The idea behind The Artist is a fun one; making a silent movie about silent movies in 2011. It’s a gutsy gamble to make a modern audience sit through a film with no dialogue or sound, and it was an interesting exercise seeing if director Michel Hazanavicius had what it took to keep the whole thing engaging and entertaining all the way through. Happily, he does. The Artist is a fun little romp that kept me entertained enough from start to finish, that used its sound free limitations in several clever ways to set up sight gags, and that was brought to life in gorgeous black and white photography that always gives you something new to marvel at. And still, The Artist suffers because it feels more like a dare accepted, a challenge met, than it does a story that anybody actually wanted to tell.
Our lead character is George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a huge star in the silent film era. When we first meet him he runs afoul of a Hollywood wannabe named Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), who we watch rise from tabloid fodder, to extra, to famous starlet over the course of the film. Conversely, we watch Valentin as he goes from the top of the world to destitute; a relic left behind in the switch from silent films to talkies. This sound like a rich premise that could be a good way to explore Hollywood history, the development of technology and the effect it has on man, what role vanity and ego plays in our development, or countless other interesting angles. But instead all The Artist really gives us is a whimsical, schmaltzy love story and a melodramatic, blunt force fall from grace yarn that feels like it could have come out of one of the most minor works of the film era in which the story is set.
And it gives us downright unlikable characters starring in those stories as well. Valentin starts the film as a self important goober, the sort of fellow who salutes a painting of himself when he leaves the house every day and goes back out on stage for every extra round of applause he can milk out of a crowd. And he ends the film as a prideful, vain shell of a man who really has no one to blame but himself for his sudden downward trajectory. Peppy starts the film as an insufferably cutesy social climber almost drowning in manufactured spunk and spirit, and she ends the film as a pathetic lapdog, panting at George’s feet and nuzzling his crotch no matter how many times he kicks her away. They both develop and change over the course of the film, but from people I didn’t like into people I liked even worse. The effect was a story that I had a hard time attaching to. The Artist was nice to look at, it impressed in how well it pulled off its gimmick, but I don’t understand how it’s getting hailed as one of the best films of the year by many. I refuse to opine that a lot of people are overrating it just so they can seem high-minded and cultured for liking something that is silent and in black and white, so instead I’ll just assume that everyone fell hopelessly in love with the adorable, well-trained dog that serves as one of the main characters, and were overly kind to the production because of that.
