Which means that it’s time for your expectations to be adjusted. Not downward, and not because a black-and-white silent film in the new millennium is an oddity at best and a stunt at worst. The problem is that end-of-the-year plaudits equal bigness in most people’s minds, and “The Artist’’ is a small, exquisitely-cut jewel in a style everyone assumes is 80 years out of date.
That assumption, of course, is wrong. Michael Hazanavicius’s love letter to classic cinema isn’t perfect but it’s close enough to make just about anyone who sees it ridiculously happy - and that includes children and grown-ups who have never come across a silent film. In the face of the noisy, neurotic assault vehicles that movies have become in 2011, “The Artist’’ asserts timeless verities: a charming hero, a beautiful ingénue, the wit and invention of a cinema that doesn’t need to talk, and the awareness that times and technologies change - and that beautiful things can get left behind in the rush to the future.
It’s a Hollywood tale, made up of familiar pieces: a bit of “Singin’ in the Rain,’’ a dollop of “A Star Is Born,’’ genetic splicings from actual film history. France’s Jean Dujardin plays silent film star George Valentin, a delightful popinjay whose name references Rudolph Valentino but whose career and persona are basically that of Douglas Fairbanks, the movies’ first action hero. (To add to the pleasurable confusion, Dujardin’s a ringer for Gene Kelly.) Like Fairbanks, Valentin combines athleticism with winning joie de vivre, and he’s exactly the same offscreen as onscreen: the king of Hollywood.
