Getting Reel

The Artist and Hugo celebrate the best of old-school moviemakers

This year’s Academy Award nominees for Best Picture include two nostalgic odes to moviemakers from yesteryear, and Oscar voters are always pushovers when it comes down to love letters regarding their own industry. One’s a shoo-in for the major awards, while the other will likely grab the technical prizes, although both entries, alas, have thus far been embraced more by the film-geek contingent than mainstream audiences.Unless there’s a sudden groundswell of support for the George Clooney movie The Descendents, the likely Best Picture winner will be The Artist (Weinstein Company; 101 minutes; PG-13; 2011), a Gallic confection about Hollywood’s dream factory as it experienced the seismic transition from silents to talking pictures. And it will win not only because of its spark-plug delights but also for its novelties: It’s a black-and-white silent movie for today’s moviegoers (especially Oscar voters) who have probably never seen a black-and-white silent movie at the bijou--and shame on them.

The Artist will also become only the second silent flick to win for Best Picture, which hasn’t happened since the 1927 World War I drama Wings copped the top honor at the very first Oscar ceremony. The need for cinematic symmetry at the 2012 Academy Awards will be tough to ignore.

The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius is best known to stateside art-house audiences for his pair of OSS 117 retro spy spoofs that starred actor Jean Dujardin as a secret agent. Both are reunited for The Artist’s valentine to the film industry, with Dujardin as leading man George Valentin (natch), a big star in 1927 when silents are still in vogue--but not for much longer. Despite his wealth and success, George is also trapped in a loveless marriage with an unhappy spouse (Penelope Ann Miller), which gives Hazanavicius the opportunity to pay homage to a classic montage from Citizen Kane, as a succession of sour breakfast scenes at the Valentin mansion reveals their discord.

When talkies inevitably overtake Tinseltown, the prideful George ignores the wisdom of his cigar-chomping producer (John Goodman) to adapt to changing tastes because this is one fad that simply won’t go away. Meanwhile, The Artist charts the progress of vivacious Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo, Hazanavicius’ offscreen wife), an autograph hound and talented hoofer who unexpectedly moves from extra status to become one of the brightest lights in the talkies.

Hazanavicius liberally borrows plot motivations from other films concerning old Hollywood. The first half is from the 1952 MGM musical Singin’ in the Rain (the grinning Dujardin often resembles Gene Kelly in some scenes) and the second half from the still-corrosive 1937 version of A Star is Born, with George’s career decline paralleling Peppy’s ascent. Indeed, Peppy’s attempt to cast George in a talkie has its basis in fact: Greta Garbo tried to accomplish a similar feat by casting her favorite silent-cinema co-star John Gilbert, doomed as a talkie lead, in MGM’s opulent Queen Christina (1933).

The change in thematic tone explains why The Artist’s bouncy first half gives way to a too-sober midsection (ironically, when George turns to booze for solace) before the movie revives itself with a happy-feet finale. Yet the movie abounds with privileged moments. There’s sly amusement watching George get himself emotionally prepared for a scene (it usually involves the raising of his arched eyebrow). And there is an image of delicate sweetness when Peppy spies George’s jacket on a rack, then puts her arm into its coat sleeve as she caresses herself, as she swoons while imagining a real encounter with her favorite star.

It also makes bizarre sense that a movie-mad Frenchman like Hazanavicius would be so faithful to the moviemaking style of the 1920s and 1930s, even more so than Mel Brooks could pull off in his 1976 salute Silent Movie. Hazanavicius’ work is presented at a 1.85:1 ratio to accommodate the projection requirements of modern multiplexes, although the left and right sides are masked off to retain the squarish 1.37:1 ratio that was used by Hollywood until the 1950s.

Hazanavicius also employs a number of master shots for visual purposes, notably the image of a teeming studio stairwell in which George is positioned at the bottom and Peppy at the top banister. And it’s wonderful to watch a dynamite choreographed number in which the camera simply observes the dancers in action, with no need for the type of flashy music-video edits that marred the dance sequences for the 2002 movie version of Chicago.

To make another connection with old silents, particularly the 1926 war movie What Price Glory that enraged lip readers who could tell that co-stars Edmond Lowe and Victor McLaglen were using foul language, there is one instance in The Artist featuring naughty words during an outburst uttered by John Goodman. Yet Hazanavicius’ fun film uses title cards only sparingly, although they usually have some reference to speaking. “I won’t talk! I won’t say a word!” George’s character shouts during the film-within-a-film sequence that opens The Artist, as he screams silently while sitting in the electric chair--and he’s wearing a tuxedo, no less.

