Film review: The Artist

By Alistair Harkness
Published on Thursday 29 December 2011 00:00

The noise of nostalgia surrounding The Artist threatens to blow the film’s playful, frothy surface charm out of all proportion

LIKE The King’s Speech earlier this year, The Artist seems to have inspired a small band of evangelical followers so determined to convert cinemagoers into true believers that if you don’t show appreciation by loudly guffawing every joke, spontaneously weeping tears of joy and standing on your chair shouting “Bravo!” until the lights come up, your status as a living, breathing human being with a heart and a soul may well be called into question.

Never mind that this black and white, 1920s-set silent film is merely a slickly put together piece of entertainment that cleverly appropriates elements of a long-dead format in order to give the old A Star is Born plot a relatively fresh makeover. The excitement over the faux sense of nostalgia it creates – nostalgia for something few filmgoers can possibly have experienced first time around – is in danger of blowing its surface charms out of all proportion.

Which isn’t to say those surface charms don’t have merit. Playful and frothy, it’s an easy film to like thanks to the way French director Michel Hazanavicius plunges us into Hollywood circa 1927 and proceeds to use some of the hazily remembered filmmaking techniques of the silent era to put a new spin on the story of a silent movie star forced to confront his own obsolescence as the talkies arrive. Said movie star is George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a handsome, Douglas Fairbanks-esque actor whose unwillingness to embrace the inevitability of synched sound – for reasons that will be made clear in the final moments – will inevitably bring about a tragic fall from grace.

As the movie opens though, Valentin is at the top of his game, starring in adventure movies with a loyal Jack Russell called Uggie who is as faithful a friend off-screen as he is on it. That Valentin is a ham who lives for the attention of an adoring public is immediately apparent from the way he lurks behind the screen at his premieres and bounds out with stage-managed reluctance to soak up the applause. What’s also soon apparent, however, is that this need for approbation is really masking his unhappiness at being trapped in a loveless marriage. His wife (Penelope Anne Miller, making the best of a one-dimensional and rather thankless role) has grown bored with his antics. As a result, Valentin finds himself susceptible to the ego-boosting attention provided by a flirtatious wannabe starlet by the name of Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo). Not exactly backwards at coming forwards, Peppy uses her gams and her gumption to inveigle her way into the movies as an extra on Valentin’s next picture. Though clearly attracted to her – he even fluffs his scenes to legitimately allow him to spend more time getting close to her – he also nobly resists acting on his impulses, giving her some sound professional advice instead and reluctantly sending her on her way.

This chaste depiction of their relationship deliberately mirrors the production codes of the day rather that the debauched realities of Hollywood in the 1920s. It’s a stylistic choice that leaves Hazanavicius open to charges of playing things a little too safe, story-wise. Indeed, the film’s deliberately glossed-over shallowness becomes a little wearing as the story jumps ahead a couple of years to focus on the decline of Valentin’s career just as Peppy’s is skyrocketing.

That’s mainly because the cleverness of The Artist’s technical achievements begin to take over from the emotional sweep of the narrative, a consequence no doubt of Hazanavicius letting form dictate content rather than the other way about. Of course, there is much to admire in that technical cleverness, including the film’s most audacious joke in which the fourth wall is broken by a sound effect. And yet such things also often make the film feel like a Woody Allen gag stretched to breaking point.

What sees it through is the joyous nature of the performances – and the fact that Hazanavicius’s graceful shooting style gives us the space to appreciate them. Neither Dujardin nor Bejo (nor any of the other main players) slip into parody; their heightened, naturalistic approach instead provides us with a modern-day approximation of the viewing experience that audiences in the 1920s might have had. Uggie’s scene-stealing turn shouldn’t be underestimated either. As Susan Orlean’s recent, magnificent biography of canine star Rin Tin Tin, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend points out, dogs featured prominently in silent films, often serving as naturalistic counterpoints to the more awkward screen presence of their human co-stars. The Artist’s Uggie even performs life-saving duties on Valentin, a brilliant scene, but one that can’t help feeling unintentionally symbolic given that his appearance revives the film every time it threatens to flag. In the end then, The Artist is mostly cute and goofy fun, but it lacks boldness that would make its title genuinely ring true.

Rating: ***

The Artist (PG)

Directed by: Michel Hazanavicius

Starring: Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, James Cromwell, John Goodman

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