Les Misérables (2012): Tragic, Not Magic

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.