Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-Review by Professor Popinjay

Imagine Tommy Lee Jones playing Claude Monet while putting no effort into emulating a French accent aside from the occasional “Entre” and “Merci” and you’d have a close facsimile to the performance phoned in by Stuart Hughes in The Artists’ Special: Monet: Shadow and Light. You may ask “Why are you expecting so much from a 45 minute Canadian Made-for-TV Movie?” An excellent question. Quit bothering me about it.

There’s a whole slew of throw-away movies in The Artists’ Special series all pertaining to various artists, composers, and demolition experts. I lied about the demolition experts just to make this review more interesting. I got the idea to do that from this movie!

Oscar Claude Monet (or Clode as he is called by Canadian actors apparently) grew up with a singer mother who supported his artistic ambitions and an industrious father who wanted him to abandon painting and become a rodeo clown… or a grocer. I forget which.  He was forced to join the army and fought in the Franco-Prussian War but continued to use a paintbrush as his weapon of choice, slinging paint on enemy troops with extreme prejudice while heavy metal music blared in the background. He studied art in several prestigious schools but was disillusioned by the classical styles accepted at the time and favored developing his own unique artistic methods like a boss. He submitted an early painting to the Salon de Paris which they promptly rejected because it made them feel things… strange wonderful wicked things.

Monet: Shadow and Light takes place immediately after all this exciting stuff and we find our hero destitute with wife and child in tow, the butt of the critic’s terrible jokes. Sound familiar? That’s right. I’m giving this movie the same treatment!

So what lie was applied to make this segment of Monet’s life interesting? A young boy by the name of Daniel Fontaine. I looked him up. He paints decent depictions of teddy bears wearing clothes. I mean the teddy bears are wearing clothes. I have no idea what Daniel Fontaine wears while he paints. I hope to God it’s SOMETHING but you never know. The idea  that this man (who solicits paintings he’s done as late as 2019) was a fledgling contemporary of Claude Monet is completely ludicrous and I suspect I’ve looked up the wrong Daniel Fontaine but he was the only one I could find who paints so you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.

The addition of this boy to Monet’s story adds the final variable in the formula for all these movies which goes as follows: Artist can’t art. Artist meets Troubled-but-Insightful Lad (TbIL). They live, they love, they learn. They have a falling out. Artist has revelation thanks to some pithy thing TbIL said in a flashback. Artist can art again. The End.

Yes, it’s acted poorly. Yes, it’s historically inaccurate in almost every possible way.Yes, the writing is bland and formulaic. Yes, the best part is that it’s only 45 minutes long counting credits. Yes, the French accent consultant took most of the budget and ran off to the Moulin Rouge. All this is true aside from that last part. And yet, I like these movies if “movies” they can be called. Despite the fact that they don’t feature Iron Man strangling a purple cgi Goonie, these films still manage to draw a genuine tear from my eye when the resolution comes. I think that’s important. Plus it exposes kids to classical art in a completely accessible way provided you tie them to a chair and peel their eyes open to make them watch it.

My art teacher took me to the Monet exhibit in Portland back in the day. The paintings were larger and more amazing than I ever could have imagined. It was a highlight of my life and I think back on it fondly and often. I was inspired. I felt just like Daniel Fontaine must have felt and I know if I had the time and patience, I’d paint my own rendition of clothed teddy bears.