The Artist

This amusing silent film about silent film won top Oscars, scored huge box office, and was the best of the slew of nostalgic films released this year; not-great movies about how great the movies use to be like Hugo, My Week With Marylyn, Super 8, The Muppets, etc.  Stylistically faithful to the silent pictures it celebrates--not only shot in black & white but in the 1.33:1 Academy aspect ratio--The Artist’s best quality is its faithful period detail, not its slight narrative.  For example, the cast really do look like people from the silent era. John Goodman in particular seems like he just stepped out of a two-reeler from the teens.

Unfortunately, much of The Artist feels like a tribute rather than a film with something new to say about Hollywood’s transition to sound.  There are some lovely visual sequences but not quite enough of them, and far too much of the film feels lifted from other movies.  In fact, director Michel Hazanavicius’s use of Bernard Herman’s Vertigo theme to underscore the climax of the film is incredibly distracting.  It’s not that I consider it a sacrilege to use music from a classic film if there is a point to the choice, but this is clearly just a case of the director liking a piece of music and the composer not being able to create something original that works better.  That is a pretty major failing; after all this is a silent film, so the music is a crucial component.  Using one of the most famous pieces of music in all of film history can not help but distract from what is happening in the story, and make any cinephile start thinking about Vertigo.

Still, the film is charming and the actors (even the dog) are terrific.  The last scene is quite wonderful and provides the context and dimension that is lacking in the movie up to that point.  By the end, The Artist has transcended superfluous novelty and become a sincere (and half-way decent) work of art.