The Artist is pretty great!
You know, I like silent films. And I'm disappointed that people don't really make them anymore. And it's one of those cases where, you know, new technology didn't REALLY make this art form obsolete -- I mean, sure, it negated the need for a piano player in the theater, but you know, you CAN still make a movie where people don't talk very much.
I've been griping for years that cartoon characters talk too damn much, and then Pixar went and made Wall-E. (Plus Aardman's got a Shaun the Sheep movie coming.) But hell, you can still make a good live-action silent feature too.
It makes me think about the cases where new technology HASN'T supplanted old. Thirty years out, we've seen that rumors of the radio star's death were greatly exaggerated -- and when's the last time you saw a music video? That WASN'T just made by some guy on YouTube?
Anyhow. Silent films are an all-but-dead art, and The Artist makes a case not just that this was a tragedy for the actors who lost their careers, but for auteurs and audiences alike.
The film's clever in how it challenges assumptions. Certainly silent film acting is necessarily different from acting in a talkie (or on a stage, where you have to project to the audience, which is itself different from a stage in a small venue where the audience is closer). I tend to think of silent film acting as exaggerated, and the film plays with that -- there's a line about mugging, and certainly there's a fair amount of it in this film. But it's not JUST exaggeration, not JUST mugging -- Jean Dujardin spends much of the movie doing some incredible, subtle facial acting.
Indeed, the movie plays with the contrast between exaggerated and subtle acting, particularly in one scene where Dujardin is having an argument with his wife -- she's crying and waving her arms and contorting her face, and he's sitting there with a restrained expression. And you can read him as well as you can read her.
Something else I noticed: I know what John Goodman and Malcolm McDowell sound like, and I was filling in their voices. But I didn't know what any of the REST of the cast sounded like, and was making up their voices in my head without even thinking about it. I think that's likely a deliberate choice on casting.
And that, of course, gets to another reason that talkies killed people's careers: a lot of silent film actors didn't have marketable voices. (To this day I don't know what Chaplin sounded like; I know he did some talkies but I haven't seen them -- except Modern Times, which was a talkie but which HE didn't talk in.) Look at a cast whose leads are named Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo and it's easy to see one of the advantages of silent films: you can cast anybody, regardless of where they're from or how they sound, and distribute them internationally with only a few modifications to the dialogue cards.
The Artist is funny and brilliant and sad. It makes you think, if you want to, but if you don't it's a perfectly straightforward movie with the sort of presentation you don't see anymore. It's been limited-release up to this point but it just got a slew of Oscar noms, so I'm guessing it'll be easier to find now.
