The Artist

So I remember seeing the trailer for this movie earlier last year and was very excited about the potential for the movie. Once it was released I kept hearing rave reviews after another but never got the chance to see it until tonight. Being a mostly silent film it did rather well for itself bringing in over $58 million on a meager budget of only $15 million.

The plot centers around a famous silent film actor George Valentin, played by Oscar nominee Jean Dujardin, who fails to make the difficult transition into the talkies while a former costar, played by fellow Oscar nominee Berenice Bejo, excels and launches a powerful career in the talkies.

I was warned by a close friend that the script was eerily similar to Singin' in the Rain, which is a personal favorite of mine. Lo and behold, it was quite similar down to the famous co-stars who hate each other, accidental meeting of a fan turned movie star turned love interest, almost identical tap dance sequence, leading man that looks like the twin of Gene Kelly, etc. The movie started off with the almost identical premise of Singin' except Donald O'Connor had been replaced by a super cute terrier. While both movies started exactly the same, The Artist took a different path to arrive at their mutual ending. There were still similarities between the two but at least the second half of the film was not an exact replica. Quite obviously, I'm not in agreement with the best original screenplay nomination as this story obviously isn't very original. The characters were written with interesting yet one-dimensional dynamics between each other, obviously being mostly silent anything more complex would've been quite difficult.

I very much enjoyed the throwback to the old days of Hollywood. The aspect ratio, frame rate, lenses, lighting, set design, everything was the way it was back then and it made it work today. It almost crossed the line into becoming just a gimmick several times, but for the most part it was endearing. Was it necessary to get the point across? Probably not, vintage and contemporary could most likely have been intertwined to tell the story. However the director stuck to it and did it well. The story was effective and entertaining. The use of silence helped to illustrate the world they lived in at least. I must say that the film was much choppier than I was expecting.

Best actor and best supporting actress? Well, perhaps. It took an extreme amount of dedication and skill to pull of a believable silent film. The performances were out shined by the silent aspect of the movie unfortunately.

Before watching the film, I had placed my bet on this as the winner of Best Picture, which it still may do because of the 'innovative' route it took. As I stated earlier, if it hadn't used the silent film technique the whole time, it might have been able to stand on it's own merit. The way it is now, it's all about the uniqueness of the silent aspect. It overshadows everything else in the movie. It's the only thing everyone talks about. Nobody mentions the extensive score going on and on, or the studio sets that seem to have been replicated from every film of that era or the work it took to film the movie with the same style as it's predecessors. At least it did the silent thing well. "I'm blackmailing you, don't you see".