Let me start with a couple of admissions, so you know where
I’m coming from: First, before catching the movie version of
Les Misérables,
I had never seen a stage production of this operatic musical, nor had I ever
read the epic (1400+ page) novel on which the stage production was based. So I
was a Les Miz virgin, if you will.
Second, I’m not a huge fan of musicals, and in particular movie
musicals. Saying that I’m not an enthusiast of the genre does not mean that I’m
antipathetic; I’ve enjoyed innumerable stage musicals in my time, although, I
usually don’t gravitate in that direction when I’m choosing to go to a
theatrical show. I’ve liked a few movie musicals as well, such as
West Side
Story,
Fiddler on the Roof, and even
Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
I saw Les Misérables on Christmas day,
i.e. its opening day, in the big auditorium at a beautiful old movie house,
with a crowd of people, most of whom undoubtedly were already enthusiasts of
the show and/or the genre. The crowd was excited in advance, rapt throughout,
and, for the most part, I believe most folks left satisfied after the 157-minute
opus concluded. My own reaction was complicated. I remained interested to the
very end, enjoying some aspects of the show very much, while disliking other
things. The fact that I was conscious of these competing responses throughout,
suggests that I never fully got caught up in the experience the film was trying
to create.
Les Misérables the movie/musical encompasses
an expansive story ranging over nearly twenty years. The title reflects Hugo’s
chief concern and theme: the story of the unfortunate masses of people
oppressed by the French nobility and wealthy class, and the brutal justice
system in their employ. The plot concentrates on the story of a man, Jean
Valjean, who has been victimized by the system, having spent nineteen years in
hard labor for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread, but who finds redemption
through compassion. A second plotline shows us the degradation and ultimate
destruction of Fantine, a young woman just trying to earn enough to support her
out of wedlock child, Cosette; and how fate brings Cosette under the protection
of Valjean, and eventually to her true love, the radical young man, Marius, whom
she meets against the backdrop of the failed Paris revolution of June 1832.
Here’s what I liked:
The ambitious, historical sweep of this movie is admirable
and fascinating. I’m not sure how I feel about the heavy-handed Christian
redemption themes and at times the ambition gets in the way of the story, but the
overarching effect is certainly grand, and even uplifting. There is also a
palpable and likeable earnestness to the endeavor.
This is aided by the fabulous look of the picture. The sets,
the tatty, frequently dirty costumes, the makeup, the gloomy, blue-gray and
taupe color scheme, and the overall tone of the photography - exterior scenes
at dusk or night, in the rain and/or under steely overcast skies; cluttered and
crowded interiors with lower class furnishings dimly lit by candle or lantern -
all contribute to our empathy and identification with the oppressed classes and
the poverty of their circumstances and opportunities. It’s a strangely
beautiful and effective cinematography of despair. Director
Tom Hooper and
Danny Cohen, the guy
in charge of the cameras, also worked together on
The King’s Speech
(2010) and
John Adams (2008), and the two seem to have a common
aesthetic. In many ways this works to the movie’s advantage, but not always (see
below).
The singing: There is
virtually no spoken dialogue in the picture; everything is sung. This, and the
melodramatic story, gives the enterprise an impressive operatic quality,
bringing a stateliness to this film, not present in so many other musicals - where
characters typically break into song in the middle of otherwise normal
conversations. Also, refreshingly, all
of the characters actuality sing their own lines; there’s no
Marni Nixon lending
her voice to Anne Hathaway, as she did for Natalie Wood in
West Side Story
(1961) and for Audrey Hepburn in
My Fair Lady (1964).
In fact, Hathaway (Fantine) has an exquisite voice, and her
rendition of
I Dreamed a Dream is one
of the best moments in the show. Likewise,
Amanda Seyfried (adult Cosette) sounds lovely in her numbers, as does twenty-two
year old newcomer Samantha Barks (
Éponine), in her stirring, beautiful rendition of
On My Own. There was some concern,
apparently, that Russell Crowe could not sing well enough to sustain the role
of Jean Valjean’s nemesis, Inspector Javert, but I thought his singing voice
was just fine – he strained a bit for some of the notes, but this was kind of
in keeping with the insensitive nature of his character. Eddie Redmayne (Marius), last seen as the
narrator of
My Week With Marilyn (2011) has a sweet voice, and gives a
touching, post-debacle rendition of
Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.
