The Weinstein Company
Jean Dujardin is a dashing silent film idol while Bérénice Bejo is a rising star of the "talkies" in "The Artist."
"The Artist" is terrific entertainment. Already famous and perhaps overhyped as the first black-and-white silent film of the modern era, this salute to the romance of the movies is novel, funny and refreshing. It's a celebration of joyful uninhibited performance, of the type found in old musicals and slapstick comedies, when actors might be required to dance, brawl and pratfall within the same reel.
Not all the performers are bipeds. The most irresistible member of the cast is Uggie, the Jack Russell terrier who is the leading man's constant companion. Uggie is fun on four feet. When the camera races alongside Uggie as the dog runs down the sidewalk at top speed, in hopes of rescuing his master, the moment is genuinely thrilling; one undertands why Rin Tin Tin was one of old Hollywood's top box-office draws.
It's the late 1920s in Hollywood and handsome George Valentin is a silent movie idol. During the premiere of his latest film, Valentin meets Peppy ...
Rating: PG-13 for a disturbing image and a crude gesture
Length: 100 minutes
Released: November 25, 2011 Limited
Cast: Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, James Cromwell, Missi Pyle, John Goodman
Director: Michel Hazanavicius
Writer: Michel Hazanavicius
The French filmmakers who created "The Artist" and shot the film in Hollywood express a joie de cinema that is infectious. With its "silence" (Ludovic Bource's wonderful music score almost never stops), its silvery black-and-white images and its embrace of the old-fashioned squarish picture ratio (in contrast to the widescreen format introduced in the 1950s), "The Artist" harks back to a time when moviegoing was a special experience because "moving pictures" could be experienced only on a big screen. This is demonstrated in the film's opening scene, set in a "movie palace" during a packed Hollywood premiere in 1927, the year sound cinema began its ascension with "The Jazz Singer."
The premiere is attended by the film's director (John Goodman), its female lead (former Germantown resident Missi Pyle) and its dashing star, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a romantic idol who resembles Douglas Fairbanks and Gene Kelly. (In fact, shots from Fairbanks' 1920 "The Mark of Zorro" are used in the film, and Kelly's "Singin' in the Rain" is an obvious influence.)
This opening sequence is brilliantly staged by writer-director Michel Hazanavicius, as the hammy George and his equally hammy dog (Uggie) hog the limelight and milk the attention of their adoring public. Outside, however, a fan steals attention for herself when she drops her autograph book on the red carpet and bumps into George while retrieving it.
The woman, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), is a pretty young Hollywood hopeful with a crush on George. For most of the film, Peppy and George are not a romantic couple, but they are fatefully linked: Peppy's star rises along with the "talkies," while George's career fades with silent cinema itself. George loses everything, even his shadow -- a terrible fate for a man in an industry inspired by the movement of shadows on a screen.
The somewhat glum second half of the film, which charts George's self-pitying downfall, is not as successful as the first, in part because the actor's salvation depends on the somewhat unearned loyalty of Peppy, Uggie and his chauffeur/manservant (James Cromwell). The moviegoer may think the prideful and defeatist George doesn't deserve these guardian angels; meanwhile, the slackening of the pace brings into relief the relative unoriginality of the story.
In fact, the familiarity of the plot of "The Artist" is its weak point. Victim of an inevitable backlash in some critical quarters, "The Artist" has been criticized for borrowing, big time, from "Singin' in the Rain" and "A Star Is Born," and for appropriating bits of business from such other films as "Sunset Blvd." and "Citizen Kane." (The re-creation of the famous breakfast-table montage from "Kane" pays off with a nice visual joke, however.) These movies are familiar masterpieces, which may be why the cinephiles who enjoy discovering obscure cult-film appropriations in the work of Quentin Tarantino feel cheated.
I'll agree that Hazanavicius' use of some of Bernard Herrmann's score from Hitchock's "Vertigo" for a dramatic sequence may have been a mistake, if only because the music is so distinctive. Wittier is a quote from Franz Waxman's score from "Bride of Frankenstein" during the opening film-within-a-film torture sequence, when the bad guys are garbed like the mad scientists in that horror masterpiece's creation sequence. In any case, "The Artist," despite its "silent" status, is not an academic exercise; it's an unabashed crowd-pleaser.
"The Artist" arrives in Memphis as the front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar, following its recent Golden Globe and the Critics Choice award victories. This success testifies to the uncanny effectiveness of The Weinstein Company's awards-season publicity machine (Weinstein also distributed last year's Best Picture, "The King's Speech"), but it also indicates that 21st century moviegoers have found genuine delight in watching a funny and well-made black-and-white silent film on a large screen -- a new experience for most people.
Yes, "The Artist" is not a masterpiece to rank with the best of Keaton or Chaplin, but it contains several sequences that would have worked wonderfully in any silent movie, as when George performs a dance duet with Peppy's legs (the upper half of her body is hidden behind a screen), or when Peppy, solo, practices a love scene by slipping an arm into George's empty coat, to be her paramour.
The movie's intermittent use of sound and its approach to silence is very clever; Hazanavicius plays with the viewer's expectations throughout the film, from an early moment of "silent" applause to the brief bit of spoken dialogue in the final scene that may explain George's fear of sound cinema. This joke is presented casually that many viewers seem to have missed it.
"The Artist" is exclusively at the Malco Ridgeway Four.
-- John Beifuss: (901) 529-2394
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Comments » 1
BossCrunk writes:
I'm glad the Malco Ridgeway Four is finally showing this film. I've been wanting to see it for a while now.
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