing options to watch all these classics.

The last and biggest hurdle to overcome to becoming a real lover of cinema is learning to appreciate silent films.

Stick enough violence or action in a movie and you can get anyone reading subtitles. Show them “Singin’ in the Rain” and they’ll be able to watch any musical ever made. Watch a movie timeless enough and you’ll forget that it’s in black and white.

But silent films are different. They’re a hard sell for a number of reasons, and there are a few myths and cultural problems to address before we notice a change.

Debunking silent film myths

Myth #1: Sound Movies are Better

The biggest misconception about film is that it was once seen as nothing more than a novelty, and only later did it become art.

Anyone who believes that transition happened between silents to talkies is wrong.

Of course sound and dialogue is a good thing. Movies would not be the same if we had been denied the clever dialogue of modern wordsmiths like the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Aaron Sorkin and more.

Rather, silent films hardly told stories the same way as talkies, even to the point that storytelling had to be reinvented with the introduction of sound.

But this form of silent storytelling was not primitive or inferior.

The best directors of the silent screen were gifted at telling a story through purely visual means, minimizing intertitles and composing moods through facial cues and striking shot placement.

Consider the chilling images of “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” the cinematic ballet of any of Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick, the mesmerizing first-ever montage of “The Battleship Potemkin” or the simple love story behind “Sunrise.”

I can’t think of more elegant, poetic or even easier ways of telling any of those stories, and I certainly can’t imagine how words would help. Continue reading “Debunking Silent Film Myths”

The Kid (1921)

If Charlie Chaplin was not the stuntman, exhibitionist Buster Keaton was or the hard working everyman Harold Lloyd was, he surely made us cry the most.

“The Kid,” by far his most famous feature film firmly rooted in the silent era, is a lovely mix of sympathetic pathos and devilish slapstick.

Yet for as much as Chaplin made us feel, he was the kind of director and performer that could get a laugh from the idea of throwing a baby into a sewer. Continue reading “The Kid (1921)”