One has to admire "The Artist" for it's sheer chutzpah: the idea that someone can make a silent, black-and-white movie in this day and age and achieve massive Oscar-winning success is nearly unthinkable.
Yet that is exactly what director Michel Hazanavicius has done with this love-letter to the cinema of the 1920s. With a story that involves a silent-film star (Jean Dujardin) whose career fades when the talkies arrive, and the nobody-who-gets-a-big-break (Bérénice Bejo) whose stardom eclipses his, "The Artist" feels both strangely familiar — "Singin' in the Rain" meets "A Star is Born" — and vaguely exotic, with things like tap-dancing or exaggerated facial emoting resurrected from the limbo of uncool. While directors such as Steven Spielberg and his ilk often yammer on about "visual storytelling" and how a film ideally communicates its story through the images alone, Hazanavicius has walked the walk while they still talk the talk.
His boldest move is to fully embrace the big, campy emotions and naive romanticism of the cinematic era he portrays, and he certainly proves to audiences this stuff can still work. It's a world removed from the knowing, wink-wink revivalism of the Coen Bros. in such films as "The Hudsucker Proxy" or "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", although Hazanavicius' cinephile obsession with capturing the look and feel of an era is similar. "The Artist" is less about postmodernism than classicism. (Although the film's best joke is extremely postmodern — I won't spoil it here, of course.)