I’m just not impressed with the talent this Oscar season. Perhaps I went in with too high of expectations. Perhaps I’m just heartless. Perhaps The Artist is just too similar to Singin’ In the Rain: the male lead who is a spitting image of Gene Kelly, the bitchy co-star, the plucky ingenue, the new wave of talkies ousting silents, the idea to make a musical. If they were attempting homage, then there should have been some mention of real silent films of the era or even a wink at the audience when they DO borrow from the classics.The actors are amazing and have such expressive faces. The comment about Jean Dujardin looking just like Gene Kelly isn’t necessarily a bad thing; he has the grace and charisma to pull off a great biopic methinks. B? (C)r? (C)nice Bejo is gorgeous and feisty. She doesn’t just blow a kiss. She smacks you in the face with a kiss! “The name’s Miller! Peppy Miller!”Now, my strong bias towards Singin’ In the Rain isn’t the main gripe I have with the film. The Artist doesn’t FEEL like a “silent film,” in terms of genre. It’s a black and white film without sound or spoken dialogue. There aren’t enough title cards to push the narrative along. George’s meltdown occurs without proper set-up. The scene in which he finds all his auctioned-off memorabilia in Peppy’s house is so ominously scored and so heavily littered with zooms and high/low angles, and I don’t understand why. Is George and/or the audience supposed to think, “Peppy is a stalker!” or “Aww Peppy saved all his stuff” The harsh music and editing made me think the former, but neither reaction seems right. There’s no reversal in him that hints at the latter; he just plows on with self-loathing. If all that cinematic sound and fury is to imply that the love of a good woman makes him feel worse about himself, title cards would have helped.Afterwards during George’s exchange with the policeman (played by Marshall’s dad from HIMYM! Marvin Eriksen RIP), there are, once again, no title cards that clue us in to what the policeman could have said to cement George’s desire to commit suicide. Why now? A contemporary audience is expected to fill in the blanks; we’ve grown good at such cerebral exercises with modern movies that don’t give everything away, but if The Artist is meant to be an earnest silent film and not just a clever gimmick, it doesn’t fully succeed. Similar to how purist Shakespearean actors act the text, not the subtext, silent films are about content, not context. They didn’t have the technology to speak, so they had title cards. It was about need, not novelty. Now, I concede that I enjoy many subtextual interpretations of Shakespeare, but for a silent film ABOUT silent film, The Artist misses the point. As a “neo-silent film,” if you will, The Artist actually uses sound very well (in the dream sequence), but it doesn’t use text or content very well, which makes me wonder why/how it was nominated for Best Original Screenplay too. So I guess my final review is that it’s a good modern film. It’s just not a very good silent film.
January 28, 2012