Here’s my basic problem with The Artist, which I saw two weeks ago: The more I try to think about it, the more I end up thinking about something else.
Don’t mistake my tone there – it’s a very good movie, at different points entertaining, funny, and poignant; beautifully shot and staged; and simply written with little that doesn’t belong. But it didn’t stick with me at all; a great movie will come back to me often, days or even weeks after I see it, with the best scenes replaying in my head regardless of whether I called them to mind. I end up considering and reconsidering themes or questions or ambiguities, often until I see a different film. But The Artist brought none of that. It was a fun way to spend two hours, but I couldn’t call it more than that.
The Artist is, at heart, a tragic romance, the story of a man, George Valentin, who is madly in love with himself – so much so that he can’t seem to recognize it when someone else actually cares about him. The title might even be ironic, and given how he treats most of the people in his life, especially after his career begins to unravel, it might have more accurately been called The Asshole.
Valentin (Best Actor winner Jean Dujardin) is a silent-film star whose life is altered by two major events near the start of the film. One is the advent of talkies, which he dismisses as might anyone who finds his livelihood threatened by new technology or innovation. (I imagine buggy drivers had some choice words for the first automobile as well.) The other is a chance encounter with an adoring fan, the fresh-faced and aptly-named Peppy Miller (Best Supporting Actress nominee Berenice Bejo), to whom George gives a role as an extra in his next film. Her star rises with the rise of sound in pictures while he is cast aside, eventually blowing his fortune to produce a silent film that, for a variety of reasons, tanks at the box office, after which his wife leaves him and his life spirals down to the bottom of a series of bottles. He hits bottom twice, and Peppy ends up in position to repay him for his part in starting her career – if only he wasn’t too buried in self-pity to notice.
The strongest aspects of the movie lie in its subtleties, as the plot itself is pretty straightforward and there aren’t any real subplots. Peppy criticizes silent movies once she’s a star by referring to actors “mugging” for the camera, but Bejo and Dujardin mug a lot less than I expected without sacrificing the expression a silent film requires from its stars. I was far more impressed by the mass of activity underneath the film’s surface, some of which holds clues to the small twist at the end of the film that casts Valentin in a better light (but only slightly), some of which just made the film a greater pleasure to watch – such as the scene in the studio’s offices where the camera shows three floors simultaneously, with a flurry of activity around Peppy and George as she tries to reconnect with him, unaware that he’s just been sacked by the studio.
But the production values and strong performances couldn’t quite get me past how sparse the actual story was. Valentin starts at the top, falls to the bottom, nearly dies, considers suicide, but never seems to learn a damn thing – not the need to change, not the value of treating people well, not how to live within his means, nothing. Only at the very end do we see a small sign that he may have learned some humility, but even that is tainted by its circumstances. He waited around for life to come back around and save him. We spend more time laughing at misfortunes of his own making than we do empathizing with him because we never seen the insecurity that lurks behind the pride.
The dog is awesome, though.
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I was familiar enough with the film going in to try to guard against the reflex reaction that the film only won the Academy Award for Best Picture because it seemed designed to win the award – a black-and-white love letter to nascent Hollywood shot in 4:3 with only two lines of spoken dialogue, coming at the very end of the film. And, to the film’s credit, it wasn’t hard to get lost in the story, even with the twists I kind of knew were coming. But it seemed rather insubstantial for a Best Picture winner, according to the arbitrary standard in my head for that award. I expect more depth from a film deemed the best of the year by that body.
I’ve only seen one other Best Picture nominee from last year, and The Artist was better, but I’m not sure what made this film, stripped of gimmickry, better than, say, Martha Marcy May Marlene. It’s prettier, and more mainstream, and not half as disturbing, but none of those things really makes it better. I’ll work my way through the nominees as I did last year, as well as a few movies that film-critic friends of mine have pushed me to see (coughA Separationcough), but I’ll predict now that I’ll find something else I thought was more deserving. Next up is Drive
that season four is its pinnacle, perhaps the greatest single season of any American TV series from any network. I won’t say that I disagree with that assessment, but that I find it very hard to view season four outside of the context of the three seasons that led up to it – season four stands strongly on the foundation laid by 37 prior episodes that established storylines, developed characters, built tension, and began a form of social criticism that draws on traditions that predate the medium, a kind of angry exposure of societal injustice and hypocrisy that called to mind the angry righteousness of Native Son. The Wire always had a point to make; season four is where that point got made.
before last week primarily because I was always under the mistaken impression that it was a work of non-fiction, a magazine article or series of them expanded to book length. I’m sure most of you know that that impression was wrong, as it’s a novel, inspired by actual events and probably by actual drugs, but largely the product of Thompson’s expansive imagination and, in his own words, a “fantasy.”
, regarded as the first detective novel, praised by writers from T.S. Eliot to G.K. Chesterton to Dorothy Sayers.
that I found something that lived up to the standard of the first novel of his that I’d read.
, one of the best and funniest novels I’ve ever read, The Baron in the Trees contains a more straightforward narrative and doesn’t lack for humor. Cosimo (who becomes a baron after his father dies) sees the world differently, figuratively and literally, from his new vantage point, and necessities like food and hygiene force him to conceive new and unusual solutions to keep himself in the trees. He can also better understand the consequences of his actions, such as his response to the discovery of a traitor amongst his father’s retinue, and the development of his philosophy, while obviously satirizing some of the political philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th century, is built on solid foundations, such as his understanding that “association renders men stronger and brings out each person’s best gifts,” while living a solitary, hermit-like existence in the trees was more likely to lead to bitter disagreements borne of a lack of trust between Cosimo and everyone else in the village. (I thought I also detected some elements here satirizing utopian movements of the 19th and even 20th centuries.)