Very disappointed :(

Pretty Good

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Sir. Richard Attenborough's cradle-to-grave, rags-to-riches biopic of Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) is anything but a hagiography, and should be more appositely re-titled as CHAPLIN AND HIS WOMEN, since the meat of this lofty work sees Charlie (Downey Jr.) gyrating from one wife to another (four in toto plus other conquests), meanwhile the more intriguing facet of his cinematic creative process is ruefully taken a back seat. It is a warts-and-all treatment, yet somehow overreaches itself on the "warts" department, Chaplin is repeatedly portrayed as a love fool who cannot overcome his sexual predilection of younger girls (viz. jailbait), starting from his first crush Hetty Kelly (Moira Kelly), to first wife Mildred Harris (a barely 16-year-old Milla Jovovich striking the bull's eye of the ingénue seduction with flaming lips), an ill-fated union with the independent Paulette Goddard (a classy Lane), until his last spouse Oona O'Neill (Kelly again to finish the circle), a none-too-subtle way of intimating that the right one is actually the one who gets away, which to a certain degree, cunningly shifts the blame on Hetty, the undertone seems to suggest that if she had accepted Chaplin's marriage proposal before he would put his name on the map in the celluloid boom town, his subsequent failed marriages would have no place in the history, a low move that hurts the film's integrity. Plus, save for her physical resemblance, we have no inkling why Oona is the one for keeps because Attenborough never shed any lights on her story (although Kelly is game enough to take on the dual role with slight discrepancy). The frame narrative is actually set in Switzerland where an aging Chaplin discusses his biography at length with a fictive writer George Hayden (Hopkins), the tactic doesn't quite work out, not just because Downey Jr.'s somewhat unconvincing warpaint (he looks rather hale beside Hopkins and the sparks in his eyes cannot disguise his real age of 26), but also it is padding out the story, only to prepare audience for the coda when Chaplin is given an overdue gong in the 1972 Academy Award ceremony for a special Lifetime Achievement, with footage of Chaplin's films playing to make the most of one's nostalgic admiration, but the emotional punch never packs, after 140 minutes, we still have a very indeterminate image of Charlie Chaplin, is he a Communist? Why he doesn't apply for a USA citizenship after years in Hollywood and once being rejected for his assumed political orientation, it cuts an unrecoverable wound in his exile days, it contradicts with his apparent belief of the land of freedom and opportunity. All those questions are posed but not satisfactorily answered, maybe one should read his biography instead. But in the end of the day, CHAPLIN has its inherent edge, it is a film about the king of comedy, so at the very least, it is never tedious on the eyes, not with a charismatic Robert Downey Jr. fleetly mimicking the tramp's slapstick (he makes them look as effortless as Chaplin himself) and conscientiously emanating Charlie's more subdued affect when he has his own hurdles to grapple with, may it be the resistance to the sound cinema, or a bigoted lawsuit from his former lover Joan Barry (Travis). It is also noteworthy that Geraldine Chaplin plays Hannah Chaplin, Charlie's head-case mother and her own grandmother with great affection, which prompts the inference that perhaps there is a hardwired monkey wrench in the works could be partially but potentially answerable for Charlie's personal conflicts between his genius and frailties.

The movie "Chaplin" by Richard Attenborough impresses with a lot of important historical information. Beside the life of Charles Chaplin there is a lot to learn about the time he lived in. I especially liked his opinion about America. Once he said to his mom something about America and Hollywood like; This is the land of possibilities, you cam do everything here. So I could see, that this really was the time when the American Dream was still alive. One thing I liked about the movie was, that the story was told as flashback. The old Chaplin gave his opinion about certain things in is life, which really makes him human for me.You also could see and experience the development of his character. I mean that like this: The old Chaplin first seemed pretty strange for me. But step by step his life made me understand how he became who he was. Maybe it is because Chaplin was a special and quiet, but the movie is more educating than exiting. Everything happens pretty slow and there is no tension. I definitively got a good view in the time that Chaplin lived in, but I would not watch the movie at home.

Honestly before I watched Chaplin I didn't know much, all I knew was that he was a very popular actor who wore a black hat and had a cane. However, after watching the film I learned that when he was only 14 he put his mother in an asylum and after that began his career in a vaudeville theatre. after he travelled to America and was then hired in movie theatre where he was limited to what he wanted to do. I found it really amazing how he started his own film studio and started making films of his own and when sound came into the world he resisted because he thought the films were more realistic and didn't want to force sound into them because they would lose their simple comedy. I also learned that when he left America for a holiday he was banned and wasn't allowed to return.I think Charlie Chaplin is still famous today because as a film director in the 1900s he was always extremely focused on what he wanted to film and how he wanted to film it and didn't let others change the way he wanted to do things.Personally I loved the film and especially the way it was filmed, the way they went through his childhood was perfect and I never got tired or bored of it. I was constantly attached to it and i think Robert Downey Jr. was perfect for the role with his somewhat sarcastic attitude.

