On DVD Now: The Artist

The Artist

(2011)

Directed by    Michel Hazanavicius

Produced by   Thomas Langmann

Written by     Michel Hazanavicius

Starring        Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo

Music by        Ludovic Bource

Cinematography Guillaume Schiffman

I’m not an automatic fan of Academy Award winners.  “The Kings Speech”, "Million Dollar Baby”, “A Beautiful Mind”, “Shakespeare In Love”, “Titanic”, “The English Patient” are among ‘Best Film’  winners that I, even to this day, have not worked up enough interest in to actually watch. That’s right, I haven’t seen ‘Titanic’. I don't need to since about 90% of it is shown, ad nauseum, in previews, post-views, TV shows about movies, etc. Enough so that just hearing a few notes of that brain-scraping Celine Dion song makes me want to punch someone. Crying out "I'm the king of the world!" leaning out on the prow-like structure of anything, has the same effect.

Another award-heavy movie, filmed in black and white, “Raging Bull” I actually went to see with some friends, but ended up walking out of it a third of the way in due to 'raging boredom'.

It takes more than Oscar-accolades and artsy, old-style cinematography to make me want to see a movie.

So I was a little worried about “The Artist”. It won more awards, foreign and domestic, than many of those I listed earlier. It’s not only in black and white, but it’s also ‘silent’.  Gimmicky? Maybe. Trying too hard to be artsy? I suspected as much.

Adam said he wanted to see it. This surprised me. Adam’s taste in movies is pretty much the same as the rest of the family. Explosions? Bonus. High quality CGI? Yeah, that’ll do nicely.

It was a sultry Friday evening and Adam volunteered to visit the local Red Box. Sure, why not.

Like I said, my hopes were not very high, but there was nothing else on after ‘Whale Wars’ (or as it’s also known as: “Whacky tree-huggers pretend to know how to crew a ship and conduct a non-violent war.”) So I settled in for a long, quiet evening.

What happened next was exceptional. We were all glued to the tube. For the next one hundred minutes the three of us barely spoke, except for the occasional oohs and ahhs.

The story is not complicated. A renowned silent film actor Valentin, finds his whole world crumbling away beneath him as the new medium of talkies takes hold. The studio flushes out the ‘old’ actors in favor of younger, flashier, more vocally talented folk. One of whom is ‘Peppy’ a rising starlet whose career Valentin had helped launch.

As the Job-like Valentin suffers layer after layer of loss, failure and increasing humiliation, Peppy, in the background, helps keep him afloat, never forgetting his contributions to her new-found fame.

The award-winning musical score is pretty much all you ever hear. Even the scenes depicting ‘talkies’ reading their lines into crude microphones are silent.

The actors, all of them, play their parts flawlessly, hyper-emoting to make up for the lack of actual dialog. The makeup is stark, as is the lighting. Shadows, reflections and high-contrast shots are the norm, fluid and flawless. Extreme closeups are pore-counting-ly brutal.

On the artsy side, metaphors and symbolism abound. Valentin, who refuses to accept the new technology is even scolded by his wife “Why won’t you just talk?” she silently and coldly cries. Of course we have to read that scold on a title card.

One of the scene-stealing heroes of the film is Valentin’s little Jack Russell Terrier, Jack, played by Uggie, often seen silently yapping away in alarm or hiding his face in shame.

The film also occasionally points inward on itself, sometimes mockingly, often with a wink of the eye, not taking itself too seriously. I found this element very appealing.

The winning element here is not the silence, the score, the top-notch acting, the careful camera work or the wonderful editing and framing, it’s the entire package altogether. Had any of these elements over-reached, or under-reached, the result would have suffered immeasurably. As Adam said on his Facebook wall:

‎"(5 stars) A brilliantly acted, directed, and scored film. As someone who has seen maybe one silent film, I wasn't affected by nostalgia goggles, and my eyes remained glued to the screen, awaiting the next masterful frame. Flawless may be underselling it; if you have so much as an inkling of interest in films, watch The Artist."

This time my beloved son and the the Academy got it completely right.

So go ahead, I insist, watch this movie!