Henrietta Lacks Lives!

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

By Rebecca Skloot

Crown, 2011, ISBN: 978-1400052172

The next time your doctor hands you a HIPAA form, think of Henrietta Lacks. It that name rings no bells, you’re not alone, though she’s indirectly responsible for some of the most important medical breakthroughs of our time, including a vaccine for polio. Even most medical researchers know her only as HeLa, the name of the world’s most important cell culture. So who was Henrietta Lacks? That is the question medical journalist Rebecca Skloot sets out to answer. This is a non-fiction book that reads like a novel colliding with a gripping episode of CSI. What’s the crime, you ask? The ongoing tragedy of racial and class injustice in America.

The basic story is simple enough. Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman who came of age in a backwater Virginia town. She eventually relocated to Baltimore, where her husband (and cousin) David “Day” Lacks followed the Great Migration north during World War II, to the Sparrows Point steel mill that hired black laborers. Henrietta bore five children and shortly after her last, Joe (now Zakaryya Bari Abdul Rahmann), she went to Johns Hopkins Hospital, which took in black charity cases. At first, gynecologist Howard Jones found no cause for the pain about which Harriet complained, but before 1951 ended, Lacks was dead from uterine cancer. An autopsy revealed a body filled with pearl-sized tumors, the source of her excruciating demise. As was standard practice during the day, doctors took several tissue and tumor samples from the body before Lacks was laid to rest.

What happened next was—depending on one’s beliefs—either a fortuitous fluke or a miracle. Dr. George Gey had been trying for a decade to grow cells in his lab, to no avail. His entire research model was suspect, courtesy of a 1912 hoax in which Dr. Alexis Carrel claimed to have cloned chicken cells. (Carrel faked the results, the medical equivalent of Piltdown Man.) Much to the astonishment of Gey and lab assistant Mary Kubiak, however, Henrietta’s cells began to divide and replicate the moment they were suspended in culture. Since 1951, HeLa cells have been shipped all over the world and have been the subject of thousands of medical experiments. Henrietta’s cells continue to replicate to this day. They are also the only ones that have ever behaved this way, and no one really knows why.

Skloot tells the cellular story with a clarity that made me wish she had been my high school biology teacher. After her lucid account, you will come to see HeLa as a literal lifesaver for millions. But the question remains: Who was Henrietta Lacks? And that story is often as painful as Henrietta’s final days. Skloot begins with the obvious: In 1951, nobody gave a damn who she was—she was just another black charity case in a Jim Crow city. The researchers thrilled to work on her cells never asked about the donor; stories circulated that her name was Helen Lane. Even worse, none of Henrietta’s family knew of the existence of her cells until 1973, nor thought much about the times they were asked for blood samples that they thought were cancer-screening tests. It took a 1975 Rolling Stone article to reveal that the HeLa line was contaminated in the 1960s and that the blood samples were used to identify Harriet’s DNA from the intruders. It was then that the Lacks family also learned that HeLa was sold around the globe, though the family never realized a dime in these transactions.

Skloot puts a face to the cell line. After a hard fought battle to win the family’s trust—no easy feat for a 27-year-old white gal—she forensically reconstructs Harriet’s life, from her childhood and adolescence in Clover, Virginia, to her final days. Like all lives, it was filled with joys and sorrows; being a poor black woman, there were more of the latter than the former. Skloot does a superb job of unearthing the details of not just Harriet’s life, but also those of her extended family. It is a story of race, poverty, and class, one in which the principals of the medical field inhabit a different world governed by different ideologies than that of underclass (and undereducated) black folks. One of the book’s many delights is observing the intellectual development of Deborah, Harriet’s fourth child, who wants to discover the truth about her mother. But there are some gulfs that can’t be overcome, like the ones that lie between the dispassion of the lab and the everyday racism that drove Zakaryya to cold fury, or between the empirical world of science and the faith-based world of evangelical Christianity. To some in the Lacks family, Henrietta’s cells are a literal form of immortality, imbued with her consciousness and will.

