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Best Picture Prediction: “The Artist”

28 Saturday Jan 2012

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“Silence Please!”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

I CAN THINK of plenty of reasons – five, in fact – that “The Artist” collected a total of ten Oscar nominations for February’s ceremony and why it’s a likely Best Picture winner.  The only film, nomination-wise, from 2011 to outdo “The Artist” is Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo,” another nostalgic crowd-pleaser similarly interested in the advent of cinema and the rising tide of talkies in 1927.  In a class all its own, however, Michel Hazanavicius’s silent black-and-white film is a valentine to vintage Hollywood and shines for these five, fine reasons:

  1. Best Actor nominee Jean Dujardin as matinee idol George Valentin and Best Supporting Actress nominee Bérénice Bejo as starlet Peppy Miller.  The two form a fast friendship early on in “The Artist” and moving in opposite directions, Valentin can’t make the leap from silent film to talkies whereas Peppy becomes the 1920’s version of Hollywood’s it-girl.  It’s staggering to think that Dujardin and Bejo needn’t even speak to create chemistry as memorable as this.  In one dazzling sequence, Valentin sees only her legs below a screen and begins to match the pep in Peppy’s step; in another, the two cross paths on a staircase right out of Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” (1950), equally obsessed with megalomaniacal actors from a bygone era.
  2. Uggy the Dog!  If Dujardin and Bejo aren’t already the year’s most attractive duo, there’s scene-stealer Uggy as the leading man’s loyal friend.   It was a busy year for Uggy, who also appeared in “Water for Elephants.”  He’s now ten years old and, according to owner Omar von Muller, retiring after the Oscar ceremony.  Animal tricks are about as low-brow as it gets but when Uggy plays dead in “The Artist,” it’s a metaphor for his master’s demise.  Plus “The Artist” transports us to the era when a pooch walking on his hind legs had audiences enthusing: That’s entertainment!
  3. The sudden sound in the dream scene.  Give me any vociferous action movie from 2011 – yes, “The Green Hornet” or “I Am Number Four” – and the number one most startling moment on film last year is the sudden intrusion of sound into “The Artist.”  I know that the cardinal sin of any creative writing class is to end a story with the ol’ it-was-only-a-dream line, but here, the eruption of a dog barking, a telephone ringing, and human laughter echoes the film’s exuberant heart.
  4. Everything’s a metaphor.  In the hands of a lesser director, “The Artist” would run out of steam if the plotline weren’t so universal.  But Hazanavicius gives us a movie-within-a-movie with Dujardin sinking fast in quicksand.   Given that he’s stuck in the age of silent film in a city that would like to bury him, the metaphor is obvious enough.  Isn’t the film itself a comment on the perils of resisting change?  “I’m not a puppet!” Valentin declares, “I’m an artist!”
  5. Finally, a feast for film geeks.  As Valentin’s driver Clifton, James Cromwell recalls the hired help, again, from Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” while the score by Ludovic Bource reverberates with echoes of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” composer Bernard Herrmann.  There are traces, too, of “Citizen Kane.”  Music is, of course, vital in a film without dialogue.  Dartmouth professor James A. W. Heffernan once wrote “movies speak mainly to the eyes,” but “The Artist” speaks to the eyes, ears, and heart.

Review: “Beginners”

17 Wednesday Aug 2011

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“In Bloom”

Movie Review: “Beginners”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

IN THE BEGINNING was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God had a Son, and God said: “Son, I’m gay.”  This is the gospel according to Mike Mills’ new film, “Beginners,” inspired in part by the director’s own relationship with his father, Paul, who died of cancer in 2004 shortly after coming out of the closet.   Paul (or “Hal” as he’s known in Mills’ film) is played sensitively and memorably – Oscar voters take note! – by 81-year-old veteran actor Christopher Plummer.  That’s right, Christopher Plummer as in Captain Georg von Trapp in 1965’s “The Sound of Music” and pretty much every film since then.  What lends “Beginners” its charm is the smiling spryness Plummer brings to the role of a septuagenarian essentially reborn as the gay man he never got to be.  We see him, shirt unbuttoned, strolling a dance floor packed with younger men, and later, calling his son for some social cues.  “Oliver, they had some wonderfully loud music in the club tonight,” he informs him over the phone, “What kind of music is that?”  His son, in bed, replies reticently: “Probably house music.”  “Okay,” says Plummer, chuckling to himself as he writes this down in case he forgets, “House music.”

As Mills’ fictional stand-in, Oliver (played by Ewan McGregor) is a kind-hearted Los Angelino who inherits his father’s Jack Russell terrier named Arthur (played by Cosmo) after his dad dies at age 75.  Since the film is told nonchronologically, we’re sometimes given endings before beginnings, which keeps the memories of Oliver’s deceased parents alive and, well, amusing from start of finish.  In one flashback, a young Oliver is taken to an art museum by his eccentric mother Georgia (Mary Page Keller).  She’s asked to leave after imitating the geometric designs on display.  “What?” she asks her young son, “I’m not allowed to interact with the art?”  Now flash forward to the modern day where Oliver meets Anna (the ravishing Mélanie Laurent) at a costume party where Oliver, with Arthur in tow, is dressed as the good Viennese doctor, Sigmund Freud.  A mute Anna has laryngitis and communicates only through pen and paper.  Playing the analysand, she sprawls out on the sofa before him.  “I guess we should begin with your mother,” Oliver jokes.  A relationship soon blossoms to parallel the love story of Hal and his young boyfriend Andy (a shockingly plain Goran Visnjic in a pageboy haircut).

The first frame of “Beginners” features a white flower in full bloom followed closely by the grim imagery of death: Oliver cleaning out his father’s house in the Hollywood Hills, dragging garbage bags to the curb, and flushing his dad’s cancer meds down the drain.  There’s a love of whimsy and unpredictability in Mills’ “Beginners,” as well as in his 2005 adaptation of Walter Kirn’s coming-of-age story, “Thumbsucker.” Mills is probably better known, however, as Mister Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know” and the oddball short story collection, “No One Belongs Here More Than You”).  Director of “The Future,” July shares Mills’ love of social weirdness, and since we’re getting Freudian, Oliver’s mother sports a curly haircut uncannily similar to the real-life July’s.   

From the outset of “Beginners,” Hal’s Jack Russell is so preternaturally smart that he speaks in subtitles, a clever but gimmicky touch that kept the audience members around me giggling to no end.  Giving Arthur a tour of his apartment, Oliver sits him down, man-to-man, and tells him: “Look, it’s lonely out here, so you better learn how to talk with me.”  An alert-looking Arthur stares back, his subtitle reading: “While I understand up to 150 words – I don’t talk.”  What the bittersweet “Beginners” explores is that desire to talk, and to be heard, which seemingly spans age groups, generations, even species.