Movie Review: Monsieur Verdoux

(Charles Chaplin, USA, 1947)

It is easy to love genius in full bloom. It is harder to love genius when it occasionally goes dormant, trying to find its way again.

I began watching Monsieur Verdoux on a very lazy Sunday, before the resumption of classes after Thanksgiving break. My first reaction was shock--how could Chaplin be this far off the mark? Much of the dialogue was heavy-handed and dull; the characterization, idiotic; the French ambiance, never convincing; and the pacing, interminably dull. I can recall laughing once, possibly twice, but certainly not enough. I was so thoroughly bored that I stopped halfway through the movie to go do something else, dreading the prospect of watching the rest of the film. I spent a good deal of time preparing myself for the possibility that I might have to bad mouth one of my favorite directors, and prayed for the outside hope that the last half of the film would be better.

I'm not sure exactly what happened between the time I stopped watching the movie the first time, and the resumption of the film a few days later. Maybe going back to class made me slightly more in tune with Chaplin's desperate outlook on the world; maybe I needed more distance from Chaplin to appreciate exactly what he was doing; or, maybe, the second half of the film is demonstrably better than the first. All I know is that I saw something completely different when I resumed. The parody was more nuanced, the writing got better and better with each passing scene, the jokes started to fall together. And the final scenes? Pure Chaplin--a sublimely understated concoction of humor and sorrow, as good as anything in City Lights, Modern Times, or The Gold Rush, with a haunting reminder in the final shot that the differences between the old Chaplin and the new Chaplin are not as deep as one might have thought. So after one viewing, I was left with a film that was awful in its first 40 minutes, and an incredible in its last 80. What to do? As the old maxim says, "If at first you don't succeed, screen, screen again!" (Well, something like that...). The second time around, I sat through the film from title credits to the final fadeout. Predictably, I suppose, the two opinions balanced out--the first part seemed much better, and the second part had some flaws to pick out.

Article Author: Michael Gerardi

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