The Artist

What Sarah said:

Charming, witty, moving and beautiful The Artist follows a film star in the 1920s who develops a relationship with a young dancer. I think that everything in this is well executed, it comes across as a very charismatic film. One very memorable standout is the performance by Uggie. The chemistry between all the characters is spot on. The artistry of this makes it a standout film in my opinion.

Mike’s verdict:

I want to like this film.  I like the idea of it.  I like the look of it.  I even like the choice of actors and I think that they portray their characters very well. (Yes, especially Uggie.)  There is indeed some charm in a film that can be boiled down to only the necessities. So much of every day life is non-verbal and implied by actions, but telling a story this way is surely harder than one would expect. The successful elimination of an entire storytelling vector (in this case audible dialog) can be freeing for the audience, since there is less to focus on in any given scene.  The energy that would normally go into attention for the missing vector can be focused elsewhere; perhaps on visuals or even non-dialog audio like the score.  Used correctly, this effect can draw the audience into a film in ways that are unfamiliar and ultimately contribute to a greater sense of connectedness. The audience will forget that something is missing, because that aspect is in fact not missing – it’s just not present.

Unfortunately, this film actually fails to accomplish the goal of telling a story without dialog. First, a significant portion of the story is told through dialog that is entirely present, but just not audible.  Many of John Goodman‘s lines are spoken, but with the audience required to lip-read. This would be acceptable if those lines were superfluous; one or two words at a time, spoken in obvious reaction, anger, surprise, dismay, etc. But that is not the case.  His character is central to the development of the plot, and many of those developments can only be understood by reading his lips. This makes it impossible for the audience to forget that the audio is missing – every time his character speaks I am reminded that part of my normal sensory input has been disabled. It’s irritating.

But even more irritating is the fact that the film actually uses dialog intertitles (the printed text edited into or between scenes), but does so randomly, without any obvious consideration for whether or not the audience actually needs clarification at a given point.  Not only are these additional reminders to the audience that their senses have been deliberately disabled, they are also used too infrequently given how often one is required to lip-read and at the same time used too frequently when lip-reading would have actually been just as effective.

Even worse, the intertiles that are provide are in French, despite the fact that all other written text in the film (such as visible newspapers) are written in English, and the dialog that needs to be read from silent lips is also entirely in English.  Yes, I understand that this has been marketed as a “French” film, but it’s not – literally everything about this film is English accept for the awkwardly timed intertiles.  The assumption that the audience must be able to read written French and English lips was aggravating and it caused me notable frustration throughout the viewing.  I spent a significant portion of the film trying to sort out what was actually happening.

Which brings me to my next complaint – the story.  Quite simply, it makes absolutely no sense that a production company would suddenly abandon their biggest star just because they are making a switch to ‘talkies’.  The entire world of film audiences would have been demanding to finally hear the voice of their hero George Valentin. It makes even less sense that Valentin would resist working on ‘talkies’ right to the point of bankruptcy. At minimum he could have continued to accept non-speaking roles just to pay the bills.  Without some kind of conflict films would be nothing more than a string of uninteresting scenes, but conflict has to make sense.  This film’s conflict is just too contrived.  I simply cannot accept that the characters would have made the choices that are depicted.

Obviously, I’m not a fan of this film.  But they always say that criticism is worthless without suggestions for improvement, and I do in fact have some suggestions. First, eliminate the requirement for lip-reading and intertitles entirely by rewriting the scenes that rely on them.  This will likely add a lot off camp to the scenes, but that would be more in line with the time-period anyway.  Second, change the plot to one where all the same events occur, but are in fact being orchestrated deliberately by Peppy Miller who is a mentally ill stalker bent on ruining Valentin’s life so that he is forced to be with her.  The film already has the necessary components to make this work – it just needs some tweaking to the non-verbal dialog.

4/10