Actually, the big disappointment for me was Hugh Jackman
(Jean Valjean), a guy with lots of musical stage experience, who was expected
to be the highlight of the singing cast. Jackman had quite a bit of airtime,
and his insistently quavering tremolo really got on my nerves after a while. It
might work on stage, but not in a screen performance with lots of close-ups and
big time Dolby Digital blasting away.
The acting: Not only do the actors sing their own lines, but
they do so in real time, i.e. while they are acting. Seems sensible, but in
most movie musicals the songs are recorded first and then the scene is shot
with the actors lip synching their own (or Marni Nixon’s) voice. Hooper fitted
the actors with tiny earpieces (to pipe in simple piano accompaniment) and mics
on their clothes (which were later digitally removed) and let ‘em belt out
their parts while in the action. Perhaps as a result, the acting throughout is
uniformly superior to most musicals I’ve seen. This being a drama (melodrama,
actually), that’s a big plus. Hathaway and Jackman (notwithstanding his
singing), in particular are superb. Crowe is kind of wooden, but acceptable.
The beautifully choreographed production number of Master
of the House by Sacha Baron Cohen (Thénardier)
and Helena Bonham Carter (Madame Thénardier) is a treat.
Here’s what I didn’t like:
Jackman’s godawful quaver (see above).
Speaking of the music, and at the risk of alienating the
hordes of Les Miz devotees out there, I have to say that it seemed awfully
repetitive to me. Oh, every song has a different title, and the lyrics changed
from one to the next, but the tunes kept coming back in song after song. I’m
guessing that over the two and a half hour span of this film, there were maybe
four or five truly different songs. They were pretty good songs, memorable even;
but all, it seemed, were in the same key. That’s not the fault of the filmmaker,
but rather, a limitation imposed by the composer,
Claude-Michel Schonberg. This
sameness is particularly noticeable given the length of the film and because
the entire thing is music. Operas of this length would have one or two
intermissions.
An odd thing about the score and songs, to my way of
thinking, was that stylistically the entire work seemed to be from another
time; although written in the 1980s, there is no hint of rock’n’roll, jazz, minimalist
classicists such as Phillip Glass, or other musical touchstones of the last
thirty or forty years. Musically, these pieces could have been written in the
fifties or sixties (although it’s been suggested to me that this could be said
about a lot of eighties musicals). The lyrics, on the other hand, are lovely
and do a nice job telling the story.
Another problem (which may have arisen in the transition
from book to musical?) is that we’re provided precious little context to help
us understand the events of the story. For example, the movie starts around
1815, but there’s no preamble explaining what happened since the fall of
Napoleon and the first French Revolution, how things got to the dire state
shown in the opening, and so forth. Les Miz culminates with a rousing students-at-the-barricades
revolutionary moment in 1832, but fails to explain how this came about (other
than the general sense that society is oppressive to the have-nots), whether
it’s historically significant, who’s in power, etc.
I understand that Les Miz is not so much about history or
story as it is about emotion. Still, it’s hard to care, if you don’t know
what’s going on. I said earlier that the show feels operatic, and operas too
are mostly emo. Yet, while it’s certainly true that opera plots are often
flimsy and disjointed; this here is a not a stage production, there are no
supertitles, nor a program guide with background information to read before the
lights go down; it’s a big budget, no intermission movie, and it would have been
no big deal to provide a little background in the form of a preamble (as in
Argo, for example). The fact that the stage version of Les Misérables
was the same in this regard is no justification for this lapse in the movie;
the producers had no problem adding a new
song to the show – why not a
preamble?
Although I earlier praised the tone and mood created by director
Hooper and cinematographer Cohen, I do have a major bone to pick with the camera
work: their insistence on extreme closeups of the characters as they are singing
their sad torch songs was, to put it mildly, distracting. I don’t know about
you, but I lose my empathy for someone if I’m compelled to stare into their
mouth at their molars and tonsils; yet time and again that’s where the camera
took us, often at the most sensitive moments, such as Fantine’s I Dreamed a Dream.
On balance, I felt the experience of Les Misérables
did not live up to the epic aspirations of the filmmakers, nor, probably, to
the anticipation of its fans.
In Wide Release.
