The Artist is charming, heart-warming, and fun, but I’m still uncertain why it’s destined to win the top prize at this year’s Academy Awards. To be fair, I accept that Best Picture rarely means “the best picture,” but I’m still confused about the source of all this hype. Michel Hazinavicius’ film is cute. It truly is, and not with a condescending tone. Jean Dujardin is funny, fluid, and a joy to watch. And Berenice Bejo exemplifies beauty and conjures black and white memories from the Hollywood Studio Era of the early 20’s.
The Artist is the story of George Valentin (Dujardin), a silent highly successful silent-film actor whose career is thrown into peril with the advent of talkies in 1927 and doubly jeopardized by the stock market crash of 1929. In the blink of an eye, Valentin is usurped as a main draw by Peppy Miller (Bejo), fails to make a successful, silent, comeback film, and subsequently plummets from his summit, left to sell everything at auction merely to survive.
Valentin’s hubris foreshadows his descent. His antics with an unknown Miller outside of his recent premier upstage the film he’s promoting, relegating it to page five. Such attention gives his producer Al Zimmer (John Goodman) little leverage in daily dealings. All of this changes when Zimmer asks Valentin to join him in a smoke-filled screening room (Ahhh! The good old days when smoking indoors – or anywhere for that matter – was acceptable!) to show him the recent “sound test” for a film version of Romeo and Juliet. As the lead actress belts forth silent notes, Valentin is unimpressed and shrugs off the challenge. “People come to see me, not hear me,” he asserts via an expository narration card that pops up on the screen.
Soon, Valentin is past his prime, forced to “make way for the young,” and Kinescope productions has closed down its silent-movie sets, choosing to produce talkies.
And then, the decline of an actor. It moves as you would expect. Drunkenness, depression, loneliness, thoughts of suicide, a faithful dog, etc.
And then, it gets happy again. Miller becomes the hero, then the villain momentarily, then the hero again, and all’s well that ends well.
And, again, I wonder, so what?
The Artist makes the viewer happy. This can’t be denied. The fallen man at the end of his rope is given a few extra feet to grasp until he can make his way back to the top, or maybe, three-quarters of the way, but hasn’t this story been told a dozen times? Don’t movies like Almost Famous or A Star is Born and the much-less-superior Rockstar or Rocky V tell a similar story? What about Boogie Nights? Sure, it was based on the rise and fall and rise of a porn star, but isn’t it the same narrative?
Perhaps because The Artist is a silent film. However, should this be seen as anything more than a novelty? The story itself is cliché, and, if the film weren’t silent, the events would seem ridiculously fantastical. Portions of the film are eaten up by dance-numbers that showcase Valentin and Miller’s light-hearted natures and a repressed attraction to one another, but don’t similar scenes take place in movies like Bring it On¸ Step Up and Save the Last Dance? The first scene of 1987’s Adventures in Babysitting shows Chris Parker’s (Elisabeth Shue) similarly capricious and hopelessly romantic personality via dance. Come to think of it, there are a few fortuitous car crashes in that film as well.
Perhaps I’m missing the larger points being made. Perhaps The Artist is commenting on the regurgitative nature of Hollywood, and how “new” is a fallacy. Perhaps it’s really suggesting that “new” pertains less to ideas and more to gimmickery – or, how the story is presented. Here, the story is predictable and ridiculous, but touches our hearts because it is “new” – or, at least, new to us. My issue here is that, truthfully, The Artist should not be considered the only “silent” film to come out this year. I would consider Tree of Life an equally silent film.
Tree of Life may not be the best film of the year either, but as I’ve written before on this site, it is told primarily through images – much like The Artist. There are a few lines of dialog, but comparatively similar to the amount of dialog typed on the narration cards that pop up during The Artist. Plus, The Artist has the advantage of being presented on crystal clear, digital film, so reading lips is a bit less problematic. When Al Zimmer demands that Miller “Get out!” we don’t need the cue card or the gesticulation. It’s clear what he’s mouthing. The same can be said for most of the crucial scenes. Sure, we can’t hear them, but we can see them perfectly well.
Admittedly, Tree of Life is not nearly as saccharine or accessible. It was a more complex. Clearly, “complex” doesn’t always equal “better,” but it does require additional attention. Perhaps that’s why The Artist is getting much more praise than Tree of Life. The Artist is a delightfully sugary sweet that lingers. If you happen to disappear for a tub of popcorn or a beverage during the film, it’s easy to catch back up. Valentin is smiling; his mustache is an upward parabola: he’s happy. Valentin is frowning, his mustache is downward: he’s sad. In contrast, Tree of Life can get a bit confusing if you step away for a minute – especially if you re-enter during one of Sean Penn’s scenes. (Still trying to figure out why he’s in the movie.)
At the end of Tree of Life, I sat pondering what I saw, looking at my notes, and trying to figure out where to start. The universe? Time? Dinosaurs? Death? Maternal instinct? Paternal construction? Initially, I was overcome and needed to digest everything before assessing.
When The Artist ended, I wanted something, so I connected Dujardin’s last line “with pleasure,” replete with a thick French accent, to a commentary on xenophobia and how his accent in a talkie would classify him as an “other,” making him less palatable and raising the ire of the quotidian, nationalist consumer of the early twentieth century. I also ruminated on Bejo’s exotic look (she is from Buenos Aires) and how, perhaps, Hazinavicius was looking at racism in cinema, reminding us that only those who could “pass” graced the screen – lest you were a “mammie.”
Perhaps the something is a satire on people’s need for the “new” and viewer’s reactions to The Artist ultimately lead to the outcome in a grand social experiment.
Regardless, it’s cute.
