Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Real Charlie Chaplin’ on Showtime, a Fascinating Documentary Bio of a Wildly Complicated Icon

Showtime documentary The Real Charlie Chaplin is a rarity, a biography that does justice to its topic, covering it from mop of curls to duck-toed boots, in two hours. Peter Middleton and James Spinney direct, and Pearl Mackie narrates, this comprehensive examination of the screen star who was arguably the most famous man on Earth until Adolf Hitler came along – we’ll get to that, and it’s fascinating – and even then, you’d have to take infamy into consideration. A Chaplin bio is one heck of a challenging project to tackle, but this film argues early on that it’s up to the task of finding the “real” man beneath the bowler hat and toothbrush mustache; let’s see if that boast is justified.

THE REAL CHARLIE CHAPLIN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The film opens, quite cleverly, in Dec., 1916, with a cheeky “report” on all the Chaplin sightings across America. He was everywhere, from New York to California, the hat, the cane, the ‘stache, but which one was actually Chaplin? Perhaps the one who came in 20th place in a Chaplin lookalike contest, as one rumor went. Chaplinmania was in full swing, and admirers of his slapstick-comedy nickelodeon films expressed their appreciation by dressing like his famous Tramp character, who “has no name, no fixed address, no family, no set point in space or time,” Mackie narrates. And that’s precisely the genius of it: The Tramp was a universal figure, instantly recognizable, ripe for imitation, a reflection of everybody and nobody at exactly the same time, and, the film asserts, he was more famous than kings, queens, emperors and the like. (Just please don’t call the Tramp a “brand.”)

Chaplin was born in London in 1889, to a drunken father who ran off with another woman, and a mother who was soon institutionalized. He ended up in a children’s “workhouse,” which is just a slightly more acceptable word for “orphanage.” We hear a woman’s voice, and it’s Effie Wisdom, in a 1983 interview conducted when she was 92; she used to play in the London alleys and streets with Chaplin, who, she says, promised to never forget her. (To sit here in 2021 and listen to the voice of someone who knew Charlie Chaplin in the late 1800s is kind of astonishing.) We see her, too, but played by an actor in a nifty reenactment, lip-synching to cleaned-up audio.

Anyway. Chaplin eventually fell in with Fred Karno’s comedy troupe, where he learned the basics of slapstick comedy, which, to the untrained eye, appears to be the art of falling down on purpose without killing yourself. The troupe toured the U.S., and he specifically was targeted by producers of moving pictures, an art that Chaplin thought was beneath him until he was offered a contract that was triple the salary of his vaudeville gig. We hear Chaplin’s voice from a 1966 Life Magazine interview, and he explains the origin of the Tramp: A desperate, last-minute throwing-together of disparate items from a wardrobe, including another actor’s boots and Fatty Arbuckle’s pants. The camera rolled, and he let rip. That was Feb., 1914, and if you do the quick math from the documentary’s opening scene, it took more than two but less than three years for him to become bigger than Jesus.

From here, the story is a rolling snowball gathering much from his mostly triumphant professional life and mostly turbulent personal life. They intersected in the films he wrote, directed, edited, produced, scored and starred in – The Kid, City Lights, The Gold Rush, Modern Times, et al – which frequently reflected the poverty and parental issues of his youth. There was also The Great Dictator, and yeah, I told you we’d get to that: Another massively famous person with an outlandish persona and toothbrush mustache rose to prominence, and the two of them shared many other parallels (they were born four days apart!), which Chaplin addressed in this film, the first to feature the voice of the previously silent Tramp.

The film also diligently shares the dark side of Chaplin: His near-OCD control of his directorial work; his multiple marriages to teenage women, some of whom emerged with stories of psychological abuse. The spotlight afforded him opportunities to share his politics, which eventually got him run out of the country – more of an indictment of J. Edgar Hoover’s cruel campaign to brand Chaplin a Communist during the Red Scare. (Extra credit question: Should he have “stayed in his lane”? Discuss.) We eventually get to home movies of a silver-haired Chaplin, filmed after he’d married and had children with his fourth wife, goofing on camera, performing, always performing. Those scenes are narrated by his kids, who describe him as a tyrant of the household; his daughter Jane says he was so “inaccessible,” for years she deeply yearned for a single opportunity to have a meaningful one-on-one conversation with him. What a sad happy man Chaplin was.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: A year ago, Showtime debuted Belushi, another documentary that foregoes the usual talking-heads approach to celeb bios. And here, we should note that a whole bunch of Chaplin’s films are streaming on HBO Max.

Performance Worth Watching: It sure seems silly to highlight someone over Charlie Chaplin in a movie about Charlie Chaplin, who might just be the greatest pure performer ever captured on film.

Memorable Dialogue: Mackie, on the Tramp: “He’s a nobody, and he belongs to everybody.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Once again, as ever, there is the art and there is the artist, and the points where they intersect and diverge are so, so fascinating. His films vouched for the downtrodden, criticized the powerful, sympathized with immigrants, showed average Americans being ground up in the gears of the machine (literally!). He wrote what he knew, to a degree. His films made slapstick an art – an art that’s all but lost now, yet seems utterly timeless when we see him fumble and waddle and pratfall and stumble.

The Real Charlie Chaplin profoundly illustrates the power of silence and speech in Chaplin’s life – how the former made him and the latter sank him. It juxtaposes the Tramp’s famous first spoken lines, a plea for peace and unity during World War II taken from the final scenes of The Great Dictator, with the uglier, dictatorial side of his personality, which dominated his life behind the camera, where he was a cruel womanizer, distant father and a director who hired and fired multiple actresses in the quest for the perfect scene in City Lights – a scene that took him weeks upon weeks upon weeks to shoot. The resulting film is among the greatest of all time; do the ends justify the means? Can we reconcile the man and his work? (I ask questions that don’t have easy answers, if they have answers at all – more like endless debates.)

Middleton and Spinney’s direction is shrewd and confident, transitioning seamlessly from playful to serious when necessary. Their approach is fearless, and the implications we’re left to wrestle with insist that Chaplin’s scandals carry on, in the stories of brilliant artists/troubled men of the current day. His monstrous behavior had little bearing on his career; the film suggests that for far too many, his life’s biggest scandal may have been when the Tramp first opened his mouth and spoke. What a world. Let’s hope it’s gotten better.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Real Charlie Chaplin is a stellar primer for newcomers to the well-trod story of Chaplin, while acolytes may appreciate its restored archival audio and bits of candid home movies. The film also quietly showcases its relevance here in our own modern times.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream The Real Charlie Chaplin on Showtime