Skloot is a participant observer of the most-noble sort, a writer who helps heal a lot of mistrust and hurt. (She’s even set up a Henrietta Lacks memorial foundation.) Although she’s clearly sympathetic to the Lacks family, she’s also an empiricist. Skloot even-handedly tells the story of Henrietta’s cells, and leaves open all questions of whether the ends justify the means in medical research. As I warn students, it is a mistake to impose the values of the present upon past actors. Informed consent laws did not come into being until 1957, and the National Institute of Health had no research review boards until 1966. Gey and his research team may have been insensitive, but they were well within the ethical operating parameters of their day. And, as Skloot also shows, morality is even muddier when it comes to bodily materials removed in the operating room. Do individuals own discarded tissues and cells? Lawsuits are pending, but to date the courts have ruled that these things are akin to garbage tossed in the local landfill and scavenged by others. That’s hardly a satisfactory answer for patients or physicians, as it leaves ambiguous the question of privacy versus research/public good. That HIPAA form you’ve signed a hundred times is one of the many ways doctors seek to protect themselves. Call it a small measure of posthumous respect for Harriet Lacks.

Cronenberg Plays it Safe in a Dangerous Method

A DANGEROUS METHOD (2011)

Directed by David Cronenberg

Recorded Picture Company, 99 mins. R (nudity, sadomasochism)

* * ½

David Cronenberg’s latest directorial project takes us inside the personal lives of Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), and Jung’s patient-turned-psychiatrist, Sabrina Spielrein (Keira Knightley). My feeling about this film can be summed up by a concept from psychology: ambivalence.

The film opens with the bourgeois Jung entrenched in a private sanitarium. The neophyte psychiatrist is about to try Freud’s controversial talk therapy on a particularly difficult subject: Spielrein, a spitfire of madness who contorts her body into shapes that strain her physique, and rockets between moments of razor-sharp lucidity and impulsive wildness. We might as well get this out of the way: Knightley’s not just the weak link in the cast; she’s more like a broken one. To put it even more directly, she’s dreadful–one of the worst performances I’ve seen since Kevin Costner as Robin Hood. She’s supposed to have animal magnetism, but she looks anorexic; her acting is so single-note histrionic that we simply don’t believe in her when she’s supposed to be “cured” and on the path to revamping psychoanalysis in her native Russia. She had an affair with Carl Jung in real life, but it’s hard to fathom their relationship on the screen.

The interesting dynamic is the one between Freud and Jung, Freud being the Father figure that Jung must slay in order to develop his own myth- and symbol-based analytical methods and break from his mentor’s mono-causal link between neurosis and sexuality. Mortensen is as good as Knightley is bad; he plays Freud as a man ferociously protective of his intellectual turf, silently devastated by what he perceives as Jung’s betrayal, and yet a surprisingly loyal and caring friend. It’s also a delicious irony to see the man who wrote about sex all the time as the most conventionally moral character in the film.

As for Jung, Fassbender portrays him as a bourgeois hypocrite–happy to live in the lap of luxury courtesy of the money of his wife Emma (Sarah Gadon), whilst being unfaithful to her. He is outwardly the picture of Swiss Calvinism, but his first conquest is Spielrein, who gets her jollies by being dominated and whipped. Soon, we no longer know which is bigger, Jung’s impact on the field of psychoanalysis or his ego.

In the film, you’ll vote for ego. The script is adapted from a stage play, which was adapted from John Kerr’s scholarly treatise of Jung. Think a copy of a copy. At 99 minutes, you’re not going to learn much about the intellectual disputes between Freud and Jung; these come in hints and dribbles, but never depth. Vincent Cassel makes an appearance as Otto Gross, a drug-addled psychiatrist driven by an unfettered id. He’s mainly here, though, to act as the devil on Jung’s shoulder that encourages him to act upon passion and impulse. Cassel has a certain rakish charm, but the ideas he puts forth is all surface and no depth. In sum, this is a non-intellectual film about intellectuals. It’s as if Cronenberg either did not trust filmgoers to unravel the world of ideas, or that he felt them incapable of doing so.

