A story before naptime

Captain Abu Raed (2008) is reportedly an attempt to make a Jordanian Charlie Chaplin movie. Making a Chaplin movie without Chaplin is always a bad idea. Chaplin was the greatest actor in the movies, a brilliant multi-faceted performer. He did not craft great stories or invent original situations. His stories are poorly constructed and grotesquely sentimental at the core, which is some of the problem with Captain Abu Raed.

The first 30 minutes of the film are completely enchanting and will make you love the city of Amman and the Jordanian people and impress you with the compositional talents of the film's writer-director, Amin Matalqa. After that, the inability to spin a compelling story does in both the charm of the leading actor, Nadim Sawalha and the fine cinematography of Reinhart Peschke.

Abu Raed is an airport janitor who wears a discarded captain's hat home. When the children in his impoverished neighborhood spot him, he adopts the identity of a airline captain and spins marvelous tales for the children, creating an oasis of fantasy and imagination from their harsh urban life. So far, we have Danny Kaye in Hans Christian Andersen (both characters are practically sexless). Then Abu Raed tries to rescue a boy from beatings administered by his drunken father. But the plan backfires. He rats out the father, the cops come, everything is covered up, Abu freaks, but THEN...nothing happens. This bad-guy father never visits any reprisals on the son. You can't have your bad guy refuse to do bad stuff--that's just bad story telling.

Then Abu makes a plan for the mother and children to escape from the father. But...they successfully escape!! Yes--no complications, no difficulties, no story twists. A man makes a plan and then executes it. That's a story?

There's a tentative relationship with a young woman who is an airline pilot, but I have no idea what it means, since there are huge differences in age and class between her and Abu--he simply is an unimaginable suitor in this society.

How would this be different if Chaplin were in it? Well, first of all there would have been some slapstick complications in the rescue and much comedy of embarrassment in the scenes with the young woman. There would have been a powerful bond between man and boy, as seen in Chaplin's The Kid and a profound sense of longing for missed opportunities, as in the dazzling final shot of The Circus.

Look--if you're going to make a Chaplin movie, you better damn well have a Chaplin at the center of it. Otherwise, you've just got goo.

Incidentally, here's Chaplin in The Kid with what appear to be, appropriately, Arabic titles below the English titles:

Down for the countess

I had never felt sorry for Marlon Brando until I saw A Countess From Hong Kong (1967), Charles Chaplin's last feature as director. Perhaps only a great artist could make a film this bad, but as I think about filmmakers such as Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock and even Welles, none of them ever made something as incoherent and incompetent as this. (Although in fairness, Huston, Stevens and Kubrick did.)

Brando got a lot of heat at the time for being the "wrong" kind of actor for the film, of not having the right comic sensibilities. This is unfair. Chaplin was the wrong kind of director. Branod appears on-screen as a complete professional, game as hell, trying to play a decent sort of fellow who often acts in inconsistent, cruel and irrational ways and then has to suddenly reclaim his decency, who is asked to bend his character out of shape for an unmotivated gag and then try and revert to the character. In short, his assignment was impossible to begin with, and Jacques Tati, Peter Sellers, Roberto Begnini and Jack Lemmon combined couldn't have gotten this terribly conceived and horribly written part to make sense.

Loren survives clearly by ignoring Chaplin's simplistic direction and sparkling as much as she is allowed to. Every once in a while she, too, has been required to execute an out-of-context pantomime turn and she gets up and performs like a properly brought-up schoolgirl, and then goes back to what she knows works. And at one point, she actually gets to say, "This whole thing is a terrible mess," and you have to remind yourself she's talking about the character's situation, not the movie.

But the incompetence pervades the entire film. The set is lit flatly in all scenes, and it is the kind of movie in which people lie down and close their eyes to go to sleep without turning off any of the 32 lights that are blazing away on the set. The following things are meant to be hysterically funny: a door buzzer that sounds like an electronic fart (there are no door buzzers on cruise ships); burping; a giant bra--not a sexy one, but one clearly intended for an obese Amazon; running between one room and another; and an immense cruise ship which visibly rocks back and forth in bad weather, like the scow in The Immigrant (1916). Brando's character insists that Loren's character (a stowaway in an ambassador's stateroom) behave and dress decently, then gets mad when she is wearing his last clean pair of pajamas and tries to tear them off her body. His character seems to be going through some sort of personality disintegration attributable to a serious mental disorder, but it is just bad writing.

Oh well, you say, a door-slamming verbal farce was not Chaplin's form. Au contraire--take a look at The Idle Class or even City Lights, which are riddled with farce. No, Chaplin's gifts had waned so badly, that his own cameo in the film is not even funny. Chaplin acting a quick comic bit.

I'm sure people entered this feeling it would be an honor to work with a master and that the film, even if not one of Chaplin's masterpieces, would not be forgotten because he made it. Would that it were forgotten--everyone involved would have been better off. Poor Marlon.

[Out of respect for Chaplin, I will embed The Immigrant here, so you can see one of his best films, operating as actor and director at the height of his powers.]