I braved the icy conditions yesterday to get a bit of air into my lungs while adding to my log pile using the special wood-splitting axe I’ve recently acquired. This amazing tool, with a cunningly shaped blade which doesn’t lodge immovably into the wood, is known, it appears as a ‘maul’.

Wondering if this new addition to my vocabulary was connected to the verb ‘to maul’, I consulted our battered two-volume copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and learned that both noun and verb are cognate with ‘mallet’, and ultimately derive from the Latin ‘malleus’, meaning ‘hammer’ (as in Malleus Maleficarum or ‘Hammer of the Witches’, the infamous 15th century witch-hunt manual).    As a verb it has been used in the U.S. in the sense of ‘to split wood with a maul and wedge’ since the late 17th century, and -  as far back as 1593 - it began to be used figuratively with the meaning ‘to injure by criticising’, to ‘pull to pieces’. And it is this latter use of ‘to maul’ that I am about to exemplify today, the object of the mauling being the much-praised film ‘The Artist’.

What is galling is that I had been looking forward to seeing it since reading the reviews from Cannes, a typically ecstatic one being by Geoffrey Macnab (18 May, The Independent) who wrote that

Michel Hazanavicius's ‘The Artist’, added to the Cannes competition at the last minute, is both a surefire crowdpleaser and a magnificent piece of film-making. Whatever else, this is also surely the most enjoyable contender for the Palme d'Or this year.

adding that

‘The Artist’ could easily have seemed very kitsch indeed. Thankfully, though, this is far more than just a knowing and ironic pastiche of old Hollywood silents. It is heartfelt too. Even the most ridiculous scenes – for instance, the dog's heroic rescue of a man caught in a fire – seem dramatic rather than absurd. Dujardin's performance is a revelation. He has the carefree quality and the athleticism of a Fairbanks in his pomp.

Early on, the lack of spoken dialogue is disconcerting. However, the pacing is so brisk that audiences will quickly forget they're watching a silent movie. Formally, the film is a tour de force.

Ludovic Bource's rousing music, the brio of the performances and Guillaume Schiffman's luminous black and white cinematography help draw spectators in. "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!" Gloria Swanson (playing an old silent era diva) famously proclaimed in ‘Sunset Boulevard’. Watching ‘The Artist’, we know exactly what she means.

Macnab was merely one of the first to shower this film with praise. According to the website Movie Review Intelligence 92% of all reviewers have described it as ‘excellent’, while Rotten Tomatoes goes even further: critics, they claim, have awarded it an amazing 97%, while audience members notched up a still respectable 91%.

And since those favourable reviewers include two people whose opinions I hold dear - the good Doctor Mark Kermode and the saintly David Thomson (author of the indispensable ‘Have You Seen?’ and ‘The New Biographical Dictionary of Film’) - you can imagine how excited I was when my local Odeon finally confirmed it was going to show it.

Why, Thomson, in ‘The New Republic’, had written that one sequence was ‘so artfully handled it’s worthy of the Ernst Lubitsch who made sound pictures’, while Mary Corliss, in ‘Time’ referred to “a wit in story construction worthy of Billy Wilder or Preston Sturges”. If these top-notch movie critics were to be believed, we were about to see a film worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as ‘Ninotchka’, ‘Some Like it Hot’ or ‘The Palm Beach Story’.

So last week Jane and I took our seats with a feeling of pleasurable anticipation. By halfway through, however, things were going wrong, and we both started stifling yawns.  Finally, when the lights went up I carefully said ‘Well, there wasn’t as much magic in it as I’d been led to expect,’ and Jane simply said that it had been a waste of money.

So what did we find disappointing about this much-praised film (which has gone on to sweep all before it at the Baftas)?  Well, to start with, neither of us had much time for Jean Dujardin, who won best actor prize for his portrayal of the fading silent star George Valentin. David Thomson wrote that the film

‘is fortunate to have Jean Dujardin as Valentin (he won the acting prize at Cannes for the role). He does Fairbanks and a kind of James Mason equally well; he is quick—quicker than most silent actors in fact—and hugely likeable, especially as his pride is humbled and his soul begins to emerge.’

Sorry, David; I can only describe his acting style in ‘The Artist’ as grin / glum / grin:  a pasted on smile when he’s at the top; morose when it all goes wrong;  exuberant at the finale.  I didn’t like him in his first collaboration with Hazanavicius (the spy movie parody ‘OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies’), and I liked him no better here.

Bérénice Bejo, playing opposite him as rising star Peppy Miller, has charm and freshness. But she’s strait-jacketed by the story-line, which has her falling for Valentin from the start, which leaves her no place to go.

