Yet surely indulgence
is the operative word when we consider the screenplay awards for
Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris, a film which shines only in
comparison to most of Allen's work in the past decade, and then
mostly when he's revisiting familiar tropes from his past. It's very
much like a blown-up version of an Allen short story, but given its
place in Allen's canon it's theme of the idolised past not really
being better (or practical) in the present, could be viewed as
unfortunate. It's also lucky, in the sense that those Oscar-voting 62
year olds are probably the last generation for whom Hemingway and
Fitzgerald were held up as literary gods, as well as romantic figures
from history. It's an interesting conceit: Owen Wilson plays Gil, a
writer making lots of money in the movies who wants to finish his
novel, and comes to Paris looking for inspiration from the city of
the 1920s (though not specifically for the Lost Generation—whose
identity, after all, was based on having survived a savage, senseless
war). His fiance thinks his career as a Hollywood hack is just fine,
and is willing to indulge his dreaminess just so far. To stack the
deck, Allen gives her the kind of parents who give nouveau riche a
bad name, more gauche than rive-gauche, and a know-it-all professor
friend with whom she's signalled early and often to have an
affair—he's the kind of guy we expect Marshall McLuhan to come out
of the crowd and correct.
On his own, Gil gets
transported back to the 1920s and immediately meets Scott, Zelda, and
Hem. He's encouraged in his writing, not least by Gertrude Stein, and
he also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard) the woman of his demi-monde
dreams, especially if he'd seen Amelie before he had those dreams.
And that is the lesser of the two big problems with this film.
Woody's Paris is about as real as Gil's Paris of the Twenties, that
is, about as real as Woody's London was in Match Point; although in
that film I thought Woody might have been influenced by Hitchock's
Frenzy, and the unreality was part of its charm. It's presented in a
visual homage to his opening of Manhattan, which was in part about
Woody himself living in the past, but rather than convey the beauty
and mystery of New York's kaleidoscope world, his Paris is a
stereoscopic viewer full of picture postcards, the kind of thing my
ABC colleagues used to run as shorthand to identify the which part of
the wide world Wide World of Sports was visiting this week. His Paris
is luxury hotels, top restaurants, museums where Carla Bruni is a
guide, and the odd quirky shop whose odd quirky assistant will turn
out to be Gil's soul-mate. It's a construct from the past as much as
the 1920s are for his alter-ego.
But those 1920s are
even more of a conceit in another way. Famous faces satisfy the
received opinions of them. Woody's Hemingway talks, not like
Hemingway may have talked, but like he wrote. Maybe that's because he's Gil's Hemingway, not Woody's? Though his takes on Scott
and Zelda are good (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill are perfect as the doomed golden couple), and Kathy Bates' Stein is a hoot, the deeper we
go into Gil's fantasy world, the more historical figures assume
walk-on roles, to the point where they get introduced, we appreciate
the likeness to the pictures of them on Wikipedia, and they walk off.
At least they walk, so they can't be called tableaux vivants.So when Gil and his period flame Adriana themselves go back to the
Belle Epoque, she stays there; she also sees the past as more
attractive than her present (and never considers the time paradox:
she mentions Gil in a book, which she wrote presumably after meeting
him but before getting stuck in the belle epoque, but somehow managed
to get published in the present.) Woody's conceit is much the same
thing: Hollywood loves his film because it's literary, and speaks to
a culture they remember but haven't participated in years. But for him it may serve a simpler point: in Manhattan the wonderful young girl went to Paris and he lost her; this time, the younger Woody played by Wilson--California rather than Manhattan but with a similar nasal voice--goes to Paris and finds her. It's that simple.
The Artist is an even
more likeable movie, whose textured black and white images also
recall the past, invoking all the glamour that was Hollywood in its
heyday. But as it rechurns many of our favourite cliches form silent
films, it as indulges a peculiarly French sense of style over
substance—that a trench coat and cigarette is all it takes to
hardboil a man. It's true that this was indeed the currency of silent
film, but although it shows modern audiences that contemporary emotions can be expressed in silence, there is rarely a moment in The Artist where we sense the
kind of gut-wrench which the best actors of the era could wring from
their theatrical techniques. This is why I was particularly puzzled
by Jean Dujardin's Oscar for best actor—his is a pleasing, but
hardly challenging performance. Similarly, the film itself is hardly
challenging; The Artist does little to play with the uses of silent
film; Mel Brooks' Silent Movie was much more creative with what it
did with the limits of silence. It's also significant that Silent
Movie ended with Marcel Marceau 'speaking', whereas The Artist ends
with the sound of tap: ironically one of the easiest for talking
films to dub (and thus make dancers seem better than they are).
