More than a curiosity

Rating: 8/10 (18 July 2012)

There's always a risk with a movie like "The Artist" that it will become all about the gimmick and nothing more. But Michel Hazanavicius's modern-day re-creation of a black-and-white silent film is so adroitly executed and artistically wrought that it transcends the gimmick and becomes an impressive work in its own right.
Set in the late '20s and early '30s, the period when movie-making was transitioning from silents to talkies, the movie focuses on George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a dapper matinée-idol who 's more devoted to his dog - the scene-stealing Uggie - than to his acting partner/wife (Penelope Ann Miller). The problem is that Valentin seems more suited to the silent screen than the sound one - we learn why at the end - so we watch as his career and his personal life take a turn for the worse throughout the course of the story. If that sounds a bit like the premise of "Singin' in the Rain," you're right, but the movie also has a touch of "A Star is Born" about it, for as Valentin's career goes into an ever-increasing death-spiral, the beautiful young ingenue (Berenice Bejo) he helped to discover has taken to the talkies like gang-busters and is becoming a major star of the silver screen. (One can also find a couple of homages to "Citizen Kane," but they're a little less obvious).
"The Artist" is obviously of most interest to those with a love of cinema and movie history, as it re-creates in breathtakingly beautiful terms the look and sound of silent movies (the tinkling-piano score is by Ludovic Bource). The movie is pure joy to look at, thanks to the eye-popping cinematography of Guillaume Schiffman, which captures the otherworldly elegance of a world framed in black-and-white images. The story may strike some as facile and simplistic to say the least, but that's clearly in keeping with the temper of the times and the era of motion picture history in which it is set. I could have done with a little more of the behind-the-camera glimpses into old-time movie-making and a little less of the foreground romance, but that is a minor quibble in a movie that works on so many other levels. One of those is the acting, with Dujardin and Bejo managing to create effective characters with only a minimum of mugging, and John Goodman and James Cromwell doing the same in supporting roles. And little Uggie, who also appeared in "Mr. Fix-it" and "Water for Elephants," puts Toto and Rin Tin Tin to shame in the canine-acting division.
With movies like "Moneyball," "The Descendents" and "The Tree of Life" hanging around, I wouldn't have voted for "The Artist" as the Best Picture of 2011, but I wouldn't have missed the one-of-a-kind visual experience it affords for anything in the world.