Based on Charlie Chaplin's 1964 autobiography and the 1985 book "Chaplin: His Life and Art" by David Robinson, this is a very good film concerning the great filmmaker and artist, not a word that I ever use lightly, but it never reaches its full potential. Richard Attenborough's direction is excellent throughout but the script by William Boyd, Bryan Forbes and William Goldman (who wrote the director's previous films "A Bridge Too Far" and "Magic") tries to cover too much ground. Chaplin had a very long and eventful life which was full of incident and controversy. Even at 143 minutes, the film, which takes place from 1894 to 1972, is too short to cover (almost) his entire life in a satisfactory manner. It would have perhaps been better to focus on a particular period of Chaplin's life. Confining ourselves solely to Attenborough's own films, "Young Winston" covers only 20 years of Churchill's life while "Gandhi" does not deal with his childhood at all. A similar approach would have been to this film's benefit.Robert Downey, Jr. is excellent as the title character, playing him between the ages of 19 and 82. His performance is certainly the highlight of the film as he is very compelling as the young music hall star who took the world by storm when he made it to the big screen. In spite of his great success and worldwide fame, I think that Chaplin had quite a sad life in many respects and the film does a good job at depicting that. He grew up in the squalor of an East End slum and spent a year in a workhouse, which later led him to describe the Victorian era as "a pitiless time" and served as the direct inspiration for "The Kid". While his riches mean that he wants for nothing in the material sense as an adult, he is never truly happy as he is essentially a tortured creative genius. The film does not spend as much time as I would like on his creative process but I liked that it portrayed it as a very difficult and time consuming one. Ideas did not simply pop into Chaplin's head fully formed. It also did not hesitate to depict Chaplin as a flawed man who, until his fourth wife Oona O'Neill came along, was not able to forge a lasting relationship with a woman. He is shown to obsessive about his work to the point that it damages his relationships. Downey was deservedly nominated for Best Actor for his performance.The nature and timescale of the film means that no character other than Chaplin himself is given the same chance to shine but Attenborough nevertheless assembled a great cast. Chaplin's daughter Geraldine is excellent as his mother Hannah, whom she never knew in real life. Hannah suffered from a severe mental illness which led to her being committed in 1903. Geraldine Chaplin has relatively little screen time but she brilliantly portrays her grandmother's increasingly erratic behaviour and these scenes are the most moving in the entire film. Chaplin clearly loved his mother and was good to her in that he brought her over to California and bought a house for her by the sea but did not know what to do with her. I wonder what he would have thought of Geraldine's performance. Paul Rhys is very good as Chaplin's beloved half-brother Sydney but his sole reason for being in the film seems to be so that he can be proved wrong at every turn. Anthony Hopkins does the best that he can in the thankless role of Chaplin's friend and editor George Hayden, the only notable fictional character in the film.Other than Geraldine Chaplin, Kevin Kline is the strongest of the supporting cast members as Douglas Fairbanks, perhaps the best friend that Chaplin ever had. He was perfectly cast as the most famous swashbuckler of his day and it is a real shame that he only has a few major scenes. Moira Kelly is good in the dual role of Chaplin's first love Hetty Kelly, who sadly died in the Spanish flu epidemic, and his last love Oona O'Neill. While her Irish accent as the former is a little over the top, it is far better than most due to the fact that both Moira Kelly's parents are Irish. That said, I thought that she was better as Hetty overall. The film features great performances from Dan Aykroyd as Mack Sennett, John Thaw as Fred Karno (the music hall impresario who gave both Chaplin and Stan Laurel - who is briefly depicted - their first breaks), Kevin Dunn as J. Edgar Hoover, Diane Lane as Chaplin's third wife Paulette Goddard and, in a one scene cameo, James Woods as Joseph Scott. It also has nice small appearances from Bill Paterson, Marisa Tomei, Maria Pitillo, Attenborough's brother-in-law / "mascot" Gerald Sim, John Standing and Nancy Travis.On the negative side, I think that the film spent too much time on Chaplin's complicated love life. The film asserts that he is basically trying to recapture how he felt with Hetty Kelly but I find this to be a fairly unconvincing pop psychology explanation for his sexual proclivities. When it comes to his first wife Mildred Harris, the film accurately depicts her as having a false pregnancy but it is never mentioned that she and Chaplin later had a son who lived for three days. Although he had two sons with her, his second wife Lita Grey appears for about a minute but this may be due to the fact that she was still alive when the film was made.Overall, this is a great tribute to one of the most influential and famous men in the history of cinema but it could have been an even better one.