The Artist | Film review

There’s something a tad backward about critics’ groups falling in lockstep to hail a pastiche of silent movies—as opposed to, say, encouraging viewers to check out actual films from the Golden Era. But if The Artist sparks a renaissance, the whole exercise will have been worth it. In his fleet, entertaining homage, director Michel Hazanavicius fuses Singin’ in the Rain’s end-of-the-silents narrative to A Star Is Born’s declining-career melodrama, and doubles down on his ambition by shooting in a reasonable facsimile of a silent-film style. (If the visuals seem less lush than they might have been, the intertitles are blessedly few.) Jean Dujardin plays dashing Valentino clone George Valentin, whose self-regarding smile keeps on giving and whose on-off romance with rising It girl Peppy (Bérénice Bejo) provides the movie’s heart. But does anyone want to hear George talk?

The Artist is hardly purist. Just as Mel Brooks did in 1976’s Silent Movie, Hazanavicius (the OSS 117 spy parodies) sometimes turns “silentness” into a gag. A well-played nightmare sequence, in which George is tormented by the sounds of a falling whiskey glass and laughter, feels more like a nod to Wild Strawberries (1957) or 8 1/2 (1963). And while the movie sports a few dull patches and the occasional baffling misstep—an appropriation of Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score for the climactic crosscutting seems particularly arrogant—The Artist is the kind of lark you’d happily see more of.