The Artist (Film Review)
As someone who loves silent films as well as those occasions when film goes meta on its history and manages to wrap that up in a good story, I was thoroughly charmed, but also very frustrated, by The Artist. The charmed part is easily explained: the film actually pulls off being, if not a completley silent film, then a silent film the way Chaplin made them when he was still holding out against sound but also tried to use it to make a point, in City Lights and Modern Times. (Meaning: for the most part, the respective films are silent as far as the acting is concerned, but not only is there a musical soundtrack but there are also sound effects now and then, distorted speech intruding on silent artistry one of them. The film actors handle the challenge very well, despite the fact none of them would have had practice in acting without relying on your voice before. And visual gags & movie homages abound. (Including one to the breakfast scene from Citizen Kane that's less of a homage and more of a rip-off, but then again it has the neat addition of the wife painting moustaches all over the newspaper photos of her husband.) The finale is one of those glorious cheerworthy sequences that make you wish you could dance.
The frustration takes somewhat longer to explain. Let me start with a clever and amusing homage I spotted in a montage of movie credits which indicate how Peppy, the female main character, goes from being the female version of a spear carrier to a supporting actress to a main lead in the business. In the first film Peppy lands a job in, the leading actress is called "Norma Lamont" which is a neat combination of two famous fictional silent movie actresses, Norma Desmond (from Sunset Boulevard) and Lina Lamont (from Singing in the Rain). Both of these films, in quite different ways, deal with the silent films and their stars being overtaken by sound, and both are obvious inspirations for The Artist, a film that centres around silent actor-star George Valentin whose fame vanishes as young actress Peppy's star rises. Singing in the Rain does this as a comedy-musical, with Lina Lamont as its villain; her inability to adapt to sound is played for laughs. Sunset Boulevard does it as perhaps the most acid Hollywood-on-Hollywood film until Robert Altman made The Player, and Billy Wilder is better at dialogue, and it was a present day film of its time having an advantage none of the others do, to wit, Wilder could cast actual silent movie stars. Gloria Swanson playing Norma Desmond against William Holden's screenwriter Joe Gillis doubles the old versus new Hollywood in a way that can't be replicated down to their very body language. Norma is larger than life in that film; the "you're Norma Desmond - you used to be big!" / "I am big. It's the pictures that got small" dialogue works because of that. However, the way Wilder achieves this isn't by begging the audience to feel sorry for Norma, or letting his other lead feel sorry for her. On the contrary. Joe Gillis is relentlessly and witheringly sarcastic at Norma's expense, more, not less so once he takes her money and becomes her lover. This, btw, works in Norma's favour in terms of audience sympathy. (It might also be due to the fact director/scriptwriter Billy Wilder actually had made some additional cash as a gigolo during his Berlin days as a struggling scriptwriter and reporter. In the article he wrote about this he included the statement that key to any success was not to come across as feeling sorry for the ladies.) And there we get to my problem, because The Artist relentlessly asks you to feel sorry for George Valentin, and has practically every character feel sorry for him to boot, most of all Peppy and his chauffeur (James Cromwell, always nice to see). This, on me, had the effect of feeling George's self pity incredibly annoying instead of feeling for him the way I did for Norma Desmond.
I also felt the screentime devoted to George's downfall-and-misery times far too long, which brings me to another homage/compare-and-contrast. If you've watched some silent films, say, by Chaplin, literally a child of Victorian England by imprint of taste, or for that matter Fritz Lang of Vienna via Berlin, you know those films love their melodrama in terms of plot. And their occasional deus/dea ex machina. But Chaplin, probably due to being a comedian, was also very clever with his timing. Those times when the characters in his films, be they the Tramp or the respective other leads, are out of luck and miserable do not give the impression of going on endlessly and often go with being punctured by absurd comedy. The opening sequence of The Kid is a case in point: THE WOMAN (Chaplin characters don't often have names) has become an illegitimate mother and was deserted by the father (never to be seen in this film again). Poor, miserable, near suicidal she puts the baby into a millionaire's car. So far, so melodramatic. But this is of course when the car gets stolen by two two thieves who discover too late they have a baby to deal with as well, and we're into a series of gags as they try to get rid of the baby, which is found by THE TRAMP, and then he tries to, etc.The conclusion of The Kid also offers pure Victorian melodrama and dea ex machina: THE WOMAN, saved from death back when and now a star, is reunited with the kid and adopts THE TRAMP as well. Hooray! The Artist goes for a similar mixture of melodrama and comedy but doesn't get the balance right in the same way. George's relentless lengthy misery is one reason, but the other is that Peppy, with no other reason than the fact he was nice to her once when he was a star and she a newbie (and that he looks admittedly dishy), keeps trying to help/save him; one of her films is called "Guardian Angel" which is the kind of thing silent film would do, granted, but you know, most silent films still would have tried to give Peppy a bit more actual relationship with George to begin with in order to justify her selfless support. And while you could never accuse Chaplin of creating feminist characters, his women don't feel guilty because of their success. (The woman in The Kid is worried what became of the baby, obviously, but quite happy with being a star. The flower girl in City Lights just loves having a flower shop of her own at the end, thanks. The closest to the George/Peppy relationship in a Chaplin film is probably the relationship from Limelight, the should-have-been-his-swansong sound film that has Chaplin as a down on his luck former star and music hall comedian Calvero versus Claire Bloom's rising star (as a ballerina). The ballerina feels sorry for Calvero, granted, and organizes a come back stage show for him at the climax of the film, but he literally saved her life at the start, is a pragmatist mostly free of self pity (and also realistic enough to know turning this into a romance would be a bad idea), and they spend enough time together to make it understandable why she fights for him later on. And she, too, doesn't feel guilty for being successful when he is not.