Of course there were some fine moments. David Thomson was right to single out the sequence I referred to earlier, where Peppy, ‘plays an extra with whom Valentin dances briefly—done in several takes, all spoiled because love is blooming’.  Yes, I concede that that worked charmingly, belonging in a much better film.  Where it belonged, in fact, was in a film which was less predictable: where you didn’t know in advance that it was Peppy who was responsible for buying up George’s furniture and effects; that he would be setting fire to the copies of his films; that the one to escape the flames would be the sequence where the two dance together, when Peppy was still an extra; that it would end as it did.

And no amount of allusions to much more memorable films - the nod towards ‘Citizen Kane’ with the montage of breakfast scenes to show the disintegration of a marriage (about which, in this film, we actually know nothing); the outrageous theft of Bernard Hermann’s great love theme from ‘Vertigo’; the nudges towards ‘A Star is Born’ and ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ -  can turn this into a good film let alone a great one.

At the end of the Bafta awards ceremony, Martin Scorsese (having seen ‘The Artist’ walk off with seven awards, while his own ‘Hugo’ had to content itself with winning best production design and sound) must have had a job concealing his disappointment at losing to an inferior film.  At least I’ve been able to have a bit of a rant to help me get over my own disappointment.

(Here’s a better review of ‘The Artist’ than I could ever write, by

Devin Faraci, of ‘Badass Digest’)

There are small pleasures to be found in The Artist, the homage to silent movies that is, for most of its running time, also silent. Beautiful black and white cinematography is always a joy to behold on the big screen, and there are some very nice shots. There are a couple of laughs, and the film features one of the great modern dog performances.

But there’s not much else to be found in The Artist. Shockingly empty, mostly bland and often kind of boring, The Artist is a fine technical exercise but offers little else beyond the gimmick of a silent film in 2011. Worst of all, The Artist doesn’t even make a particularly convincing argument about why we should care for silent film. Where Scorsese’s Hugo makes silent filmmaking feel vital and present, the whole point of The Artist is how outdated it is.

Which means that yes, it’s another film about how the talkies killed silent films. If you’ve never seen Singin’ In the Rain this might be fascinating territory, but The Artist is no Singin’ In the Rain. The Hollywood story is less than half-baked, and the other plot element - a love story - isn’t doing much better.

George Valentin is a silent movie superstar, and an egomaniacal goof. At the premiere of his latest movie he ends up photographed with a fan, who over the course of the next few years rises from extra to star. As her career goes up, his goes down - George refuses to do talkies. He sinks all his money into one last silent film, which bombs. Then the stock market crashes and he’s finished.

That’s like the end of act one. Most of the film is George being stubborn and making bad decisions and wallowing in self-pity. Why does this woman, Peppy Miller, stay in love with this guy as he pisses his life away? I’m not sure, but it’s the crux of the film’s love story. And that love story is rote and bland.

I guess you could make some kind of argument that Peppy, the avatar of the talkies, and George, the symbol of the silents, form a bridge to the future of cinema, but that would be putting a lot more weight on filmmaking than The Artist actually does. There are a couple of winks and homages to the earliest years of the movies, but they’re not particularly incisive, and the film seems to have just about nothing to say about film - silent or otherwise.

It seems pretty obvious that the setting is just an excuse to employ the film’s central gimmick. Director Michel Hazanavicius does a decent job of approximating the concept of silent films (but not the reality. There's way too much modernism in the camerawork), and much of the cinematography is handsome. But this isn’t enough to sustain a motion picture. It makes for a good short.

Jean Dujardin plays George, and he has the perfect look of a silent movie heartthrob. Dujardin and Hazanavicius worked together on the comedic OSS 117 films (which are throwbacks to 60s spy films - if these two keep going back in movie history they’ll end up making a flipbook), and the director gets a nice performance out of his lead, especially in the early parts of the film when George is still basically likable.

Bérénice Bejo, who plays Peppy, has lovely big silent movie eyes, but there’s nothing for her to get across with them. The girl enters the movie in love with Valentin and is always in love with him. There’s not much else to it. It’s a shame, because I think she would be great given some sort of conflict or tension or activity in which to partake.

There are some American actors as well - John Goodman as a studio president, and James Cromwell as an infuriatingly loyal servant - but the show is stolen by Uggie, who plays The Dog. The Dog is George’s constant companion, and he’s the funniest and best thing in the movie. Every moment when Uggie wasn’t on screen I wondered how long before he returned. Someone give him his own spin-off, please.

Film fans will be happy to know that there are some other great faces that pop up - Malcolm McDowell is in it for five seconds, Bill Fagerbakke has a walk on and Ezra Buzzington comes out of nowhere being all Buzzington for a few moments. The Artist is not lacking for acting talent.

It’s not that The Artist is bad (although it drags so much in the middle that it comes very close), it’s that The Artist is a trifle. There are nice moments in the film, some lovely moments, but they never add up to anything with meaning, to anything with weight or anything with impact. If The Artist truly were from the period it’s about, it would be a minor film that occasionally played on TCM at 3AM, and about which even hardcore silent film fans wouldn’t care much.