I have a lot of problems with this movie, but the biggest is that Michel Hazanavicius isn't a great visual storyteller. I think probably the most effective set piece in the film is when George has a nightmare that involves diegetic sound.
If you're emulating the Silent comedies, I guess I can understand his simple camera placements, and they obviously slowed the cutting style, and shot a little wider to have that feel. The problem is that the Chaplin films, or the musicals that seem to be the basis for the film's narrative (there's a lot of The Band Wagon and Singin' in the Rain in the films, including direct lifts), you have main characters with indomitable spirits. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think there's a Chaplin, Keaton, Astaire or Kelly film where we're forced to watch them mope that long without some sort of relief (maybe the closest to that would be An American in Paris, but that has way more fun in it). So when the film shakes loose the fun of its world to show the main character suffer, I didn't care because everything felt so loaded. They were still making silents after The Jazz Singer, the transition happened slower than it did in Singin' in the Rain and people would still go to see stars in silent movies. I understand that may not work for a simple narrative, but then is this a throwback or isn't it? Jean Dujardin is likeable, but what makes those other performers so likeable is their moxy. When he gives up, I kept waiting for the big turn.
But when you talk about the melodrama, the film doesn't embrace that language. Perhaps it's fair to say he's using the more comic director's approach to silent, but that doesn't work when you're showing a man fall further and further. And from Pabst to Von Stroheim to Murnau, etc. they were really sophisticated visual storytellers. Griffith and Eisenstein as well, if the idea is that it's mimicking the earlier greats. And when Hazanavicius used cues from Vertigo to basically give meaning and weight to a sequence that should have had that to begin with, I lost all respect for the movie. Vertigo earned that music, this didn't, especially in how that sequence is staged. I felt like this is a silent movie for people who don't know or like silent films. And I can totally see why Harvey Weinstein latched on to this. Like The King's Speech it's middlebrow entertainment that has the illusion of class/intelligence, etc.