In much the same way
Midnight In Paris' historical figures become less and less
substantial as the film picks up speed, so too The Artist's story
reverts more and more to cliches as it picks up speed. French cinema
has always loved Hollywood's style, and paid it hommage, that trench
coat and cigarette was for decades thought enough to transform even
the most unlikely French actor (Catharine Denevue, anyone?) into
Bogart—but The Artist's cliches are sometimes so historical as to
be unrecognised by most of its audience, even our prototypical
62-year old Oscar voter. In this sense you can understand the
plaudits for Dujardins' performance, which deserves plaudits for
overcoming two handicaps. One is the strident one-note beat of his
leading lady Peppy (Berenice Bejo) and the other, of course, is being
upstaged by the dog.
Uggie, charming as he
is, may indeed be the best metaphor for the film itself—for there
isnt a single thing he does that we haven't seen Asta, or Rin Tin
Tin, or Lassie, or Pete (the pup with the ring around his eye in the
Little Rascals) do already. When today's audiences react to Uggie's
big life-saving moment, it's with brand-new glee, which is
understandable. You can't criticise them for falling for it,
but we can chide Oscar voters for not knowing more, or better.
In which context, it is
somewhat surprising that Hugo did not do better—although what The
Artist has that Hugo doesn't, besides a dog, is the ability to project a sense of
wonder without bogging it down in just the sort of knowingness I'm
exhibiting in this essay, so maybe I am indeed demanding the
impossible. Martin Scorsese's love of movies has been demonstrated
before, in documentary fashion, and here it propels a story which
engages his sense of wonder at the same time it loses ours, by
turning into another worthy documentary, about the rediscovery of
George Melies. To put it simply, the difference between The Artist
and Hugo is that the former shows us the wonder of silent film, while
the latter tells us about it.
I should confess now
that I saw Hugo in 2D, so I can't evaluate fully Robert Richardson's
Oscar for its use of 3D (except by visual inference) but it is
exceedingly fascinating even when seen in two-dimensions. The film is
gorgeous to follow, and Richardson constructs his shots around
Scorsese's theme of the mechanical becoming human, and the human
mechanical. But sadly, it's the performances which are the most
mechanical thing in the film. The children sometimes look like
they've been processed in CGI-- they may well come off
two-dimensional when seen in 3D, but it's hard to warm to them,
especially when they are together. Paris Montparnasse station is
populated entirely by English actors who seem content to go through
the paces of their well-established stage presences—not totally
their fault because their stories are very lightly developed almost
in silent film fashion (as we watch at a distance through Hugo's
eyes)--except for Sacha Cohen's hammy Inspector Gustave, who would
not be out of place in a silent film, or in a Clouseau tribute band.
For a comedian whose success relies solely on playing with safe
ethnic stereotypes, Cohen seems an odd choice to play a damaged but
sensitive character, and it's as if his performance recognises that.
Matching him with Emily Mortimer creates an interesting link with Allen's Match Point.
It was the film I liked best of these three, the most involving, but in the end, Hugo seems
to lose interest in its most compelling story: the boy trapped in the
station, and instead loses itself in the very familiar stories of the
people within the station, presented with incredible low energy, and
the history of silent film, presented with high energy focused on
didactic explanation. Its Paris is a thing of wonder, but to Scorsese
that wonder can't compare to the movies themselves. It fully deserved
its haul of five technical Oscars, and indeed Scorsese's Golden Globe
for best director might have been a better reward than was his Oscar
for The Departed.
For Allen, Paris is a
thing of wonder which inspires love and literature, for Scorsese it
is a thing of wonder that inspires cinema. For and the movies can't
compare to that. For The Artist's Michel Hazanavicius, Hollywood is a
thing of wonder, where all is artifice, and only more artifice can
redeem those nearly destroyed by it. For the 62 year olds who vote
for Oscars, those pluckings at the strings of wonder appear to be all
we need expect from our movies.
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