The Artist

It's a silent movie in black and white. I'm perfectly willing to accept it on its own terms as silent; it didn't come across as a gimmick to me. And I take it as a black and white -- not gimmick there, either.

Still, "The Artist" didn't speak to me. I'm accustomed to watching silent movies, and I'm used to longer scenes, superbly composed camera shots of empty sets or of actors sitting silently as they muse. "The Artist" seemed to me to be completely contemporary in its compositions and pacing. Where others see a paean to the lost art of silent film-making, I saw a contemporary movie that happened to be in black and white and silent.

It quickly became apparent that "The Artist" was a take off on "A Star Is Born" with a tip of the fedora to "Singin' in the Rain" -- which tipped me off it would have a happy ending. Sure enough, our hero, a star of the silent screen, laughs off the advent of talkies and becomes a has-been while the girl he meets and introduces to motion pictures becomes a talking sensation. I judge the movie to be about a half-hour too long, dragging us along as our hero sinks into oblivion, alcohol, and poverty, while the heroine becomes the talk of the country in talkies.

There was one scene which I found riveting. In a sequence after he dismisses talkies, our hero is in his dressing room and rattles a glass. It's the first sound we hear from the movie. He's startled, and he makes noises among the objects on his dressing table as if the world in which he lived had been silent before but now there's sound. But he himself could not speak. We see him silently scream at his image in the mirror. Then he wakes up sweating from a dream. It was a fascinating thing to do -- to have sound effects without dialogue in a silent movie. I thought it dramatized his fears very well while commenting on the nature of silent movies by stepping outside the bounds of the screen.

Unfortunately, the plot was obvious, the actors did not do anything I thought amazing with their silent roles, and the cinematography was too modern for my tastes. It was an interesting experiment, and I won't say it failed, but it did not bring me into their world as other movies have done.

I recommend contrasting this movie with Fritz Lang's talkie "M," where Lang uses sound but has long stretches of utter silence as we watch the characters interact with each other and their world. "M" has the best use of sound I can recall. Lang's "Metropolis" is a silent film that I recommend for his brilliant compositions and lingering portraits of his actors. "Metropolis" was released in 1927, the year "The Artist" is set in at the beginning.