The Artist (2011)

3 months ago

The Artist (2011)

I WON’T TALK! I WON’T SAY A WORD!

by Chad Perman

For all the modern day cultural importance of movies, I can’t help but think that they used to simply mean a whole lot more way back when. A time I never knew but feel an aching nostalgia for nonetheless. A time when a movie was an event, but not only an event: an escape like no other, a communal experience, a uniquely bright wall in a dark room full of people waiting to be transported, enlightened, entertained. You can’t but think how very much of that experience is lost in 2012, as we sit and watch movies all alone on our computer with a handful of browsers open in a misguided attempt at multi-tasking, or stream them over our tiny smartphones as we lie in bed or sit in the bathroom, several hundreds of people’s hard work and artistic achievement reduced to a way to pass the time or fill our heads with the little bit of noise we’ve convinced ourselves we need in order to live, to not be bored or silent, not even for a little while.

Don’t get me wrong: I love movies in whatever form I can get at them. But I miss what they must have been when they weren’t available at a moment’s notice or impulse, when you had to go to a theater to see a movie or you’d never see it at all, ever. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, from a movie critic in the early 1930s:

“Theaters are the new Church of the Masses - where people sit huddled in the dark listening to people in the light tell them what it is to be human.”

And I’m thinking about all of this as a way of trying to understand the waves of love and admiration that have swept Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist into the unlikely position of being the odds-on favorite to win Best Picture at the Oscars this Sunday, not to mention the host of other awards it’s already managed to garner this year. For after all, this is a silent film we’re talking about. A silent film in the year 2012. Quite possibly the first silent film since 1929 (and only the second one ever) to win an Oscar for Best Picture. And there has to be a reason for that, a reason beyond the fact that The Artist is an utterly charming and wonderfully well-made film. For not only does it have to be all of that, but it also has to be seen and received by an audience willing to embrace such an anachronistic thing in such a thoroughly modern age. And it was. We were.

So what accounts for this reception, then? Why do we find ourselves so warmly receiving a film like The Artist in 2012? Clearly it’s tapping into something, touching a nerve somewhere. Yes, it’s delightful - but there must be something else going on, something with us. Because it’s not just cinephiles (its obvious target audience) who are lapping up the film; your aunt in Indiana loves it, too.

At its heart, The Artist is a rather familiar tale, revolving around a theme as old as stories themselves: a man reluctant to change his ways only to find himself passed over altogether by the endless march of progress. It’s a story that can be appreciated both literally and metaphorically, applicable in a hundred and one different ways to each of our lives.

It’s also a love story. And quite a good one, at that. But, again, not something we haven’t seen/heard/read a thousand different times. (Still, oh, that feeling you get when she looks at him, when he looks at her, when they dance together at film’s end - that special kind of movie magic that never fails to move and quicken the heart!)

And yet I am still no closer to unraveling The Artist’s appeal. And I can’t stop thinking that this all has something to do with a certain nostalgia, something in our collective unconscious that longs for a time when entertainment - and, by extension, life - seemed simpler, more managable, more understandable. Even as we know, logically, that the 1920s and 30s felt no more that way to those who inhabited those times than our current moment feels to us; life always feels complicated and difficult and confusing. It’s only the context around us that changes - not our struggles, not our hearts. Yet perhaps The Artist allows us to imagine otherwise, by stripping a modern film of all its artiface (admittedly an artiface in and of itself, if we’re being honest) it allows us to see with supposed simplicity the mess we all manage to make of our lives and how necessary love and redemption can be.

Anthony Lane, in his wonderful New Yorker review, offers another plausible explanation for why The Artist is connecting so well:

Here is a crowd-pleaser that makes you glad to be part of the crowd, perhaps because—to adopt the classical viewpoint—silent cinema really was the purest and most binding incarnation of the medium, one from which we have torn ourselves, to our detriment, ever since. That is why “The Artist” seems instantly easy on the mind’s eye, and why we feel a natural tug of resistance when Peppy, the bright spark of sound, declares to an interviewer, “Make way for the young!” What Hazanavicius has wrought is damnably clever, but not cute; less like an arch conceit and more like the needle-sharp recollection of a dream.”

Or perhaps it’s none of these things. Perhaps it merely works because it does. Perhaps all these words I’m wasting to try and get at its resonance is part of the modern problem itself: our need to talk, to analyze, to make sense of everything. A silent film, by its nature, allows something different to emerge in the space where dialogue otherwise would be. And perhaps I’m filling in that space with the need to make meaning of it because that’s something that I do, always. When something enchants or moves me in some way, as The Artist surely did, I try to take that apart and look at it and figure out my response. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and a well-told story is simply and only that. Sometimes you connect with something and it feels good and warm and right and you leave the theater in better spirits for having been there. And sometimes, I guess, that has to be enough.