Let me start with a couple of admissions, so you know where
I’m coming from: First, before catching the movie version of Les Misérables,
I had never seen a stage production of this operatic musical, nor had I ever
read the epic (1400+ page) novel on which the stage production was based. So I
was a Les Miz virgin, if you will.
Second, I’m not a huge fan of musicals, and in particular movie
musicals. Saying that I’m not an enthusiast of the genre does not mean that I’m
antipathetic; I’ve enjoyed innumerable stage musicals in my time, although, I
usually don’t gravitate in that direction when I’m choosing to go to a
theatrical show. I’ve liked a few movie musicals as well, such as West Side
Story, Fiddler on the Roof, and even Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
In fact, Hathaway (Fantine) has an exquisite voice, and her
rendition of I Dreamed a Dream is one
of the best moments in the show. Likewise,
Amanda Seyfried (adult Cosette) sounds lovely in her numbers, as does twenty-two
year old newcomer Samantha Barks (Éponine), in her stirring, beautiful rendition of On My Own. There was some concern,
apparently, that Russell Crowe could not sing well enough to sustain the role
of Jean Valjean’s nemesis, Inspector Javert, but I thought his singing voice
was just fine – he strained a bit for some of the notes, but this was kind of
in keeping with the insensitive nature of his character. Eddie Redmayne (Marius), last seen as the
narrator of My Week With Marilyn (2011) has a sweet voice, and gives a
touching, post-debacle rendition of Empty Chairs at Empty Tables. 
The acting: Not only do the actors sing their own lines, but
they do so in real time, i.e. while they are acting. Seems sensible, but in
most movie musicals the songs are recorded first and then the scene is shot
with the actors lip synching their own (or Marni Nixon’s) voice. Hooper fitted
the actors with tiny earpieces (to pipe in simple piano accompaniment) and mics
on their clothes (which were later digitally removed) and let ‘em belt out
their parts while in the action. Perhaps as a result, the acting throughout is
uniformly superior to most musicals I’ve seen. This being a drama (melodrama,
actually), that’s a big plus. Hathaway and Jackman (notwithstanding his
singing), in particular are superb. Crowe is kind of wooden, but acceptable.
First let me say that I really liked this movie.
Both efforts show off Russell’s brilliance as a writer and
director of dialogue-driven scenes, which reveal the characters’ flaws and
yearnings, set up the action, and drive the stories forward. In these families,
passions are quickly triggered, people argue and talk over each other, and,
despite or perhaps through such verbal conflict, inspiration and understanding
eventually flows. Underlying the dysfunctionality, there is deep familial love; and this love eventually leads to redemption.
A friend of mine, also a movie lover, told me last week that
he had just seen Spielberg’s Lincoln and did not like it at all. Too much
Spielbergian pulling at the heartstrings, he said. I pointed out that Spielberg
loves to do this and does it well; in fact in his best works, like Schindler’s
list and Saving Private Ryan, our emotions are plucked over and over again. My
friend owned that he had not liked those pictures either. So be forewarned – if
you don’t like Steven Spielberg pictures, you may want to skip Lincoln. Everyone
else should run out and see it.
Based in part on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 history, Team of Rivals: The Political
Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Kushner’s script smartly focuses on the last four months of
President Lincoln’s life, and mostly on January 1865, a time when he and
the ‘radical’ Republicans were trying
desperately to muster enough votes in Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution, banning slavery. There were questions about the
legality of Lincoln’s famed Emacipation Proclamation, and, in any event, it was
generally believed that once the war ended, it’s power and validity would end
as well. Although Republicans were the majority party in the House, a two-thirds
majority was needed to pass the constitutional amendment, and the Democrats were generally opposed. The savage
Civil War was about to end, and Lincoln and his allies wanted the vote on the
amendment to occur before that happened, fearing that national reunification
might dissipate enthusiasm for the cause (or allow Southerners back into the
chamber to vote against it). Yet rumors were flying that the Confederacy was
ready to sue for peace.
After seeing this, I dipped back in the archives and watched John Ford's 1939 Young Mr. Lincoln, starring young Henry Fonda (the film that brought Hank to prominence, in fact). That film is a classic, and worth seeing, depicting Abe back in Springfield Illinois, as an aspiring young attorney. Fonda's Lincoln is ambitious, idealistic, and folksy as hell, and a right good, clever lawyer, too. But Day-Lewis' impersonation is the one for the ages.