Where all of this is going: Peppy as George's selfless guardian angel made me long for cynical Gigolo scriptwriter Joe. Or Norma Desmond herself, who as opposed to George kept her money from the silent days and employed her first director (and first husband), played by Erich von Stroheim (told you Wilder could get the actual goods for Sunset Boulevard) as her butler. I'm sure she'd have found a spot for George as the gardener, but the fights as to whose films to watch at night when in a down-with-sound-mood would have been glorious, and given their respective will power, there's no question Norma would have won.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/751160.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
The frustration takes somewhat longer to explain. Let me start with a clever and amusing homage I spotted in a montage of movie credits which indicate how Peppy, the female main character, goes from being the female version of a spear carrier to a supporting actress to a main lead in the business. In the first film Peppy lands a job in, the leading actress is called "Norma Lamont" which is a neat combination of two famous fictional silent movie actresses, Norma Desmond (from Sunset Boulevard) and Lina Lamont (from Singing in the Rain). Both of these films, in quite different ways, deal with the silent films and their stars being overtaken by sound, and both are obvious inspirations for The Artist, a film that centres around silent actor-star George Valentin whose fame vanishes as young actress Peppy's star rises. Singing in the Rain does this as a comedy-musical, with Lina Lamont as its villain; her inability to adapt to sound is played for laughs. Sunset Boulevard does it as perhaps the most acid Hollywood-on-Hollywood film until Robert Altman made The Player, and Billy Wilder is better at dialogue, and it was a present day film of its time having an advantage none of the others do, to wit, Wilder could cast actual silent movie stars. Gloria Swanson playing Norma Desmond against William Holden's screenwriter Joe Gillis doubles the old versus new Hollywood in a way that can't be replicated down to their very body language. Norma is larger than life in that film; the "you're Norma Desmond - you used to be big!" / "I am big. It's the pictures that got small" dialogue works because of that. However, the way Wilder achieves this isn't by begging the audience to feel sorry for Norma, or letting his other lead feel sorry for her. On the contrary. Joe Gillis is relentlessly and witheringly sarcastic at Norma's expense, more, not less so once he takes her money and becomes her lover. This, btw, works in Norma's favour in terms of audience sympathy. (It might also be due to the fact director/scriptwriter Billy Wilder actually had made some additional cash as a gigolo during his Berlin days as a struggling scriptwriter and reporter. In the article he wrote about this he included the statement that key to any success was not to come across as feeling sorry for the ladies.) And there we get to my problem, because The Artist relentlessly asks you to feel sorry for George Valentin, and has practically every character feel sorry for him to boot, most of all Peppy and his chauffeur (James Cromwell, always nice to see). This, on me, had the effect of feeling George's self pity incredibly annoying instead of feeling for him the way I did for Norma Desmond.
I also felt the screentime devoted to George's downfall-and-misery times far too long, which brings me to another homage/compare-and-contrast. If you've watched some silent films, say, by Chaplin, literally a child of Victorian England by imprint of taste, or for that matter Fritz Lang of Vienna via Berlin, you know those films love their melodrama in terms of plot. And their occasional deus/dea ex machina. But Chaplin, probably due to being a comedian, was also very clever with his timing. Those times when the characters in his films, be they the Tramp or the respective other leads, are out of luck and miserable do not give the impression of going on endlessly and often go with being punctured by absurd comedy. The opening sequence of The Kid is a case in point: THE WOMAN (Chaplin characters don't often have names) has become an illegitimate mother and was deserted by the father (never to be seen in this film again). Poor, miserable, near suicidal she puts the baby into a millionaire's car. So far, so melodramatic. But this is of course when the car gets stolen by two two thieves who discover too late they have a baby to deal with as well, and we're into a series of gags as they try to get rid of the baby, which is found by THE TRAMP, and then he tries to, etc.The conclusion of The Kid also offers pure Victorian melodrama and dea ex machina: THE WOMAN, saved from death back when and now a star, is reunited with the kid and adopts THE TRAMP as well. Hooray! The Artist goes for a similar mixture of melodrama and comedy but doesn't get the balance right in the same way. George's relentless lengthy misery is one reason, but the other is that Peppy, with no other reason than the fact he was nice to her once when he was a star and she a newbie (and that he looks admittedly dishy), keeps trying to help/save him; one of her films is called "Guardian Angel" which is the kind of thing silent film would do, granted, but you know, most silent films still would have tried to give Peppy a bit more actual relationship with George to begin with in order to justify her selfless support. And while you could never accuse Chaplin of creating feminist characters, his women don't feel guilty because of their success. (The woman in The Kid is worried what became of the baby, obviously, but quite happy with being a star. The flower girl in City Lights just loves having a flower shop of her own at the end, thanks. The closest to the George/Peppy relationship in a Chaplin film is probably the relationship from Limelight, the should-have-been-his-swansong sound film that has Chaplin as a down on his luck former star and music hall comedian Calvero versus Claire Bloom's rising star (as a ballerina). The ballerina feels sorry for Calvero, granted, and organizes a come back stage show for him at the climax of the film, but he literally saved her life at the start, is a pragmatist mostly free of self pity (and also realistic enough to know turning this into a romance would be a bad idea), and they spend enough time together to make it understandable why she fights for him later on. And she, too, doesn't feel guilty for being successful when he is not.
Where all of this is going: Peppy as George's selfless guardian angel made me long for cynical Gigolo scriptwriter Joe. Or Norma Desmond herself, who as opposed to George kept her money from the silent days and employed her first director (and first husband), played by Erich von Stroheim (told you Wilder could get the actual goods for Sunset Boulevard) as her butler. I'm sure she'd have found a spot for George as the gardener, but the fights as to whose films to watch at night when in a down-with-sound-mood would have been glorious, and given their respective will power, there's no question Norma would have won.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/751160.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.