Oscar Contenders #4: Embracing Our History

Review: The Artist + The Descendants

If The Artist isn't the greatest silent film, it may be the best you've seen. Or the only one you've seen. Writer and director Michel Hazanavicius has an assured touch, moving almost seamlessly from melodrama to comedy to romance. This is classic silent cinema of the Charlie Chaplin variety--a wink to the camera accompanies each tug at the heartstrings. We rely on actors more than ever: their faces, their sighs and smirks. To this end, The Artist mostly succeeds. 


The physicality hasn't quite been mastered. The comedians and tragediennes of the 1920s relied on their bodies, nimble with a gag, drooping like a wilted flower at each tragic intertitle. No one beyond the two leads seems to inhabit a truly silent world, where movement and mime is everything. For the film-within-the-film director, John Goodman has the dour face of a beloved pug, but the script feeds him line after line to orate silently. We don't need to see them speak; we need action.


Jean Dujardin is marvelous at playing this. As silent film star George Valentin, pushed out of pictures to make way for talkies, he is dashing as Errol Flynn and elegant as Fred Astaire. In the more menacing third act, as Valentin's career fades and his self-loathing consumes him, we take his menace as seriously as Orson Welles in Citizen Kane. For all this impersonation, Dujardin feels like an original. Bérénice Bejo is charming, full of buxsome energy as rising "It" girl Penny Miller. These girls are always smitten with the hero, and that cat-and-mouse game is why we bought tickets, isn't it? The Artist may yet appeal to folks who've never seen Intolerance or Sunrise. Imagine how good modern rom-coms could be if the actors shut up and let their eyes do the work.

Alexander Payne shows the same confidence in The Descendants, a superb follow-up to Sideways. In fact, it's my favorite film of 2011 (so far). Land mogul Matt King (George Clooney) learns that his comatose wife isn't going to wake up after her boating accident--and that she was in love with another man. Payne places his unblinking camera close on Matt as he takes it in. He barely keeps his hurt and anger in check, but we see it all in Clooney's weary face. Often closed-off, Clooney invites us in here; his performance feels spontaneous. 


Payne may be one of the best dramedy directors we have. The Golden Globes stuck Sideways in comedy and The Descendants in drama, but both films occupy the liminal space between. This isn't just a director's quirk, but it fits as the King family struggles with their memories of their mother. Should they laugh it off, burst into tears, or get angry? All the above, and then some. The script by Payne and Nat Faxon doesn't hurry through emotions (its only flaw is narration stating the obvious, later abandoned). The whole cast sinks into Payne's rhythm, and some surprise us. Who knew Shailene Woodley as his daughter Alexandra was capable of this maturity? Take note, too, of Judy Greer and Matthew Lillard in dramatic roles. 


While Matt mourns his wife and does some reconnaissance on her lover, he also must choose which investor he and his cousins should sell acres of undeveloped property to. The Hawaiian land is sumptuous, and Payne shows it off proudly. He takes shots at both native Hawaiians and the newcomers, but we sense the movie's on the island's side all along. The land is the Kings' connection to their ancestors, and though they grapple with Mom's poor parenting, they owe it to her and the long departed. As The Descendants ends, Matt and his daughters have come to accept their dependence on each other, and learn to let go.