RDJ Then and Now: Chaplin and Oppenheimer
“But then I think about it and go, I’ve made my peace with what I am at my core: There’s really only one thing I’ve ever been any goddamn good at.”
-Robert Downey Jr. (Robert Downey Jr.’s Post Marvel Balancing Act, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/09/magazine/robert-downey-jr-interview-oppenheimer.html)
The Robert Downey Jr. we know now would be an odd fit for the role of Charlie Chaplin in all but a little of the look: the short dark hair, wiry build, average height, but these aren’t anything particularly unique. The eyes still have it though- devilish orbs giving off glimmers of playfulness, mischief, and charming know-all- yet if they once belonged to youth and all the promise of a full life ahead they now belong to a weathered face and soul that has been to hell and back.
One of my favorite opening scenes in a movie is the train chase in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade- it has nearly everything I love about Steven Spielberg: wonder, suspense, humor, rollicking on-the-edge-of-your-seat excitement, and a perfectly synchronized medley from John Williams. Yet even though the movie is a Harrison Ford vehicle, the star of this sequence is River Phoenix, playing the young Indiana Jones. It’s easy to see that this young man will become the elder Indiana, and how he might have inherited Harrison Ford’s movie star throne as well. Whenever I watch this movie it’s hard for me not to play that what-if game.
Watching the young Downey Jr. in Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin you see another tragic young prince of early 1990s Hollywood in a performance that is more than worth the price of admission. Due to Attenborough’s decision to chronicle most of the adult Charlie Chaplin’s life, Downey Jr. is tasked with a lot and handles it with aplomb- he goes all the way from the young vaudeville hotshot playing a drunken old man to a crusty reptilian-like elder statesman who is but a shell of the shining star he once was. These late period Chaplin scenes are a tad awkward, despite a game Anthony Hopkins as Downey’s acting partner, but you still see in the young actor an admirable courage to take on the near impossible and withhold the character’s prodigious physicality that is so on display in other parts of the movie (Chaplin really soars in a few of the set pieces that show his revolutionary gift for physical comedy). You can tell he’s a man reckoning with all the ups and downs of a massive life, a bit insecure and prickly yet proud and earnest and with that glimmer of light that lit up the world. I like the scene at the end when he’s watching himself, it’s Robert Downey Jr. as an old fictionalized Charlie Chaplin watching the young real Charlie Chaplin, yet both RDJ and Chaplin seem enmeshed as one and in curious wonder at the black and white spectral dreams playing out on the screen.
As Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer, RDJ also appears in black and white, but as a person who is more centered in the mind than the body. Around the time of the film’s release, my acting teacher noted how Downey Jr. had purportedly struggled with playing such a slimy, hard-to-forgive person, without much humanity to latch onto. Yet he found a way into the role when he realized “looking at Strauss, I saw that he was a guy who had his nose to the grindstone and was a civil servant for decades. I have something I can relate to.” It’s so far from his hyper-charismatic performances as the silent film legend, not to mention Tony Stark in the Marvel movies, and yet it’s really just the other side of the same coin, an inversion of that effortless likeability that offers a glimpse into the darkness of one of our biggest actors, who now seems so polished, machinelike on the surface that it’s a wonder this man ever really struggled with anything. And to me it gave the third act of Oppenheimer a visceral, beating human pulse that, perhaps even more than the Trinity test and the atomic press conference, gives Cillian Murphy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer a formidable antagonist to play against, a grounded conflict amongst the subatomic nuclear realm, and the film its lasting power. In a career spanning almost 50 years (!) it’s somehow something we haven’t seen from RDJ and even offers a glimpse into what still be might to come. You can only imagine.
Picture from: https://screenrant.com/robert-downey-jr-oscars-nomination-lost-chaplin-response/
