Role: Mildred Harris
Genre: Biography , Drama
Director: Richard Attenborough
Based on: “My Autobiography” by Charles Chaplin; “Chaplin: His Life and Art” by David Robinson
Running time: 143 min
Release Date: January 8, 1993
Additional Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Geraldine Chaplin and Paul Rhys

Synopsis

The biography of Charlie Chaplin, filmmaker extraordinaire. From his formitive years in England to his highest successes in America, Charlie’s life, work, and loves are followed. While his screen characters were extremely hilarious, the man behind “The Little Tramp” was constantly haunted by a sense of loss.

Although the film was criticized for taking dramatic licence with some aspects of Chaplin’s life, Downey’s performance as Chaplin won almost universal acclaim. Attenborough was sufficiently confident in Downey’s performance to include historical footage of Chaplin himself at the end of the film.

The film was lauded for its high production values, but many critics dismissed it as an overly glossy biopic.One critic wrote that the screenplay “endeavors to cover too much ground. The life of Charlie Chaplin was so vast and varied that a film is far too restrictive a format to give it justice.”

The film was released on DVD in 1997. A fifteenth-anniversary edition was released by Lions Gate Entertainment (who obtained the distribution rights to the film in the interim under license from the copyright holder, StudioCanal) in 2008. The anniversary edition contained extensive interviews with the producers, and included several minutes of home-movie footage shot on Chaplin’s yacht. The box for this DVD mistakenly lists the film’s running time as 135 minutes (it is 144 minutes, the same as the original theater release).

The 15th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray of Chaplin was released on February 15, 2011.

Critical Response

The film received mixed reviews, lauded for its high production values, but many critics dismissed it as an overly glossy biopic. Although the film was criticized for taking dramatic license with some aspects of Chaplin’s life, Downey’s performance as Chaplin won universal acclaim. Attenborough was sufficiently confident in Downey’s performance to include historical footage of Chaplin himself at the end of the film. According to the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 61% of critics have given Chaplin a positive review based on 56 reviews, with an average rating of 5.8/10. The website’s critics consensus reads, “Chaplin boasts a terrific performance from Robert Downey, Jr. in the title role, but it isn’t enough to overcome a formulaic biopic that pales in comparison to its subject’s classic films.” At Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 47 out of 100 based on 22 critics, indicating “mixed or average reviews”. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an “A–” on an A+ to F scale.

Vincent Canby of The New York Times lauded Downey’s performance, and deemed the film “extremely appreciative”. Todd McCarthy of Variety remarked that Chaplin’s life was too grand to be properly captured in a film, criticizing the screenplay, but praised the casting and the film’s first hour.

Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two out of four stars, dubbing the film, “a disappointing, misguided movie that has all of the parts in place to be a much better one”, but praised Downey and the production values. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times felt Attenborough’s filmmaking and Chaplin’s life were ill-suited to each other, but said of Downey, “Lithe and lively and looking remarkably like the younger Chaplin, Downey does more than master the man’s celebrated duck walk and easy grace. In one of those acts of will and creativity that actors come up with when you least expect it, Downey becomes Chaplin, re-creating his character and his chilly soul so precisely that even the comedian’s daughter Geraldine, a featured player here, was both impressed and unnerved.”