Film

Chaplin

Name: Chaplin
Genre: Drama
Released: 1992
Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Geraldine Chaplin, Paul Rhys, John Thaw, Moira Kelly

Richard Attenborough's sprawling, respectful biopic covers the full arc of Chaplin's life — Victorian poverty, silent-film stardom, five marriages, and exile from the country that made him famous. Robert Downey Jr.'s uncanny performance is the reason to watch; the film around him is glossy, dutiful, and a little afraid to look too closely at its subject's less flattering edges.

TMDb rating

7.4

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Jamie Foxx's transformation into Ray Charles hits the same note Downey Jr. does here — an actor disappearing so completely into a musical icon that the impersonation becomes its own kind of virtuosity.

But Same biopic shape and same tendency to smooth over the ugliest parts of a complicated man.

Walk the Line2005

Another rise-from-poverty showbiz legend story, this one anchored by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon actually doing their own singing, which gives it a rawness Chaplin's polish doesn't have.

But It's a genuinely conventional music biopic — no surprises in the structure at all.

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Tim Burton's black-and-white love letter to a terrible director is the funhouse-mirror version of Chaplin: a film about the joy and delusion of making movies, shot with real affection for old Hollywood.

But It's a comedy about a failure, not a drama about a genius — tonally it's a hard left turn.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Sunset Boulevard1950

Chaplin ends in exile, mourning a fame that outgrew him; Sunset Boulevard imagines what happens to the ones who never let go of it, told without a shred of sentimentality.

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The Aviator2004

Scorsese and DiCaprio tackle another self-made American titan undone by his own obsessions and paranoia, with the same lavish period detail and awards-season sweep.

But Nearly three hours long, and Howard Hughes's decline is a much colder, lonelier watch.

Amadeus1984

A genius artist, an unreliable narrator looking back, and a society both dazzled and repelled by him — the emotional architecture is nearly identical, just with wigs instead of bowler hats.

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Jim Carrey vanishing into Andy Kaufman is the closest thing to Downey Jr.'s trick here — a comedian playing a comedian whose off-stage self nobody could quite pin down.

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Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce, shot in stark black-and-white, is a rawer, angrier take on the persecuted-comic-genius story that Chaplin tells with much more velvet.

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My Week with Marilyn2011no page yet

A gentler, smaller-scale look at another fragile, adored performer being consumed by their own myth, with a lovely, aching performance at its center.

But Much slighter in scope — a week, not a lifetime, and it knows it.

Bird1988no page yet

Clint Eastwood's Charlie Parker biopic, with Forest Whitaker astonishing in the lead, shares Chaplin's structure of genius shadowed by addiction and a world that couldn't hold him.

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Zelig1983

Chaplin's tragedy is that the Tramp became bigger than the man; Zelig, made with real technical wit, is entirely about a person disappearing into whatever the world needs him to be.

Woody Allen's mockumentary about a man with no fixed identity, shot on faux vintage film stock and spliced into real archival footage, is a sly, funny meditation on fame swallowing selfhood.

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