Perhaps he’s right, but it makes for rather tepid filmmaking from a man who directed such edgy films as Dead Ringers (1988), Naked Lunch (1991), and A History of Violence (2005). I suspect Cronenberg hoped that the sadomasochism theme would supply the danger implied in the film’s title, but Knightley can’t deliver on that promise and, in the end, only Jung’s bourgeois comfort seems the least bit imperiled. The film’s luscious exteriors simply can’t compensate for detachment that feels as cool as an Alpine lake any time Mortensen isn’t on screen. This speaks volumes. You know that a film lacks spark when you’re waiting for Sigmund Freud to appear and pick up the pace!

Religion Has No Place in Politics

I thought we were done with this nonsense. In 1960, John Kennedy had to deflect fears that his primary loyalty resided in Rome, not in the US Constitution. Some voters charged that JFK would consult the pope before he made important decisions, and quite a few nervous Protestants reprised anti-Catholic rhetoric that was straight out of the Gilded Age. After eking out a narrow victory, Kennedy allayed fears in a masterful inaugural speech in which he told Americans that “here on earth, God’s work must surely be our own.” In 1962, the Supreme Court struck down school prayer; in 1973, it said that a woman had the right to make her own reproductive decisions. Too bad the court didn’t go the whole nine yards and demand that all references to God be struck from US currency, official documents, political speeches, the NFL, and patriotic songs. The court left enough wiggle room for that old demagogue Ronald Reagan to put God back in the voting booth without requiring proof of residency.

Flash forward to 2012, where you’d think that every Republican candidate has been handpicked by the Creator. Even worse, religion keeps popping up in ways that threaten American freedoms. Just recently American bishops forced Barack Obama, a president as pliable as Gumby, to back down on a regulation that would make religious-based hospitals and businesses offer contraceptive benefits in employee healthcare plans. This, the bishops argued, is antithetical to Catholic doctrine and violated principles of religious freedom. No—it doesn’t. The first amendment guarantees personal religious rights, but the Constitution is grounded in the separation of church and state. It’s time to make this explicit and find those seeking to mix religion and politics in violation of the Constitution. There is no place whatsoever for religion in the civic life of Americans.

It is, of course, deeply ironic that Catholic bishops would presume to lecture anyone on such issues. Entrusting moral principles to those who tried to whitewash the church’s pedophilia past is akin to asking Lizzie Borden for advice on axe etiquette. The bishops apparently slept through logic as well as ethics. A public institution is precisely that; Catholics may teach and preach as they wish within the private confines of their churches, but once they open their doors to the broader public, these institutions are no longer private. We have all manner of regulations within the public realm—ask Amish people who have to have reflective triangles on buggies traversing public highways, or Jewish butchers who must meet food inspection codes when they prepare kosher meat. In the case of a Catholic hospital, for instance, an attempt to impose Catholic dogma violates the religious freedom of non-Catholic employees. If that hospital wishes to hire and treat only Catholics, fine, but it should not get any taxpayer money, nor should it be certified. Moreover, any religious leader using the pulpit to influence public opinion should forfeit the tax-exempt status of the church and be forced to register it as a political organization.

Let me repeat: There is no place for religion in American civic life—as John Kennedy tried to tell us. I don’t say this because I’m anti-religion. I’m not. I’m anti-your religion. I’m anti-Rick Santorum’s religion, anti-Mitt Romney’s religion, anti-Pat Robertson’s religion, anti-Elijah Muhammad’s religion, anti-Moshe Hersch’s religion, and anti every other religion you can name insofar as that faith system seeks to dominate public policy. Americans are not “one nation under God,” as devilish a phrase as ever devised by man. We are many nations under many different deities and the moment we express preference for any one of them, none of us have religious freedom. The GOP right is fond of evoking the Founding Fathers, but apparently not even that “historian” Newt Gingrich grasps what they had in mind when they constitutionally forbade the establishment of an official religion in America. What would the USA look like under an official religion? Probably a lot like Massachusetts Bay Colony under the Puritans—a land of imposed orthodoxy that was unwelcoming to Quakers, mainstream Anglicans, Baptists, Catholics, and Native religions. Perhaps one prone to throwing out ecumenical thinkers such as Roger Williams, or uppity women such as Anne Hutchinson. Or maybe one that launches periodic witch hunts. The Founding Fathers understood that Roger Williams was ultimately correct: freedom of conscience and political freedom were incompatible with state-sanctioned religion.