If movie maniacs enjoyed The Artist, they will surely be in seventh heaven with Hugo (Paramount; 127 minutes; PG; 2011), director Martin Scorsese’s three-dimension spectacle that, beneath the family-flick veneer and high-tech geegaws, is his most from-the-heart work in years. In snowy Paris circa 1931, the orphaned Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) covertly lives within the walls of a bustling train station. Hugo labors amid the depot’s various mechanical clock workings, a job that belonged to his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone), who has since disappeared. If Hugo admits that his uncle is indeed gone, the station’s police inspector (Borat’s Sacha Baron Cohen) will whisk him to the orphanage with other parentless urchins.

The movie chronicles the initially unlikely connection that links a not-so-friendly toymaker (Ben Kingsley) with Hugo’s departed dad (Jude Law), a museum worker who has left behind an automaton (capable of actually writing and drawing with its mechanical, pen-equipped hand) that is missing the heart-shaped key that winds it up. Hugo believes that if he can track down that key, maybe the robot will unlock a posthumous message from his pop.

Those plot points, taken from Brian Selznick’s mammoth 2007 novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, may not sound like much when boiled down for a synopsis, plus we’re in a spoiler-free zone. But they sure inspired Scorsese, who infuses massive doses of what used to be called “movie magic” to hurtle this cinematic charmer to the finish line. Special effects help drive this opulent eye candy, with its hyper-lush recreation of a long-ago storybook France that is more akin to Vincente Minnelli’s Gigi than Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. And the stereoscopic visuals and scrupulous spatial compositions create a 3-D universe that is staggering to behold.

Speaking of depth, Kingsley’s gruff incarnation of a broken man who cannot revisit his illustrious past ably anchors this film’s emotional center. There are also nice turns from Chloe Grace Moretz (the foulmouthed moptop of Kick-Ass) as the toymaker’s perky goddaughter who assists Hugo’s search and horror king Christopher Lee as a kindly librarian. And Cohen as the gimpy gendarme (by way of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau) provides the necessary comic relief to prevent Hugo from tipping into the dark side.

Like The Artist, however, Hugo takes another direction from where it began, as the orphan’s quest dovetails with Scorsese’s desire to honor our collective filmdom heritage. There are nods to the choo-choo cinema from a previous century, with glimpses of The Great Train Robbery (1903) and the Lumiere Brothers’ Arrival of a Train at a Station (1896), both with coming-at-you shock effects that, as Scorsese indicates, are still with us in this latest round of 3-D fascination.

And a Scorsese 3-D flick would not be complete unless there was an extended tribute to magician-turned-moviemaker Georges Melies, the turn-of-the-20th-century auteur who pioneered trick photography in films such as the still-imaginative A Trip to the Moon (1902). There is a long flashback of Melies at work in his studio (“This is where dreams are made,” Melies allows) in a glorious 3-D sequence that has reportedly made many cineastes weep with joy. It’s no wonder that Scorsese himself turns up during this flashback with his cameo as a top-hatted still photographer: Labors of love don’t get more personal than Hugo.  

Scorsese’s zeal for incorporating his longtime passion for film preservation into Hugo sometimes feels like a pledge-drive message, however. And there’s irony to spare since his cause exists within a 3-D film that can only be seen via digital projection because Hollywood is systematically orchestrating the elimination of the 35mm film format. (If you still haven’t seen the 3-D version, act fast: Hugo hits DVD shelves on Tuesday, Feb. 28.)

Yet Scorsese’s storytelling artistry is evident in every frame, with the scenes developed by John Logan’s screen adaptation adding up to a satisfyingly cohesive experience. Indeed, foreshadowing is everywhere: A scene in which the kids sneak into a theater that is screening Safety Last (1923), the daredevil comedy with Harold Lloyd hanging from a building’s clock hands, as well as Hugo’s double-whammy nightmare interlude help pave the way for a thrilling chase climax involving Hugo and the station constable that incorporates ingredients from these preceding sequences.

And if you think Hugo is a departure from Scorsese’s resume involving gangsters, hooligans and the like, think twice. The seeds for Hugo were planted way back in a guest column Scorsese wrote for a 1978 issue of Film Comment in which he listed his cinematic guilty pleasures. He championed the 1953 Vincent Price shocker House of Wax (“It's the best 3-D film ever made--and director Andre de Toth had one eye!” Scorsese wrote) and saved special praise for the 1951 British classic The Magic Box, a biography concerning William Friese-Greene, a forgotten pioneer in the development of a cinematic film camera. Scorsese’s 1978 words ring even more true now:

“I saw it as a child. It was the film that taught me a lot about the magic of movies. Specifically, it taught me how to do flip books {which are a running visual in Hugo}. The scene where Robert Donat {as Friese-Greene} shows Laurence Olivier {as a perplexed bobby} his film is a scene that says everything about movies; it opened the whole magical quality of filmmaking. The magical and the mad: a man who would continue to try and try--at the expense of his family, his career, everything. The obsession of it! It makes you want to sign up. When you're 8 years old, it makes you want to be a filmmaker.”