"The Con-Artist: An Argument Against This Year's Oscar Front-Runner"

Why is this man smiling?  

When I first heard there was to be a black and white, silent film with a square aspect ratio set to be released, I’ll admit my interest was piqued.  I thought it should be irresistible to anyone with even a minute passion for film, regardless of whether its design was a gimmick, an homage to the birth of cinema, or better yet, a challenge to modern-day audience tolerances.  But as the days remaining in 2011 became fewer, and praise heaped on The Artist became greater, all the way up to its Golden Globe win for Best Musical or Comedy, I began to grow equally as suspicious.  What was it about this film that was transcending its self-imposed formal restrictions and resonating with both the art house and mainstream crowds? 

Many people, especially critics, have pronounced The Artist the film of the year.  Always searching for trends in cinema with which to link, as a thread, through the films on their top ten lists, many critics decided that last year was the year of the love letter to Hollywood, drawing from Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, and Martin Scorsese’s Hugo as similar examples of which Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist could rest comfortably at the forefront, due to its quite literal fixations on, and reiterations of, ancient cinematic techniques.  That’s all well and good, but how does the film play?  When its artifice is stripped away, is there anything left?  Is it a compelling story?  Does the film’s screenplay make it worthy of the Best Picture award it is certainly destined to take home?  In words that Hollywood once should have been able to understand, not by any stretch of the imagination.

For those who have not seen the film, it begins conventionally enough in the ordinary world of silent film star George Valentin, riding high as his film studio’s current marquee star, turning out hit after hit.  An impromptu dalliance with Peppy Miller, a random woman on the street, in a scene that desperately wants you to think of Charlie Chaplin, has the ultimate effect of landing her on the cover of Variety, and pretty soon she finds herself cast in pictures due to public reception.  The incident also becomes another impediment in the loveless marriage between Valentin and his wife, who share a mansion together but rarely the same space within it.  Soon, the film has you believe, overnight, that silent films were replaced by talkies, as Valentin’s studio head tells him they are searching for new faces, and that basically his career is over.  The rest of the film, and I mean rest of the film, parallels Valentin’s descent into depression and self-loathing with Peppy Miller’s rise to superstardom, until he eventually hits rock bottom and Peppy has to save him from utter ruin.

If all this seems quite simple and concise, it’s because it is.  And for some reason, critics, and subsequently audiences, have seemed determined to mistake this coy simplicity for universality.  For an entire hour The Artist features scene after scene of Valentin’s downward spiral into depression, offering no additional information or story development.  We see him watching one of his films in an empty movie theatre, we see him walk by a huge line outside a screening of a Peppy Miller film, we see him drinking in a bar, we see a woman who doesn’t even recognize him approach to talk about his dog, we see him fire his butler, we see him sell off his estate, we see his wife leave him, and the list goes on, ad infinitum, to the point where more so than any other film in recent memory I’ve wanted desperately to fast forward through, not because it was bad per se, but because I had the overwhelming urge to scream “I get it already!”  There is nothing wrong with showing a man’s gradual decline into depression, but The Artist’s errs are three-fold.  First, Valentin’s character is completely undeveloped.  Unless you subscribe to the notion that owning a small dog is all that is required to establish a main character as a hero, there is literally nothing about Valentin that warrants emotional investment in his plight, and the character’s self-loathing comes off as whining, upper class laziness and miserablism.  It doesn’t help that Hazanavicius captures multiple times the complete transformation of Dujardin’s face, from furrow to smile, and a ridiculously over-the-top smile at that, inviting laughter instead of empathy.  Second, is the lack of subtext throughout the film.  My desire to scream at the screen, and there has to be others who feel the same way, comes from boredom at the film's redundnacy.  Another character or two, or something else at stake besides the popularity of a fading film star, would have solved this problem.  And third, the hour long montage of depression is edited together haphazardly random.  With scenes of gravity in front of more trifling ones, the simple compression of several years of time, a basic formal element of filmmaking, fails at delivering a cohesive sense of logical progression and therefore an effective emotional punch.

All of these problems are related, and could have been avoided quite easily.  The basic arc of the film is substantive, and it has an abundance of charm that despite my opinions, I was not able to resist completely.  But throughout, director Michel Hazanavicius makes the unwise choice to not complicate anything, most likely from a fear of alienating an audience already grappling with the film’s stylistic choices.  Did Hazanavicius forget that the silent film era produced D.W. Griffith’s The Birth Of A Nation and Intolerance, the latter of which was an epic three-and-a-half-hour film with four parallel storylines that spanned several centuries?  Or did he forget about Battleship Potemkin, a film that is still ranked among the greatest films ever made, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, the father of montage, who discovered that the human mind was actually able to extricate a distinct meaning from the juxtaposition of two seemingly random images?  For a film that wants very much to be a paean to the roots of filmmaking it is stubbornly ignorant.  The Artist remains little more than a regurgitation of a focus group’s idea of what silent films are, parading a general sense as gospel, while ignoring simple facts like how the cumbersome nature of film cameras meant little to no camera movement.  Yes, The Artist showcases the same willful negligence as most films that depict the process of filmmaking as a point and shoot, in-camera edited affair.  But who needs veracity when you have a smiling man with a dog?  Who needs substance when you’ve got the ultimate vehicle for millions of Americans so in love with and envious of the beautiful people they just won’t see Valentin for what he is, a lazy sad sack who sits around waiting for someone else to make it all better for him?

In the end, though, it matters not the things that don’t make it onto the screen.  The Artist contains all the hallmarks of a Best Picture winner:  oversimplification that borders on the juvenile, cliché emotions that assume resonance among an audience, and an unwillingness to ask anything of its viewers beyond a mere diversion between fistfuls of popcorn.  If the Academy truly wants to reward a film that could be called a love letter to Hollywood, Hugo clearly, and much more adequately fits the bill.  Scorsese doesn’t pander, you either get his references or you don’t; and if you don’t it doesn’t matter, the screenplay by John Logan is so well written the story provides more than enough value for your dollar, leaving the film’s inherent self-reflexivity a clever bonus for the true film lover.  The elephant in the room regarding The Artist, the question that nobody seems to be asking, is what would the Oscar nominations look like if there were nine other silent films made last year?  Would they all be nominated for Best Picture?  What makes The Artist so special that it could be singled out among other films with similar stylistic pretensions?  Nothing.  If the film were in color and had sound it would be unwatchable, laughable even.  Its artifice is just a gimmick.  Unfortunately the timing of the emergence of the Oscars allowed for only one silent film to be declared Best Picture, Wings, in 1927.  Prior to that there were many masterpieces worthy of distinction as the birth of cinema, efforts from Griffith, Eisenstein, F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang to name just a few.  The Artist would stand shamefully among such company, a fact the Academy should be required to reflect on before casting their vote for Best Picture.  The film will forever remain a reluctant product of the 21^st century, a misguided example of Hollywood’s self-aggrandizing nature, lacking any ties to the art form that in many aspects changed the course of the twentieth century.  Back then the word “illusion” was commonly used when describing film.  The Artist succeeds only in being an illusion of quality cinema.