The Artist (2011)

THE ARTIST  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 

    D: Michel Hazanavicius

    Jean Dejardin, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman,

    James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller, 
    Malcolm McDowell, Ed Lauter, Missi Pyle

Here's something you wouldn't expect to find coming out in cinemas in 2011: a silent movie, done in the style of a silent movie, about Hollywood's transition from silents to sound. The main players are George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a swashbuckling action star modeled on Douglas Fairbanks, and a saucy young flapper named Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), whose career takes off with talkies, just as Valentin fades away. It's hard to imagine now what a cataclysmic event the coming of sound was for some of the movie industry's biggest stars. The technology changed almost overnight, and performers who couldn't make the transition either saw their careers tail off, or were quickly gone. "The Artist" captures some of that as it traces Valentin's personal and professional decline, and Hazanavicius does a nice job of affecting the look and manner of a late-'20s silent film. At the same time, the emotional stakes stay relatively low. When Valentin sets fire to a stash of his old films late in the picture, you're more concerned with the strips of cinema that are being lost than the chance that this washed-up actor could die in the blaze. Another thing that's missing, that silent movies couldn't do without, is star power. Watch Douglas Fairbanks in anything, even now, and you know he had something that clicked on the screen. The guy was unmistakably a movie star. Dujardin, as good as he is and as hard as he tries, can only come off as an actor playing a movie star. It's an artful approximation, but the effect is not the same.

Post Script: I've watched a few more silent movies since I first saw "The Artist", and it's occurred to me that the model for Jean Dujardin's character might not be Douglas Fairbanks but John Gilbert. Both were action stars who saw their careers tail off with the coming of sound, but Gilbert's life and career were more dramatically ruined by it. George Valentin could be either of them. Or neither. Or both. 

N.H.
9/12/2016