Is The Artist the "best" film from the last year, as the Oscars recently decreed? No. No its not. It is a surprise break-out hit from last year, garnering accolades and awards for its cast and writer/director as it played through festivals and limited releases.
By now, surely there are few people (reading this wee blog at least) that don't know about The Artist and the decision made for this film about the silent era in Hollywood to be almost entirely silent itself; as opposed to the classic and, frankly, better film about the transition from silent films to talkies, Singin' in the Rain. The Gene Kelly starring delight was in full colour, with toe-tapping songs, fun musical numbers and a star on the rise.
The Artist though is a black & white silent film about the downfall of a once-great silent era actor, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin). Valentin stubbornly refuses to do talkies and spirals further and further into obsolescence and depression. As he is on his way down, the charming young bit-player Peppy Miller (Bernice Berjo), who briefly crossed paths with Valentin is on her way up. She becomes the new toast of the town, captivating the studio bosses and audiences alike. Throughout her ascent she remembers Valentin and goes out of her way to help him in unobtrusive ways: buying up his possessions when they're up for auction, keeping an eye on him in the street. And, as you've probably heard, there is a dog.
The film is somewhat in line with director Michel Hazanavicius and Jean Dujardin's previous collaborations, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and OSS 11: Lost in Rio. Both of those films were looking back to the aesthetics and style of a previous age of movies; in the case of the OSS 117 films the spy films of the 60's. They are goofy, self-referential, self-effacing and fun films. Dujardin is in similar form in The Artist, his big cheeseball movie-star grin lighting up and blasting through at a million watts.
However, I did begin to tire of Valentin's moping, that carries on past what is necessary. When he's at his absolute lowest, with his apartment and films burned to nothingness Valentin is taken in by Peppy Miller, the one person who still cares about him. She even still has all of things. But his idiotic pride continues, Hazanavicius continuing to have Valentin's foolish pride carry him through Hollywood.
There is a noticeable tension throughout the film; the modern tugging at the classic. The Artist uses the aesthetics but not the grammar of silent filmmaking. That is, the film is silent with characters mouthing their dialogue, with the occasional card informing us to what they're saying, but the film itself is shot in a resolutely modern cinematic style. Hazanavicius seems to show his interest lies more in the aesthetics (or gimmick if you're being cruel) than in veracity.
And, speaking of cruel, there has been a backlash amongst some critics against this surprise awards-gobbler. I come down on neither side. Whereas I believe Hugo more accurately and lovingly captures the silent filmmaking pioneers, The Artist is perfectly fine enough as a film from a filmmaker who set himself and his cast an ambitious goal. The conceit is intriguing, even if the story never fully held me.
Since the release of Juno and her subsequent Oscar win, writer Diablo Cody has suffered something of a backlash. It started during the lead-up to the Oscars and reached its height come the release of Jennifer's Body. There was a slight whiff of misogyny about some of the criticism and people got rather in a lather about her stylised dialogue. These people somehow missed the point. And also, it's a sad truth that Hollywood is sorely lacking in female writers, strong & interesting female characters and intelligent & non-condescending femaleness in general.
Young Adult, her third feature-length film as writer, casts its gaze on the undeveloped female after a plethora of man-child films released. Charlize Theron is Mavis Gary, a ghost-writer for a once-popular Young Adult series of fiction. She lives her life in her self-contained apartment, falling asleep to trashy reality-TV shows and waking up hung-over, sucking down bottles of Diet Coke. She's a bit of an train-wreck of a person still stuck in adolescence. Unlike the often charmingly goofy man-children, Mavis is a character with no redeeming features. None; she has little interest in other people past using them for whatever she wants. She doesn't even bother with tossing them aside when she's done with them, instead just leaving them as she continues on her chaotic way. Mavis is the villain of the piece and I have to applaud the bravery of Cody, Theron and director Jason Reitman for making the character so unapologetically disastrous. After receiving an email from her high-school ex's wife celebrating the birth of their first child, Mavis decides she must "save" her poor ex Buddy (Patrick Wilson) from the unimaginable horrors of child-rearing and small-town life. And so, for the first time since she left, Mavis returns to her hometown and her old stomping grounds. And it is there, in one of the old bars she used to frequent, that she bumps into Patton Oswalt's Matt Freehauf. While Mavis is something of an emotional cripple, Matt is a physical one. He was beaten brutally, to near death by a group of jocks in high-school because they (mistakenly) believed he was gay. Matt walks with the help of a cane, brews his own whisky and cobbles together his own action-figures from pre-existing ones. He's bitter about his lot in life but maintains a more cheerful front. He acts as the (largely unheard) voice of reason for Mavis and