“I feel there’s so many tales and pictures ingrained in folks’s minds concerning the idea of me,” the actor Charlie Sheen tells the digital camera within the new two-part Netflix documentary about his life, “aka Charlie Sheen.” “It’s not even like they consider me as an individual. They consider me as an idea, or a selected second in time.” This evaluation, although most likely true of movie star figures typically, strikes me as particularly apt in Sheen’s case, if solely due to his fidelity in our media panorama over the previous 4 a long time. Particularly to a viewer in her late forties, comparable to myself, plainly Sheen has all the time been round: a show-business soldier by no means removed from the attain of a digital camera, able to embody a temper or an period.
Within the nineteen-eighties, when Sheen was in his early twenties, he adopted his father, Martin Sheen, and his older brother Emilio Estevez into the household enterprise, because the main man in Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” and “Wall Road,” every function some model of a younger, go-getting buck. Within the aughts, he grew to become Hollywood’s highest-paid male TV actor when he starred on the blockbuster sitcom “Two and a Half Males”—taking part in a bacchanalian bachelor all of the sudden saddled with fraternal and avuncular obligations—a cheering if considerably bland mainstay of the George W. Bush years. And, in between these high-profile gigs, there all the time gave the impression to be some diverting, although usually middling, Sheen fare to amuse audiences. (His IMDb web page lists a staggering eighty-six performing credit, amongst them choices like “Scary Film 3” and “Main League II.”)
Principally, nevertheless, what grabbed the general public’s consideration over the a long time have been the scandals Sheen was concerned in: the arrests for medicine and for assault; the rehab stays; the liaisons with porn stars and prostitutes; the short marriages and the even faster divorces; and, after all, within the early twenty-tens, the frenzied interval through which, after being fired from “Two and a Half Males,” Sheen overtly embraced his function as a proudly drugs-and-sex-obsessed insurgent with “tiger blood” pulsing by way of his veins, touring the nation with a retinue of grownup actresses to proclaim his rejection of well mannered society’s pieties, and braying the catchphrase “Profitable!” at seemingly anybody and everybody he got here throughout.
The professed intention of “aka Charlie Sheen,” directed by Andrew Renzi, is to offer viewers a peek on the individual behind the persona. This coördinated push arrives accompanied by a memoir, “The Ebook of Sheen,” printed a day earlier than the documentary dropped. “The stuff that I plan on sharing, I made a sacred vow years in the past to solely disclose to a therapist,” the actor tells the digital camera. In different phrases, it’s revelation and introspection time for Sheen, who, at sixty, has now been sober for eight years. However, as I watched, I felt that although the sequence definitely delivered on its promise of revelation, there wasn’t practically as a lot introspection, leaving the viewer with a way not of a deeper understanding and connection however of glimpsing, from a distance, at a life made virtually completely of the “tales and pictures” that Sheen claims to wish to get previous.
In a means, although, that is completely becoming. It shouldn’t be shocking that Sheen himself sees his life as a mediated one, contemplating the surroundings he grew up in. When he was eleven, he joined his father within the Philippines on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam Warfare masterwork, “Apocalypse Now” (through which Martin Sheen performed the beleaguered Captain Willard), and, influenced by the sights and sounds he skilled, grew to become more and more desirous about making dramatic and violent Tremendous 8 films at his household’s Malibu house alongside together with his siblings, in addition to their mates from the neighborhood, like future actors Chris and Sean Penn. “We form of grew accustomed to watching our father die on movie,” he says. “We acknowledged early on that these form of plotlines are compelling.” One other compelling plotline emerged for Sheen within the early eighties, when Estevez rose to fame as a member of the so-called Brat Pack. Dazzled by his older brother’s newfound standing as a media sensation, Sheen determined to strive performing, too, and was instantly enchanted by the cinematic qualities of being a star. (In his memoir, he remembers going to see a packed screening of “Platoon” with a Penthouse Pet named Lisa: “Strolling together with her on my arm previous the fired-up catcalling line that circled the block was like being in a film on the best way to the film.”)
Unsurprisingly, Sheen wasn’t the one one to expertise his life as if in a film; practically everybody in his orbit, too, seen him, a minimum of initially, as an idea relatively than an individual. Denise Richards, his second spouse and the mom of two of his daughters, tells the digital camera that she first encountered him as a teen whereas watching “Platoon” together with her dad, a Vietnam vet. (“Would you ever have thought . . . that I might marry that fucking man?” she asks). Brooke Mueller, Sheen’s third spouse and the mom of his twin sons, additionally knew him because the “scorching soccer stud” she noticed him play onscreen, within the film “Lucas.” (Sheen’s usually indistinguishable ubiquity as an actor is hinted at, amusingly, when Mueller tells the digital camera that as a younger girl, she loved her future husband’s efficiency in “Soiled Dancing,” solely to be reminded by Renzi that Sheen didn’t even have an element in that film.) This hall-of-mirrors impact—of a life represented greater than lived—is emphasised within the documentary by the frequent insertion of clips from Sheen’s varied performances in movie and TV, usually alongside Richards or Martin Sheen, that are used as an example the real-life, offscreen tales Sheen is recounting.
