Critical Recommendation: The Artist (2011)

Director Michael Hazanavicius accomplishes something with The Artist that a movie with sound in it cannot, not because there is some secret sauce to silent cinema that will forever keep talky cinema from outdoing it, but rather because he has a keen understanding of the ins and outs unique to silent cinema, how they work, and how to bend those tricks and tropes to his advantage. This is a delightful film, an amusing and thrillingly emotional roller coaster of a tribute to a bygone era of Hollywood and the technical limitations that both hindered it and defined its distinguished charm. Some movies are meant to make you sad or angry. The Artist is not one of those movies. One of the most impressive things about it is how effectively it captures such a wide range of emotions - yes, even sadness and anger - without becoming embittered, judgmental, or anything less than wholly, completely emotionally honest.

George and Peppy are not good people. I wouldn't exactly call their actions cheating, but being a silent movie star does not give a married man like George an excuse to run around the way he does with a young dancer, even if their actions remain innocent when compared to someone like Tiger Woods. What follows is some combination of George's personal failings and the seeming divine punishment of the Great Depression, and The Artist turns from a success story to one of both failure and redemption. It is an absolute whirlwind of emotions delivered both in spite of and because of its silence, a gimmick film expertly made so that it never needs to lean on its peculiarities. Its silence is not due to necessity, and is but a compliment to intelligent filmmaking that could and would have succeeded without it; still, when it comes to bright ideas, the more the merrier.

For those of you who have been in love before, you will smile all the way through this charmer of a film in adoration of how it almost deliberately evokes our memories and dreams. The visual exaggerations common to silent films made me giggle with delight, and that's because they were nothing more than the purest expression of true, unfiltered emotions that I and everyone else in the world have felt before, be it love or a million other feelings. The lack of dialogue causes you to pay attention in a way you wouldn't to a modern movie, and there is a satisfaction to be had in watching a movie with little to no spoken lines and occasionally getting to put two and two together on what it wants you to feel in a given moment. Of course, The Artist plays up its characters' actions, and this lends it much of its nearly signature charm. Being a modern imitation of the earliest form of cinema, it is delightful in a way that both of them can be, and yet neither of them was.

Its soundtrack is incredible, an imitation of an older era in Hollywood where live orchestras had to cue the feelings that a movie couldn't convey on its own, and it captures brief, five-second emotions in a way I've never seen or heard a movie capture them before. Its use of the famous show-don't-tell rule is impeccable: you will always know and feel exactly what it wants you to feel. Here, this rule is not merely in service to necessary parts of the story, but also to shockingly intricate ideas: The Artist captures such complex emotional depth with only half the tools afforded to other movies, because the strangest thing about it is also one of the things that work best. The sound design is just as brilliant, and while I don't want to spoil what this movie accomplishes with it, this achievement is a shocking revelation that is truly one of the most creative things I've ever seen in any movie.

The Artist is an entire movie of visual storytelling that turns a self-imposed restraint into a powerful tool for evoking a brilliant range of emotions, from glee to sadness to doubt to disgust to an incredible sense of solace. When these characters triumphed, I felt as though my head were in the clouds, and whenever they faced challenges or failed, I felt the weight of their frustration and grief. The movie's silence visually emphasizes its emotions, and because of this, it captures emotional honesty and rawness in a way that other movies either don't or can't. Its twists are brilliant, and while it borrows many readily recognizable beats from other romances and dramas, it also has a mind of its own, and more than once, it caught me completely off guard in the best way possible.

By forgoing an aspect that modern filmmaking takes for granted, The Artist forces itself to excel in the areas still available to it, and also captures a rare nuance: it lets you figure out what you should feel in a given moment rather than just telling you outright. George is a complicated character, and it's sometimes hard to tell whether you should be rooting for him or for him to learn a lesson. This is the point. When it matters, the film lets you come to your own conclusions about him, rather than spoon-feeding you easy moralizing. He is a terrible person, but I nevertheless found it nearly impossible not to empathize with him on some level, because I recognized so many of his shortcomings in myself, even if they manifest in different ways.

The Artist is a movie made up of cliches, and it knows it. Doing some digging, I found out it won Best Picture in 2012 after I had already typed up ninety percent of this review, and maybe that's the crowning jewel of cliches to end it. What really stands out to me about this movie is that it wholeheartedly owns something that could have derailed a movie with a lesser sense of self-awareness. Silent cinema is possibly the most cliched subcategory of film, so in that way, it's appropriate. It invites you to laugh at its tropes so that it can sneak up on you and surprise you by tearing them away to prove that they were only meant to charm and mislead you into thinking that this is all there was to a movie that is truthfully much deeper than it will initially admit.

The Artist - 10/10

Proverbs 11:2