It’s so easy and pious-sounding to evoke God in political life. It’s also facile, heretical, and dangerous. I raise the question: If we are to be one nation under God, whose god? Rick Santorum thinks that life begins at conception; I think it’s just a bunch of cells. Which of us is correct? Catholics think God doesn’t want anyone to use birth control. I find such an idea morally reprehensible in a planet of seven billion people, nearly half of whom live in abject poverty. Who is correct? I have many private spiritual beliefs; some might find a few of them ridiculous. Fine. I find the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation absurd, and to say that I find the back-story behind the Book of Mormon hard to swallow grossly underestimates my position. In my view, a lot of Southern Baptists are Pharisees with funny accents, and any black preacher who opposes gay marriage ought to hang his head low enough to read a good history of the civil rights movement! Who is right?

Who indeed? The greatest heresies ever committed are by those who presume to speak for God. Religion takes place in the realm of faith, things unseen and improvable. It seeks to help us apprehend that which we cannot entirely comprehend; that is, religion as practiced by humans is at best a glimpse into mysteries that pass human understanding. To claim more is to presume some Americans know the mind of God, a view that most faiths would consider heretical.

But Americans can read the Constitution. That’s the beauty of a nation under law rather than under God—there is one standard for all, be that person a Baptist, a Mormon, a Jew, a Muslim, a freethinker, or a Catholic bishop. American society can only function as a secular one that protects private beliefs, but also demands public decorum and collective rights. The day that Americans decide to place Jehovah or Allah or Jesus or the pope or the Angel Moroni in the Oval Office will be our day of reckoning. Expect plagues of locusts, not heavenly trumpets.

The Submission No Masterpiece, but a Good Read

Over-hyped, but worth reading.

The Submission (2011)

By Amy Waldman

Farrar, Straus & Giroux ISBN: 9780374271565

* * *

The premise of journalist Amy Waldman’s debut novel The Submission is that history repeats itself. In 1980, blind design submissions were submitted for the proposed Vietnam War Veterans’ Memorial. When the entry was chosen, a hailstorm of controversy erupted when the winner was 21-year-old Maya Lin. Some claimed her design was ugly, but most of this was a mask for what other critics simply verbalized: disgust that an Asian would be given the task of designing a memorial for Americans killed in an Asian war. (Never mind that Ms. Lin was born in the U.S. and is of Chinese descent, not Vietnamese.) As we know, Ms. Lin did build “The Wall,” though she was forced to accept a compromise in which Frederick Hart’s “Three Soldiers” statue sits at the memorial’s entrance.

Flash ahead to 2003. Another selection committee sits in New York City and solicits blind entries for a 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero. The committee has narrowed it down to two choices, a soaring abstraction known as “The Void,” favored by art critics on the panel; and a contemplative design called “The Garden,” the choice of panel chair Claire Burwell, a wealthy socialite and 9/11 widow. “The Garden” wins, but there’s a problem: the architect’s name is Mohammad Khan. Does the committee stand by its choice, or does it conclude that there is simply no way that a Muslim can build the memorial?

Once again, objective reality is of secondary concern. Khan is also native-born, Ivy League educated and, like many immigrant kids, prone to hyper-Americanism. This 37-year-old son of immigrants doesn’t even like his first name; he prefers to be called “Mo.” His main motive for entering the contest was disgust over the attack and his desire to show the attackers that they can’t do this sort of thing to America. As for being a Muslim, he’s about as Muslim as secular Jews or infant-baptized Catholics who wouldn’t know a Mass from moss (like yours truly). His religion is a thoroughly American one: he’s obsessed with money and success. His hubris is that the thing he loves most is himself.

