It’s astonishing how great art really is timeless, no? The Artist is a film deliberately made to look and feel like the 1920s with 1920s conveniences, foibles and issues. And yet the message is anything but confined to the period.
Now first of all, you gotta know The Artist is in black and white. Secondly, you gotta know it’s a silent film, with wall-to-wall old-timey piano jigs, cut away dialogue screens and deliberate overacting. I love the whole idea here. My thesis for years has been that if the screenwriting is strong enough, you don’t even need dialogue. I present Pixar’s Wall-E and Up as exhibits A & B. This means, of course, there’s a premium on acting and directing. If you don’t know what’s going on, the spoken word isn’t going to help you out.
George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is a silent films titan. He is exactly right for the look and feel of pre-talkie cinema. Sure, he’s full of himself, but he’s lovable. He’s the kind of celebrity you can’t imagine not being a celebrity because he’s so good at it. He doesn’t go anywhere without his best friend, who is coincidentally, man’s best friend. Together, they are a show even when the lights are off. George has become so insulated by his stardom that he’s unafraid of hurting the most important people in his life, his wife & his producer, all for the show. His story is anachronistic, but his dilemma is timeless. You see, talkies are coming and silent stars have a shelf life; they just don’t know it. Adapt or die, this is life.
You’ve seen this classic set-up before in the film Singin’ in the Rain. I think it’s high time this conflict arose again in movie history. End-of-world zombie apocalypse has been done a few times already.
Here we introduce Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), a fantastic name for a starlet of the era. She is the very embodiment of “adorable.” Peppy and George have not one, but two meet cutes – once during an impromptu press conference, Peppy inadvertently avoids the fuzz and knocks into George, who finds their meet a lark. George seems to have at least a superficial love of most everything; does he fancy her or is it show? She hams it up for a photo-op and finesses her newfound empowerment into a small extra role on a George Valentin film in production. In one my favorite scenes of The Artist, George discovers the lower torso of a rehearsing dancer hidden by screen and decides to play out a 1920s-style edition of You Got Served. When the screen is removed, the two discover themselves face-to-face again. The furious producer (John Goodman) tosses Peppy, but George saves her and almost instantly *poof* their careers diverge: she finds stardom, he finds the gutter.
And their divergent careers directly rival each other in true Hollywood fashion. In a clever turn, George’s self-produced silent film competes against Peppy Miller’s talkie: Beauty Mark, incidentally named after a facial anomaly invented by George to give Peppy “something.” Doncha love irony?
The Artist is one of those films that wins the Oscar for Best Picture and then everybody just as quickly decides is wasn’t really that good. I swear the Oscars is all about timing – ask Inception. That’s irrelevant, however. The Artist is quiet. Literally, of course. For a film listed as comedy, it isn’t especially funny. You could call it a “one joke film” and you’d be right. And while the acting is deliberately overdramatic, especially early on with a great many superfluous hand gestures to reflect the movies of the time period, it is a spectacular reflection of what can happen when a talented guy, in this case Michel Hazanavicius, with a great idea, gets free reign.
Rated PG-13, 100 Minutes
D: Michel Hazanavicius
W: Michel Hazanavicius
Genre: Best Picture nomination
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: How do you feel about flappers?
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Video game enthusiasts
