It’s difficult to articulate a defense for “The Artist,” Michel Hazanavicius’ silent film awards-magnet, currently on the receiving end of an inevitable backlash, without babbling platitudes. Its proponents are legion, but uniformly reduced to one sentiment: “The Artist” is a delight, an infectious joy. Rarely do the accolades dig deeper. Its detractors, meanwhile, mount compelling counterarguments. Jaime Christley at Slant Magazine slams the film for “ignoring everything that’s fascinating and memorable about the [silent] era, focusing instead on a patchwork of general knowledge, so eroded of inconvenient facts that it doesn’t even qualify as a roman a clef.” And Michael Sicinski, writing for CinemaScope, charges that it “flatters its viewership for a thimble’s worth of Wikipedia learning,” calling it “a wet clothesline of half-remembered iconic moments from a college course somebody told somebody else about having taken.”

There's evidence to supports these arguments: the film, though ostensibly glued to the conventions of the era in which it's set, repeatedly breaks the rules it establishes—and not just because sound sometimes worms in for comic effect. “The Artist” tells the familiar story of a silent star in the 1920s, the debonair George Valentin (played with commendable accuracy by Jean Dujardin), whose dissipating fame during the industry’s transition to sound is contrasted with the rise of a new darling of the talkies, Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo). It distinguishes itself from the litany of “A Star Is Born” reiterations with a winning high-concept: it is itself a silent film, period-specific not just in setting but in style.

The trouble, for most critics, is that "The Artist" approaches its own conceit with a wink, transgressing its formal borders often. Jonathan Rosenbaum claims to have forgiven Hazanavicius his trespasses right up until he employs snatches of Bernard Herrmann’s instantly recognizable score for "Vertigo," a film made 30 years after the silent era (doing so incited the ire of Kim Novak herself, who made it into a minor scandal recently). At least two conspicuous visual references to "Citizen Kane," in many ways the quintessential sound film and an emblem of the modern cinema, seem similarly egregious, and to many are incompatible with Hazanavicius's intentions. If “The Artist” is a love-letter to silents, why cite sound classics so liberally? If Hazanavicius is dedicated to his concept, why is his execution sloppy? (Another major criticism, by the way, is that the film's grasp of the silent form is tenuous at best; it doesn’t replicate films from that era, the argument goes, so much as it parrots the more superficial tropes.)

“The Artist” is delightful, but many advocates stop there. I don’t think it’s necessary to advocate thoughtlessness, or reject reasoned criticism in favor of gut feelings; there are many things to say about “The Artist” that are interesting and sophisticated, and those things are worth stressing too, even though the simple pleasures on offer here are themselves of value. It's true that, say, "The Artist's" period inaccuracies—anachronisms of form rather than content—are indeed conspicuous, but they only scan as flaws if one is seeking absolute verisimilitude. “Authenticity,” in the sense of being as true to the style of the silent cinema as possible, seems a doomed pursuit from the start, and straining to nail the conventions so that they stand up under even the most hardcore historian’s scrutiny would have been a waste of effort—its virtuosity might have impressed those with an eye for it, but the perfection of a technique is not an end unto itself. We’re never going to be fooled into thinking we’re actually watching a silent film from the silent period; this might seem like an obvious point, but if its ultimately inauthentic form is a sticking point for "The Artist's" critics, it obviously bears repeating. Hazanavicius is a contemporary artist looking back upon an antiquated form, and as he looks back through nearly a century of cinematic evolution, he necessarily adopts a melange of anachronistic viewpoints.

To that end, "The Artist's" references betray an adoration for the whole of cinema’s history, and their employment throughout what is outwardly a “pure” recreation of a period-specific style gives the film a benevolent, democratic dimension. There’s inevitably a certain nostalgia in an exercise of this kind, but Hazanavicius sidesteps regressive longing by embracing what the future has to offer. What are "Citizen Kane" and "Vertigo" if not poignant reminders of what treasures the sound era could yield? These citations, prominently displayed and immediately identifiable, herald the form’s future classics; they act as counterpoint to Valentin’s despair, suggesting that perhaps the advent of sound was not so regrettable after all. These are hopeful gestures, and the film is richer for having them. This is a film that simultaneously romanticizes a bygone era in film and looks optimistically upon a new dawn, which is why it benefits from being able to express its love for both forms. It would have been disingenuous, perhaps even hypocritical, for “The Artist” to have brandished only its silent skill set, neglecting the joy of the sound film entirely. Because though it’s a story of obsolescence, about a sense of loss in the face of change, it is also about acceptance and reconciliation. That’s why the sound which punctures its ending is more than a jarring punchline; it’s the proud entrance of the new, and it contains the confused union of joy and regret that accompany any major sea change.

“The Artist” adopts the look and feel of a silent, but the sensibility which guides it is crucially modern. An experienced parodist, Hazanavicius has a knack for drawing comic nuance from broad gestures, as when Valentin strains to affect his “serious” face before a film take. Hazanavicius's critics have made the case that he lacks an understanding of the silent form, but I’d argue that his understanding of the comic disparity between outmoded conventions and contemporary expectations is more significant to his film's artistry and populist reach. While this sometimes translates to an inauthentic silent film experience, it remains true to our contemporary experience of a “modern” silent reproduction, where we regard a lost period across a 90-year gulf of incomprehension. Aware that his film cannot be a “true” silent film, Hazanavicius is free to be more playful, bending the rules of his own game to great effect.

A scene early in the film in which Valentin dreams that sound has infiltrated his world (sudden simple sound effects and his reactions to them become enormously funny) doesn’t even make logical sense, since in a proper silent film it is presumed that sound exists within the film’s diagetic world. But that’s exactly the point: “The Artist” privileges our self-aware position in relation to the comparatively “unreal” silent world of the film, stressing how remote it is from what we’re accustomed to with sound cinema. We know not only that we’re watching a silent film, but that its silent form is antiquated and novel; and Hazanavicius knows how much mileage he can get out of playing with that awareness. That it's uncommitted to its conceit makes “The Artist” easy to criticize. It's also so enormously entertaining that it’s easy to like without much thought. But I think it’s more than a collection of winks and nods, and that its joy has motivation and purpose; I think it’s a great film that can be defended critically, if with some legwork. Its gimmick is both the central reason to celebrate its success and the giant target on its back, and if it goes on to sweep the Oscars (as it’s predicated to do), I doubt it will shake its already pervasive reputation as a middlebrow ham that gets silent film all wrong. That’s unfortunate. It isn’t a very successful history lesson, but I don’t think it ever intended to be one. It’s a fond reflection on a form that is gone, one necessarily distant, and a memory of all the film history that’s come since.

Review by:
Calum Marsh