The Artist

The Artist -- Everyone agrees that Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist (2011) is a brilliant novelty, a clever, silent film shot in the style of Hollywood pictures produced in the late twenties. I’m sorry to dissent from the overwhelming critical acclaim bestowed on this film, currently tracking at 97% positive ratings on the metacritical site Rotten Tomatoes. But, in fact, the film is not very good and, indeed, an insult to the silent cinema. Jean Dujardin plays a silent matinee idol, a film star something like Douglas Fairbanks. (He can also dance and, in fact, looks a bit like Gene Kelly.) When talking pictures take over Tinseltown, Dujardin is a relic; he loses his starring roles, his Beverly Hills mansion, his dour chauffeur and, indeed, everything but his spunky terrier, the co-star in his action pictures. Twice, he attempts suicide – once by burning nitrate-celluloid films and once with a pistol in his mouth. A beautiful actress, famous in talkies, has fallen in love with him and she saves him. She brings him back on-screen as her partner in dance films, modeled, it seems, after pictures starring Fred Astaire. The plot is thin and uninvolving. The actors are handsome and emotive and, indeed, the female lead, Berenice Bejo, is almost supernaturally beautiful, but they really don’t have much to do. Worst of all, the picture is completely predictable – I anticipated every plot point by, at least, fifteen minutes, and, to be truthful, the quarter-hour lapse between what I expected and what actually happens was just a wee-bit (well, more than a wee-bit) dull. This picture’s doom is to continuously remind you of much, much better movies. First, the movie’s principal narrative about sound supplanting silent films and turning famous actors and actresses into instant anachronisms is much better served by the witty and generous Singin’ in the Rain. Second, Guy Maddin has explored silent films and their expressionistic surreal acting style with far greater passion and obsessiveness than anything even remotely suggested by this movie – if you want to see a brilliant and delirious pastiche of silent film-making, look at Maddin’s superb The Saddest Music in the World or, even, his incandescently brilliant short Hearts of the World – Maddin catches the incredible, weird beauty of the great silent films and refracts that beauty through a prism of ruin and neglect, thus expressing our inevitable distance from these works of art. Any one of Maddin’s major pictures renders The Artist completely, and utterly, superfluous. Third, the film is infinitely inferior to the real silent films that it spoofs. Douglas Fairbanks large-scale action pictures made in the late twenties are grandiose entertainments deliriously extravagant in gesture and staging – Fairbanks almost never just walks into a room: he prefers to vault over walls or scale precipitous trellises or acrobatically somersault through windows. Fairbanks extraordinary athleticism and gymnastic grace puts The Artist’s clumsy actions sequences to shame. (And a film like Joseph Von Sternberg’s The Last Command made in 1929 with Emil Jannings does successfully everything that The Artist attempts and ups the emotional ante a thousand-fold.) Finally, the movie contrives suspense in its penultimate sequence – the heroine rushing to save the disturbingly self-pitying hero from suicide – by lathering up the images with the love-theme from Vertigo. This is completely unwarranted. Hermann’s lush Wagnerian score overpowers the rather trivial images that we see in the movie and, immediately, make us wish that we were watching Vertigo, of course, a very great film that puts The Artist to shame. Here’s what I find curious: the only way you can praise The Artist is if you haven’t seen any silent films, don’t know anything about film history, haven’t watched any von Sternberg or Maddin, and don’t, even, know Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Are most critics really this ignorant? (I note that Kim Novak has vehemently protested the uncredited use of Hermann’s great score in The Artist – the movie simply calls the music “Love Theme” by Bernard Herrmann and bizarrely cites a copyright date of 1992.)