Limelight

Charlie Chaplin, 1952

This was it, kids. This. Was. It.

By that I mean two different things. First of all, on the Film Forum site I read this blurb from Andrew Sarris saying basically Chaplin is the single most important personality ever to come out of the cinema. My initial response was "whoa there, big talk" but I couldn't necessarily think of anyone bigger. Well this was the film that thoroughly convinced me of Chaplin's genius. While recent experience has suggested to me that one ought not overanalyze such a come to Jesus moment (if you will), I'll tempt fate and say I think it's because the slapstick isn't really present, so everything else comes to the forefront and really flourishes.

Also: I've been fretting and kvetching (mainly to myself, not too much to you I hope) that I haven't been thoroughly moved by a (new) movie in a really long time. This was the one that reached out with both hands and grabbed me by the gut. Watching this film was absolutely fucking excruciating and I was so grateful for it. It's kind of like unrequited love; yeah it blows but in a way you're just happy to be feeling those feelings again. 

Though to my mind a bit of a lesser film (not much of a dig when going up against my tied-for-number-1-of-all-time), Limelight traverses much of the same territory as Children of Paradise (and yes, I realize I now have to write about that one as it risks bleeding into every other post on the site.) While Children actually has many main characters, one of them, like Chaplin's Calvero here, is a famous, accomplished clown and the profession opens up several thematic avenues, namely what does it mean to have high art aspirations in a field where people just want to see you fall on your ass? The mutually driving and inspiring relationships between love and art are also explored, often to quite heartbreaking effect.

There's something going on here that I can't quite parse out. We're led to believe from all outside sources that Calvero is over the hill and no longer funny. The only time we really see his routines are in dream sequences; they have an old vaudeville feel to them (this is the era the film was set in) and while they don't teach the heights of Chaplin's great slapstick set pieces, they work admirably. It doesn't always come out but sometimes Chaplin displays a surprising eye for dialogue; he has a way with the subtle put-down, and some banter between him and Claire Bloom's suicidal dancer in one routine shines with real charm. Are we supposed to be laughing here or not? Is this just an excuse for subpar comedy or is it a dark furthering of the sad clown motif? The film's big finale features an "encore" performed by Calvero and another old clown played by Buster Keaton. Getting two giants like these together you expect something utterly riotous; it doesn't quite reach those heights but still at times touches the sublime.

I came to a realization about alcoholics on film watching this one; perhaps I should have connected the dots earlier. Calvero is under the assumption that he's only funny when he drinks. That seems common enough; what's weird is that he seems to be right. My reaction was "I'm 90% sure it doesn't work like that, but what do I know about being funny?" It seems to invoke the notion of the unconscious nature of comedy, which Chaplin also addresses in The Circus. More importantly one has to remember that AA is only 75 years old and even now hardly everyone "gets it" as they like to say. Especially in older films, then, addiction functions less as a real-life disease and more as a kind of metaphor for chaotic, grinding existential malaise. And on that level the film works extremely well. Furthermore, just because you're not fully conversant in the ins and outs of something doesn't mean you can't hit on a fundamental truth of it; the moment at the beginning of the film where the tottering Calvero turns around to deliver an absurd bow and grotesque smile to the neighborhood children so perfectly illustrates the phenomenon of pretending everything's OK when to everyone else's eyes it is obvious that it is like totally patently not OK. (Sorry I'm reading Infinite Jest right now -- more on that later -- and I think I'm consciously or unconsciously aping a Wallacean tendency to insert the colloquial "like" into sentences.)

I think we tend to think about Chaplin as a great comedian rather than as a great actor, and I think that this film really smashes that misconception to bits. Here he demonstrates an incredible ability to hold a close-up, a quality I first noticed (by which I mean it was pointed out to me) in Jimmy Stewart with the binoculars in Rear Window. The first time you notice it is when his face falls in the first dream sequence when he realizes all the seats in the theater are empty just absolutely slays you. Another moment where he breaks down in tears proves equally crushing, melodramatic in the best, most moving sense of the word without veering into mawkish sentimentality.

Not so great, surprisingly, is Claire Bloom, considering her subsequent status as a grande dame of the Shakesperean/Masterpiece Theater ilk. She is of course terribly young here, and moments of extreme emotion/desperation seem to be slightly beyond her capabilities. I'll put it this way: when I was in middle school one of my classmates was a girl of decent popularity and a certain beauty, if you like the whole boring Irish thing. And she had an attitude, whether organic or cultivated, of being supremely bored and Utterly Above It All. Flashforward to the following summer. The place: some hall in the Vatican. I'm looking at a decidedly mediocre Renaissance painting of Dante and his Beatrice at the gates of paradise. And Beatrice is looking heavenward in what is I think supposed to be devotion and beatitude, but, the artist being decidedly mediocre, comes across as Supremely Bored and Utterly Above It All. And I said to myself: "Holy shit, self, that looks exactly like [NAME REDACTED]." And that exact look is what Ms. Bloom here affects in moments of extreme passion or emotion. She even has the same eyes and nose. It's uncanny. Despite her failure to come through in some clinches, she does radiate some beaming loveliness and telegraphs some real despair.