A silent for today

Rating: 9/10 (17 March 2012)

This is a very cunning piece of work- original only in its audacity- a tribute to the silent era in the shape of a silent movie about the era's end. What Michel Haznaravicius has done is to re-arrange the clichés of the early pictures to produce a film perfectly watchable by today's audience. The Academy went overboard and gave it five Oscars (best movie, director, costume, music and actor) but, hey, this is a movie for those who love movies. Apparently it cost $15 million to make and was filmed in 37 days, recovering nearly three times that at the American box office alone. Being silent (apart from the rich musical soundtrack) it should do pretty well in non-English speaking markets as well.
The artist himself, George Valetin (Jean Dujardin, made for the part), is a combination of Douglas Fairbanks senior and Errol Flynn (the latter of course did not start in movies until the early thirties). Handsome, dashing and acclaimed, as his career tanks with the advent of talkies, he finds refuge in the bottle. Meanwhile his one-time fan Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo) prospers in the new medium, especially in song and dance.
Silents were a repository of family values and this is reflected here – I don't remember seeing more than a chaste kiss between George and Peppy. Supporting characters like James Cromwell as George's faithful chauffeur inhabit familiar roles. One thing this movie does not have is a baddie - no damsel in distress tied to the train tracks. John Goodman (delightful as always) the cigar chomping studio head is merely recognising the inevitable in laying off George who himself proves the point by producing a spectacular box office failure. Incidentally, it is the Wall St crash which wipes out George financially though his production failure would not have helped.
What this film does superbly is put today's viewers in the seats of the silent cinema. ("Silent" is something of a misnomer since the showing was usually accompanied by music, though not usually as elaborate as here) As a time capsule this film is near perfect and no special knowledge is needed to understand it. We are kept enthralled despite suspecting we might be in for an upbeat ending. The whole thing is well done. Maybe there was more drama in the Descendants, but Oscar did at least recognise here the superb production values – an Artist's film indeed.