Mo’s ego, secularism, naïveté, and stubbornness are about to clash with another American reality: that politics often trumps fairness. Waldman sketches a world we all recall after 9/11–Islamophobia, the bunker mentality of those fearing new attacks, the rise of rightwing hate groups, the hyper-nationalism of those bent on revenge, and the stifling of voices of opposition to Bush-era military adventurism. Remember when the Dixie Chicks were boycotted for a remark that they were “ashamed” to from the same state as Bush? Or when one was considered a traitor for opposing the Iraq War? One can easily imagine the hue-and-cry if Waldman’s fictional scenario had been the reality of 2003.

Waldman populates her novel with thinly disguised provocateurs that abound in post-9/11 America: the cynical rightwing shock jock Lou Sarge; the Tea Party-like chair of Save America from Islam, Debbie Dawson; Sean Gallagher, a loser blue-collar guy suddenly thrust into the limelight as the Christian champion of his dead brother; Burwell, the do-the-right-thing fuzzy-headed liberal; and Alyssa Spier, Mo’s egoistic doppelganger, except that she’s an amoral tabloid hack willing to exploit anything and anybody to advance her lackluster career. Mo has no hard-fast principles beyond the belief in his own brilliance, his sense of entitlement, and his rigidity. Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of him: Islamic rights lawyer Laila Fathi, orthodox Muslims, rightwingers seeking to make him their poster child for lost American values, and liberals wanting him to be “reasonable” and “explain” himself. The latter becomes crucial when alarmists interpret his design as a “Muslim” garden and see its design as plot to mock America.

Waldman wisely lets all of this play out according to internal logic and refrains from telegraphing or judging. But she does give us an alternative take on 9/11 widows: young Bengali mother Asma Anwar, whose illegal immigrant husband worked as a custodian in the Twin Towers. Waldman’s cool detachment moves the narrative and makes readers question their own assumptions. A liberal, for instance, might viscerally embrace Mo, but might also come to see him as a foolish prig; and it’s hard to see how even the most sanctimonious reactionary can be unsympathetic to Anwar.

Both Entertainment Weekly and Esquire made The Submission their book of the year, and all manner of prize nominations are rumored. Is it that good? Not really. It’s thought provoking and a breezy read, but it’s no literary masterpiece. I found myself very dissatisfied with the final chapter, one in which Waldman let down her guard and wrote a futuristic coda that’s a liberal/utopian version of “And they all lived happily ever after.” Some of the characters–including New York’s mayor and the State governor–are more caricature than plausible; some of the dialogue is contrived; and Waldman leaves some logic holes. (Why was a Frederick Hart-like compromise never considered?) The Submission is a bit like the post-9/11 hysteria–more hype than substance. Forget the lofty heights; this book belongs in a more humble but respectful category: Good book. Good read.

Reasons to Discover Gina Forsyth

The content is better than the cover (which is meant to be ironic).

GINA FORSYTH

Promised Land

Waterbug 0101

* * * ½

Remember how your mother told you not to judge a book by its cover? Mom’s advice works well for music as well. I was unfamiliar with Gina Forsyth’s music and a curmudgeonly cover and song titles such as “Lord Have Mercy,” “Sweet & Sunny South,” and “We Will Be Reborn” made me suspect I was in for a Baptist accounting of my iniquities. This makes me guilty of the sin of presumption and Ms. Forsyth of insufficient telegraphing of irony. This collection from a native daughter of New Orleans is a delightful mix of sardonic humor, country sweetness, Cajun insouciance, and snarkiness, with occasional forays into delicacy. Both the material and Forysth’s voice reminded me a bit of Cheryl Wheeler, though Ms. Wheeler certainly has more range. The songs? As Forsyth put it, her intent was to present the Promised Land in four chapters: America itself, pre-and post Hurricane Katrina, and “transformation.” That song “We Shall Be Reborn?” It owes more to Howard Zinn than to Pat Robertson. “Sweet & Sunny South?” Call that one a love-hate relationship populated by colorful characters, some lovable and some loathsome. In fact, Forsyth delights in opposites; she has the wisdom to see America as a place of great promise, but also one of slap-you-in-the-face disappointments, so you might as well have some humility when things go right and keep your sense of humor honed to take away the sting when life goes wrong. And when all else fails, party a bit (“What I Did on Mardi Gras Day”).

