ART THEATRE FILM REVIEW: ‘The Artist’

10:00am | Because we’re dumb, we never figured out that we should give some proper love and attention to the Art Theatre, the one independent movie theater we’ve got here in the 36th most populous city in the United States.

But finally we’ve gotten wise, and beginning now we’ll be running reviews of whatever’s booked there for a run (plus perhaps whatever one-offs we’re able to preview one way or the other). First up: The Artist.

The framing of The Artist is a gimmick: it’s a 1920s-style silent film — the period whimsy and dialogue cards, the styles of acting and montage, the orchestral score and film speed (writer/director Michel Hazanavicius shot at 22 frames per second to achieve the effect) — centering around good-hearted but prideful silent-film star George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) as he is confronted by the advent of “talkies.”

But gimmicks don’t automatically mean second-rate art. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is framed by the gimmick of making two minor characters from Hamlet the stars, with action from the play that spawned them wandering on- and off-stage — and it’s genius.

The Artist is not genius. In fact, it’s quite simple. But that’s a merit here, not a shortcoming. Hazanavicius has succeeded in resurrecting an aesthetic — style, substance, technique. We usually think of time machines as transporting us to another era. But what if a piece of that era could be transported to the present? Hazanavicius has emulated such a chronological maneuver.

Of course, 2012 is technologically more advanced than 1927-1932, and Hazanavicius has employed several modern developments to full effect. Though black-and-white, The Artist was shot digitally, which makes it far sharper than any film from the era it emulates. And The Artist is lit with a glorious control that could only have been dreamt of by even the greatest technicians of that bygone cinema (Lang, Vertov, Eisenstein).

Cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman is a shoo-in for an Oscar — a prize he comes close to earning with one spectacular shot of a drink poured on a table. The Artist is receiving a tremendous amount of buzz, much of which seems to me to come from its novelty. As a piece of filmic narrative, it’s a nice enough story, though I didn’t find myself especially invested in Valentin or his guardian angel –adorable, generous young starlet Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) — nor in the predictable plotline. (Hazanavicius has pretty much pilfered a couple of elements from Sunset Boulevard.)

But there are plenty of cute details. And a clever dream sequence. And craftsmanship that won’t quit. So if you walk away from The Artist without finding anything to like, well, you weren’t looking very hard.

But even in that case, you’ll still realize you’ve just seen something new.