FILM / A very Dickie Chaplin

IF THERE is anything you don't understand about Chaplin, just make sure you stay until the final credits. As each performer is named, his or her character is explained one last time, just in case you missed the point: 'Mildred Harris was his first wife . . . ' This look-and-learn tone rings throughout the film, which is made from chunky flashbacks. The ageing Charlie - at least I take the buttering of his head with speckled rubber to indicate old age - sits in Switzerland and chats to his editor (Anthony Hopkins). Ostensibly they are picking over the fine points of Chaplin's autobiography, but their true purpose is to light our path through the narrative. As each stage of Chaplin's life comes up for inspection, the editor greets it with admiring blurb: 'My God, Charlie, you were the most famous man in the world, and you weren't even 30]' Sometimes information is simply dumped in our laps. When he first mentions J Edgar Hoover, Charlie is told: 'I think you should make it clear that this was before he became head of the FBI . . .'

It all begins in 1894, on stage in Aldershot. Hannah Chaplin - spookily played by her own granddaughter, Geraldine - is booed off the boards, and replaced by a small explosion of curly hair. Somewhere beneath it is her young son Charlie, who sings, dances and bats his eyelashes until the audience has no option but to watch. It feels pat, precocious and spot-on: for the next 70 years, this upstart would hijack public emotions. It may be easy to wince at him, but even then it's hard to look away. Richard Attenborough's work cannot begin to match that fascination, but to its credit Chaplin feels assured of this central, infuriating fact: attention must be paid to such a man.

This becomes easier when Robert Downey Jr appears on the scene. The growing Chaplin is played by a bony and unconvincing teenager, showing off his leaden skills to the impresario Fred Karno (John Thaw), but then Downey takes over with grace abounding. You see him as a stage drunk at the Hackney Empire, and at once you think: by Jove, I think he's got it. The dinky little backward kick, the bum used like a bumper car, a perfect command of the uncontrolled - all the tics of the trade. Downey has a perfect ear for the Chaplin accent, the way it climbed from Cockney to minced posh, and a perfect boot and fist for the slapstick; the one thing he doesn't have is an eye on his own brilliance. Chaplin was 10 times over the legal limit of vanity, but Downey doesn't touch a drop.

If it falls short of a complete performance, that's not his fault. Attenborough never gives him the space. Chaplin was cruel both in the treatment he meted out to some of his wives, and more subtly on screen, where the Tramp habitually clambers over the other characters to ensure top billing for his own reactions. The finale of City Lights seems to me more shocking than moving: that crumbling simper tells not so much of charity rewarded as of stealthy emotional schemes that have gone joyously to plan. The only film in which Chaplin owned up to this was Monsieur Verdoux where he played a homicidal husband; no wonder that Chaplin fails to mention it. Attenborough is not interested in that side of his hero, the depraved and the dandyish; there was a touch of lady in the Tramp, but he doesn't want to know.

Instead he looks to the restless exile, the principled millionaire. Charlie arrives in California, does a neat routine for Mack Sennett (Dan Aykroyd) in the middle of dusty nowhere, and next thing we know he's the most famous man in the world. Any biopic must jump ahead, but Chaplin does show an uncanny ability to leapfrog over real interest and hit the dull spots. Wives come and go like a tray of drinks - the film is even more indifferent to them than Chaplin was, which is saying something. With his sweet tooth for oral sex, he liked to feed on jailbait, which got him into trouble in court; but the film coughs politely and passes over the subject, except for one clunking scene where he lies in bed and asks his baby-doll wife to put on lipstick. Cor lumme, as the script would say.

Marisa Tomei and Penelope Ann Miller play Mabel Normand and Edna Purviance respectively; it should have been ideal casting, funny and fiery all round, but these are strictly walk-on, slide-off roles. Indeed the only one who digs into his part is Kevin Kline, who comes up with a great Douglas Fairbanks, infinitely sporty and civilised. He relaxes the movie, lets it idle a while, but not for long; there are lines to be chanted, clanging hints about what's to come - 'it's funny, you look a bit like him . . . Adolf, I mean'. Ping] Yes, that was the moment when Chaplin first thought of The Great Dictator. There's something desperately sad and schoolboyish about the eagerness of Chaplin, its will to believe that art can spring ready-made from a good idea.

The clumsiest example comes with the tale of the Tramp outfit. Charlie wanders into the props room. Suddenly a bowler hat glows and leaps into his hand . . . and, freeze] Chaplin's voiceover says no, it was much more humdrum than that. So what was it like? Attenborough's answer is to quicken the film up to runaround speed and have Charlie snatch everything within reach, like a Keystone Cop grabbing at robbers. But that is no more credible than the myth we saw first; the movie gets ready for irony and then pulls back, for fear of disturbing its act of worship. This peaks at the end, when a dopey old Charlie returns to Hollywood to snaffle an honorary Oscar. Downey has to sit there, under clips of the Tramp, and pretend to cry with pride. This has little to do with Chaplin, and an awful lot to do with Sir Richard Attenborough; it's his idea of the perfect end to a lovely life.

So why should you see this movie? Faced with a choice of either Chaplin or Modern Times and The Kid, go for the originals. They are far more finely balanced, and alive to casual inspiration; of course they entreat us with their hammy innocence, but Attenborough is really doing no different, with his wobbly dream dissolves and his cod working-class dialogue ('I'll get you a plum cake one day, when my ship comes in'). His one great bonus is Robert Downey Jr, who both troubles and refines this gawky film. The highlights are all his: a slow loping dance up the stairs to a dressing room, a soft leap from a car, half a second of spine- straightening to pose for the cameras. He is right there with Chaplin, in body at least; the spirit is harder to catch. But I loved the moment when he came off set and muttered a low aside: 'I don't feel funny any more.' The choking fear of not making people laugh, or not doing them good: such was Chaplin's double paranoia, and time has shown that he was right to worry.

'Chaplin' (12) is showing at the Odeon Leicester Sq (071-930 3232).