is, intentionally, cast in the "asexual high-school sidekick" role. There's a lot of subtle work from Oswalt in building this character, keeping most of the pain just below the surface. This is a Diablo Cody film through and through; the stamp of authorship is in every character, every situation, every exchange and it is scathing and hilarious. Cody has a continuing fascination with high-school and the influence it casts over so many American's lives. The comedy is often black as tar, sparing few in the process and Mavis least of all. Everyone Mavis meets at home has moved on with their lives while she, who physically escaped, cannot bring herself to escape from her past. There is some justification given to her arrested development late in the film but it is far from redeeming. And Mavis continues on as per usual in any case. Come the end, Mavis is an unrepentant and unchanged character, once again leaving her home-town for Minneapolis.Theron utterly owns the role of Mavis. Though the character is nothing short of a horrible, self-absorbed person (often forgetting her fluffy handbag-dog), you cannot help but watch Theron embody this characters and bring you along for her ride. She had a fairly normal, balanced upbringing and the sorry state of her life is entirely down to her own poor choices; from her failed marriage to her return home. Wilson seems to have the market cornered on the slightly emasculated modern male and here invests Buddy with a happy, down-to-earth sort of charm. Buddy is a man who has no grand ambitions but is pleasingly happy with his life as it is - which makes Mavis' plan all the more devious and destructive. Young Adult is brave, acerbic, hilarious, intelligent and engaging. It's more than refreshing, it's a slap to the face to wake you up.
Alexander Payne has been gone awhile after his award-winning Sideways. But thankfully, after an absence from cinema screens of 7 or so years he returns with George Clooney and Hawaii.
Clooney is Matt King, a lawyer whose family owns a large swathe of land on one of the islands.
The films begins with King's wife Elizabeth recently in a coma, seemingly lifeless. King, the back-up parent, must struggle to re-connect and guide his two young daughters while at the same time deciding what to do with the family's land. The land is held in trust, with King the sole trustee. However, the laws governing ongoing trusts are due to change and King & the cousins must decide who to sell their large swathe of untouched Hawaiian land to. It's a fair amount for any one person to juggle, and things are given an extra frisson when it is revealed to King that Elizabeth, prior to her vegetable-like state, had been having an affair.
Payne gives us a view of Hawaii not generally seen on screen. Past the beach-set poster and beach-casual attire of everyone, the film opens on life in downtown. Hawaii has cities just like anywhere else in the States; people struggle, people suffer and people die. There is no surfing here; this is no holiday in Hawaii to forget Sarah Marshall.
Instead King struggles to remember; to remember what his marriage was and not what he wanted it to be, to be remember how to talk to his daughters, to remember why his family are trustees of virgin, undeveloped Hawaiian land. For all those highly-charged emotions, there is a breath of comedy (often dark) that winds its way through the film. It isn't there to put the audience at a distance, but instead serves to humanise the events and the characters
There is a noticeable thematic strand that runs through all of Payne's films so far, in way or another: that of males confronting their own mortality (and generally fairly weak or weak-willed men). Whether it's Matthew Broderick's high-school teacher attempting to overcome Reese Witherspoon's over-achieving class presidential contender; Jack Nicholson's recently retired Schmidt taking off on a road-trip after a lifetime of safe simplicity or Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church carousing, drinking and navel-gazing around Californian vineyards. That continues, of course, in The Descendants with Clooney's King forced to confront the death of his marriage, and soon, the death of his wife.
There is not much here in the way of surprises, in that you are never really shocked by any character's reaction to an event or other character. But that is, in part, down to Payne's excellent character illustration and development; you find yourself unsurprised at their decisions because you get such a good feel for who these characters are. Clooney as the patriarch struggling to keep everything from his family to himself together has earned a number of critical plaudits already. And he is excellent, dialling down the usual "gorgeous George" charm to present someone smaller, a little broken. More human. Equally impressive is Shailene Woodley as King's eldest daughter, Alex. Alex is a slightly wayward teen, who has fought with her mother mainly because they are so similar. She has to help King with a lot of the heavy lifting, in looking out for youngest daughter Scottie and helping dad with tracking down the man who was sleeping with Elizabeth. There's a lot of conflicting emotions she has to deal with, a lot that has to be kept below the surface while she is outwardly outraged, and Woodley succeeds with the challenge.
The Descendants is a film I almost feel we're seeing less and less of: an intelligent, honest and relatable drama with imperfect, human characters. It can sometime seem we are bombarded with spectacle, whether it be blockbusters or awards-chasers, and so it is refreshing to have a film so seemingly intimate but with a lot to say.
