Spoilers herein.
Chaplin is one of a half dozen masters who invented film and therefore changed humanity through their dreams. His genius was one of visual abstraction -- the humor was just a strategy to engage the audience. Orson Welles thought `City Lights' the most important film ever made, and by that I think he meant the first overtly self-referential master manipulation of the medium.
Making a film _about_ Chaplin has got to be one of the sweetest, most ineluctable notions ever. One would presume that such a film would use `Limelight' as a conceptual foundation. But since modern tastes want the raw personalities and since Chaplin's energies were at root sexual, one would expect a film that focuses on abstractions from sex as the mechanism for mass engagement. One would expect us to to see and understand how his energies in life were transmuted by much effort and reflection into related energies on the screen. One would expect us to see a similar struggle in the commitment from Attenborough.
Alas, Attenborough is more Sennett than Chaplin, someone with skills by exposure but who lacks passion and intellect. Instead, we get the self-reference from an unexpected source: Downey. He is not allowed to be a sexual being here, and incidentally neither are the women in the parade of pulchritude he thrashes through: they are here cast as demure, models, instead of directly animal beings -- more film beings than magnets for Chaplin's force.
Bereft of the sexual drive, Downey is forced to give us an internal being who progressively complicates his thoughts on their way to physicality, someone who eventually spends years on projects that previously took days. He already was seriously addicted to drugs here, and one can see the marvelous resonance of internal torture of Downey overlain on Chaplin. A double tragedy unfolds before our eyes (and amazingly behind Attenborough's back).
Attenborough does deal honestly with the personal vendetta of Hoover and the national embarrassment of the exile. But little context is established for how overt, intense and ambiguous was the struggle among Hollywood intellectuals and between them and the brutality of Washington and press associates. (We need to have a film about how close Hoover brought America to revolution.) What we get instead is a focus on his poverty, brother's jewishness and mother's insanity. I think that is a mistake.
Incidentally, one could spend time in worse ways than studying how the comic timing of films was invented, and how it has been both copied and evolved at the same time. Watch Chaplin. Then watch Downey doing Chaplin. He does an honest job, placing his Chaplin in Chaplin's time, not our own, Then watch Depp do Downey doing Chaplin (`Benny and Joon') but placed in the context of evolved notions of today's physical timing. Its more immediate, tighter.
Chaplin is one of a half dozen masters who invented film and therefore changed humanity through their dreams. His genius was one of visual abstraction -- the humor was just a strategy to engage the audience. Orson Welles thought `City Lights' the most important film ever made, and by that I think he meant the first overtly self-referential master manipulation of the medium.
Making a film _about_ Chaplin has got to be one of the sweetest, most ineluctable notions ever. One would presume that such a film would use `Limelight' as a conceptual foundation. But since modern tastes want the raw personalities and since Chaplin's energies were at root sexual, one would expect a film that focuses on abstractions from sex as the mechanism for mass engagement. One would expect us to to see and understand how his energies in life were transmuted by much effort and reflection into related energies on the screen. One would expect us to see a similar struggle in the commitment from Attenborough.
Alas, Attenborough is more Sennett than Chaplin, someone with skills by exposure but who lacks passion and intellect. Instead, we get the self-reference from an unexpected source: Downey. He is not allowed to be a sexual being here, and incidentally neither are the women in the parade of pulchritude he thrashes through: they are here cast as demure, models, instead of directly animal beings -- more film beings than magnets for Chaplin's force.
Bereft of the sexual drive, Downey is forced to give us an internal being who progressively complicates his thoughts on their way to physicality, someone who eventually spends years on projects that previously took days. He already was seriously addicted to drugs here, and one can see the marvelous resonance of internal torture of Downey overlain on Chaplin. A double tragedy unfolds before our eyes (and amazingly behind Attenborough's back).
Attenborough does deal honestly with the personal vendetta of Hoover and the national embarrassment of the exile. But little context is established for how overt, intense and ambiguous was the struggle among Hollywood intellectuals and between them and the brutality of Washington and press associates. (We need to have a film about how close Hoover brought America to revolution.) What we get instead is a focus on his poverty, brother's jewishness and mother's insanity. I think that is a mistake.
Incidentally, one could spend time in worse ways than studying how the comic timing of films was invented, and how it has been both copied and evolved at the same time. Watch Chaplin. Then watch Downey doing Chaplin. He does an honest job, placing his Chaplin in Chaplin's time, not our own, Then watch Depp do Downey doing Chaplin (`Benny and Joon') but placed in the context of evolved notions of today's physical timing. Its more immediate, tighter.