'The Artist' a brilliant look at old Hollywood
Reviewer's Rating: ★★★★
French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius’ homage to Hollywood’s silent, black-and-white past creates something unexpectedly new.
The Artist, a Cannes Film Festival favorite that’s collecting more honors during this high season for movie awards, is a newly produced silent film that’s amazingly true to the early 20th-century cinema that inspired it. Far from being hokey or inaccessibly antiquated, the film delights in an ingeniously straightforward way that exceeds many a modern, technologically advanced, effects-loaded, big-budget blockbuster.
Yet The Artist itself is a tale of technology. It opens in 1927, a time when movies are still silent. Although actors do speak on screen, their words are not heard by audiences in the movie theater. Instead, printed dialogue is projected on screen between scenes.
In the realm of silent film, George Valentin is a king. The dashing leading man flashes a bright smile accented by a pencil-thin mustache. He stars in such action-adventures as A Russian Affair and A German Affair. Rin Tin Tin style, and faithful to the silent era, Valentin’s co-star is a cute, resourceful Jack Russell terrier.
Playing Valentin, French actor Jean Dujardin succeeds in being expansively charming without benefit of audible lines. No doubt Valentin as a character needs such high-wattage charisma to be the silent star he is. His desire to please an audience is so genuinely sincere.
Valentin lives to entertain. He loves working the crowds, dancing and clowning for them, graciously speaking to reporters and posing generously for newspaper photographers.
All of which gives Valentin’s abrupt plunge from the cinema heavens even more impact.
John Goodman co-stars as Al Zimmer, the blustery, mercurial boss at Kinograph Studios. It’s a colorful role for the big guy, one that lets him huff and puff and stomp off the set. He smokes a big cigar, too.
It’s Zimmer who breaks the news about a new, industry-shaking innovation, talking pictures, to Valentin.
“Don’t laugh, George,” the mogal tells his top leading man. “That’s the future.”
“If that’s the future, you can have it,” the stubbornly silent star says.
When talking pictures take over Hollywood, the unwilling-to-speak Valentin is swept aside. Dujardin’s performance as the once joyful, now ex-leading man shifts poignantly to a minor key.
Meanwhile, back at Kinograph, accurately named dancer Peppy Miller’s career is soaring. Argentinian-born French actress Bérénice Bejo plays Hollywood’s bright, new, speaking face. She’s soon to be the star of one romantic-comedy hit after another. But she must remember this: George Valentin is the faded star who opened the door for her ascendency.
Valentin’s story is a film industry story. The Artist goes to the studio lot with Valentin, on the set, in the studio boss’ office, in the stars’ dressing rooms and homes and to the grand, filled-to-capacity movie palaces where audiences thrill to Valentin’s adventures.
Although The Artist is far from the first film about Hollywood, or first film within a film, it’s among the most engaging and affectionate. The immersive experience the film creates, too, is a prime instance of filmed entertainment’s ability to transport audiences to a place and time beyond their own. A brilliant love letter to the silent era, and all film eras, it satisfies in every way.