I liked this recording way more than I thought I would, though I could have done without “11 Days,” a song about her medical woes. I’m not squeamish about the (over-sharing) medical details, but I did find the June-spoon-moon rhyming scheme hard to stomach. Check out Gina Forsyth. Not only does she sing some fine songs, she scratches out a heck of a Cajun-style fiddle.

When you check her out, skip YouTube. The videos there are of such poor quality that you won’t get a fair sample. Instead go to Forsyth’s Webpage and check out the title track. __Rob Weir

Coupons? Not Worth It!

Jeeves! Please take the limo to the Stop n' Shop so we can save a dollar on Miss Fluffy's din-din.

Food activist Michael Pollan offers simple but sage advice to Americans who worry that their food is neither nutritious nor safe: If it’s advertised, don’t buy it. As Pollan warns, foods that come attached to expensive promotions are often laden with salt, calories, fat, and chemical additives. To Pollan’s counsel I offer this codicil: Avoid all grocery products for which a coupon exists.

I know this goes against the cultural grain–there are even coupon aggregators now, such as Groupon. Still, the easiest way to get fleeced like a summer lamb is to buy food around which there is a coupon campaign. These products fall into two categories: those products seeking to convince you that ordinary food isn’t, hence its inflated price; and those that try to seduce you into buying quantities that one might stockpile to ride out nuclear winter. Here are a few recent head scratchers:

Cambell’s invites you to save a dollar if you buy ten cans of condensed chicken noodle soup. That’s a whole dime a can. Holy cow! Take the savings and buy a Bentley! Or, maybe you ought to compare Campbell’s to your local store brand, which is likely to cost at least a quarter less than Campbell’s, whose subsidiary might have made the store brand in the first place. Even if it didn’t, there isn’t much in chicken noodle soup–a (very) few pieces of rubbery cubed bird, some pasta, salt, and water. Plus, where the hell are we supposed to store ten cans of soup? Did Campbell not get the memo that birth control is legal, families are smaller than in the 1890s, and that people no longer live in houses the size of Botswana?

Krusteaz (who?) also wants you to save a buck by buying two packages of their “bakery style cookie mix.” Any bakery that actually made cookies that tasted like store dough would go out of business in a week. But here’s the other thing: If you’re an adult, you don’t want to have cookie dough handy; if you have little ones, making cookies from scratch is part of the childhood experience. Plus it’s wicked cheaper than premade products.

Totino’s also flashes promises of a big one-dollar savings. All you must do is buy four of their Crisp Crust Party Pizza. Does anyone in America live in a place where there’s no local pizza shop? Not even a Domino’s? Is the local dough slinger so inept that he can’t make one that tastes better than a frozen pie? And again I must ask the question: Where are we supposed to store four big old boxes? My fridge freezer compartment gets crowded when both ice trays are filled.

Hellman’s will save you­–you guessed it!–one American buckeroo on three mayonnaise products. Okay, just trust me on this one–you simply don’t want to go through three mayo jars within the expiration date window. That dollar you saved won’t make a dent in new trouser expenditures.

Tide offers two dollars off on any three laundry products–detergent, softener, stain treatments…. You really don’t need to buy softener any more. That’s a scam holdover from the days in which detergents were filled with lye and with now-banned chemicals. Forget it and you’ll notice nothing! So do we need three bottles of Tide? Are we confusing this stuff with OJ?

Uncle Ben’s will give you one of their rice dish packages for free. All you have to do is buy three packages of rice. I won’t lecture you on how you should eat brown and river rice, not the polished white stuff, but I will tell you that you can buy a large sack of rice at a local Asian market for far cheaper than three Benjamins (even if he is a relative). The Asian rice will have something supermarket rice doesn’t: actual flavor. But if you must buy it at the grocery store, polished white rice is all the same. No need to pay more.

I’ve saved the best for last. Fancy Feast will give you a one-dollar break on twenty-four cans of Fancy Feast Gourmet Cat Food. Look, if you can afford to buy such overpriced chow for Fluffy, paying another buck isn’t going to make you cash in your diamond mine stock. But two dozen cans? My cat can make a Midwestern hog seem like a diet queen, but not even she can gobble her way through 24 tins in a timeframe that would justify knocking down a wall to build more storage. Besides, if I bought that many, where would the ten cans of chicken noodle soup go?

Coupons for morons? I gotta million of ‘em!

The Artist is a Cinematic Masterpiece

Everyone will soon know who she is!

THE ARTIST (2011)

Directed by Michael Hazanavicius

La Petite Reine, PG-13, 100 minutes

* * * * *

This film has everything that American movie audiences allegedly hate­–it has no American stars, it’s a foreign film, it’s in black and white, there’s no discernible sex or violence, and to top it off, it’s silent. That’s right--silent. And if you duck it, you’ll miss the best film of last year, this year, and any year in recent memory. I can’t remember the last time the entire movie audience applauded a film, but that’s the precisely what happened when “The End” flashed on the screen at Amherst Cinema.

Writer/director Michael Hazanavicius is French, but he clearly has an abiding love for American silent movies. His main character, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), is a mash between Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks. The setting is 1927, and Valentin is the hottest commodity in Hollywood--a dashing rake who lives in a palatial mansion with his bored wife, Doris (Penelope Ann Miller), a loyal chauffeur, Clifton (James Cromwell), and the costar of most of his swashbuckling features–a dog named Jack (Uggie). Valentin has a big personality and an increasingly big ego–so big that he tells directors like Al Zimmer (John Goodman) whom to cast. This precisely what he does when he literally bumps into Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), a long-legged star struck fan who is so determined to break into film that she auditions for the chorus line in one of Valentin’s films. If you know film history, you know what happens next; in 1929 sound films begin to take over and Hollywood no longer has any use for histrionic actors such as Valentin who mug at the camera but lack the ability to enunciate. They are cast aside just in time for the Great Depression.

In The Artist, Valentin’s decline coincides with Peppy’s meteoric rise to fame. The story–told in the fashion of 1920s comic tragedies­–revolves around Valentin and Peppy and where their circles collide and intersect. The script is equal parts touching, sad, hysterical, and poignant. At its heart is the age-old question of whether fame obliterates the real self, of whether it merely masks the dormant goodness that can rally when the chips are down.

This film is clever on so many levels that one would need to see it several times to catch everything. Film buffs will have a field day picking out homage to films such as The Mask of Zorro, The Sheik, Sunset Boulevard, Busby Berkeley musicals, and dozens of other Hollywood classics. Watch for meaningful crosscuts, background detail, and the use of light and sound. To mention just two small details that might go unnoticed, in one scene a destitute Valentin staggers across a street and the movie marquee in the distance matches his fate. One of my favorite cuts was the strategic use of sepia chrome to show changing tastes; color would be too dramatic to show cultural flux, but a few seconds of brown tinting amidst the gray tones makes the point. And, of course, no silent film was completely silent--it just meant we didn’t hear dialogue spoken. Listen to what Hazanavicius does with music and ambient sound.

There is no dialog to speak of (pun intended), but the cast communicates all that you need to know through sweeping gestures, facial expressions, and in situ action. Dujardin is part Fairbanks, part Peter Sellers as he transitions from prince to sad sack, Goodman exercises his swaggering side to capture the soul of a bombastic director, and Cromwell uses his elastic face to make Clifford a blank slate when he’s withholding judgment, but twists it to convey anger, astonishment, resolve or pity. Bérénice Bejo is simply astounding; you easily believe her climb to the top because every time she’s on the screen you can’t take your eyes off her angular beauty, her soulful eyes, or her winning smile. The only actor that comes close to stealing scenes from her is Uggie, the cutest Jack Russell Terrier on the planet and already a veteran of numerous films (including Water for Elephants).

If you thought you’d never be caught dead at a silent film, please see this one. You’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven.