Les Miserables
Directed by Tom Hooper, written by Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, Herbert Kretzmer, Jean-Marc Natel, James Fenton and William Nicholson
Hathaway as Fantine
Editor’s Note: I am gratified to see that some critics (see below) are filing negative reviews of this film, if only because I believe this is a work of self-complacent excess, misguided, in my view, from the start. I perfectly understand that money may not have been readily available to Hooper or any director wanting to do a remake of Les Miserables straightforwardly as a drama piece, and not a cinematic transliteration of a proven stage franchise with a worldwide audience (“Les Miz”). But the truth is that Hooper’s obsession to do precisely the latter doomed this piece to a tragic and wasteful destiny: he spent tens of millions of dollars to deliver stunning production value but he also perversely suffocated that accomplishment through the tedious and misguided notion that the actors should all sing every single line of dialogue. This is always risky business in opera and operettas, but at least these often pack enormously appealing musical scores that rescue the conceit from self-destruction. In this case, with a book that contains barely one memorable song (I Dream the Dream), there was simply not enough musicality to keep this leaden construct from sinking ignominiously beneath the waves.
What a pity, Hooper here had the opportunity to top the French benchmark for this classic, a film released in France in 1958 directed by Jean-Paul Le Chanois. With legendary actor Jean Gabin in the lead as Jean Valjean, the production also featured Bourvil as the definitive Thénardier, Bernard Blier as Javert, and Danièle Delorme as Fantine. Giani Esposito, Silvia Monfort (peerless as Éponine), Jimmy Urbain (Gavroche), and Serge Reggiani (an equally haunting Enjolras) rounded out the formidable cast. In any case, considering how many versions of Les Miserables exist, I doubt that Hooper studied this version.
So I feel validated. Two reviews accompany the lead evaluation provided by the folks at WSWS.ORG, always reliable in their tastes and political acumen. The first, by Joe Baltake, takes no prisoners: Baltake does not only dislike the Hooper version, he is bothered by it. His irreverence toward Les Miz is as refreshing as the work itself is stultifying. And then we have David Denby’s delightful analysis of the film. Denby, I suspect, had a great deal of fun writing this one because he undertook his review in the name of public health, an effort to rescue those still victimized by Les Miz as a result of their own silliness. —Patrice Greanville
•••••
Hiram Lee, wsws.org
The screen adaptation of Les Misérables [the wretched ones], the long-running stage musical based on Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 novel, has found a large audience and a mixed but generally favorable critical reception. The film was recently nominated for eight Academy Awards, including in the best picture category.
The work takes up major social and historical themes, or at least borrows them from Hugo (1802-1885), one of France’s leading Romantic writers and an enormously popular figure. In Tom Hooper’s film we encounter the most perverse forms of social inequality in 19th century France, a brutal system of slave labor in the jails and the obsessive and vindictive law-and-order mentality embodied by the merciless Inspector Javert. In the movie’s climactic moments, we are taken behind the barricades of the June Rebellion of 1832, a republican uprising against the monarchy of Louis-Philippe.
Audiences are starved for serious historical material, as the popular response to Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln attests. Large themes, however, do not automatically make for great art and Les Misérables suffers from significant artistic weaknesses, both as a film and a piece of music.
Briefly, the story is this: in 1815, Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) is released from prison after serving 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his niece. Out on parole, his past and reputation prevent him from finding work. Valjean eventually breaks parole and assumes a new identity. Within another decade, he becomes a wealthy factory owner and mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer.
When a worker named Fantine (Anne Hathaway), employed in Valjean’s factory, is unjustly fired by a shop manager and meets a tragic end in the streets, Valjean agrees to take her daughter Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) under his care. By this time, however, the brutal Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe) has uncovered Valjean’s true identity, forcing the latter and Cosette to spend their life on the run. The cat and mouse game comes to an end at the barricades of the June Rebellion where Valjean goes to rescue a young student revolutionary with whom Cosette has fallen in love.
For a work so rich in themes and the dramatic and musical possibilities that go with them, one is struck by how little real drama there is in the work. At two hours and 40 minutes, the film becomes extremely tedious.
The music by French composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer are very poor and thin. One does not find in these compositions the sense of conflict, character and compelling narrative that one finds animating superior works such as West Side Story or Porgy and Bess. Les Misérables is a sung-through musical, meaning every line of dialogue is sung. This “recitative” is largely repetitive, dull and lifeless. The film’s characters, apparently conscious of their every motive, simply state again and again who they are and what they are up to. With everything spelled out, there is nothing for the audience to discover on its own. Virtually any drama is killed in the process. It’s as if one sat down to a meal only to have the chef read out the ingredients of the various dishes instead. There’s very little that’s satisfying in that.
In an effort perhaps to make up for the deficiencies in the material, the actors tend to lay everything on the line. With a vengeance. The overwrought intensity in many of the performances is overwhelming, all the more so because director Hooper ( John Adams, The King’s Speech ) shoots so much of the movie in invasive, almost claustrophobic close-ups. His actors—brutalized, covered in mud, heads shaven, teeth missing—sing their guts out and weep uncontrollably for hours. We are not moved by this so much as we are demanded to be moved. The work is pushed with considerable force in the direction of melodrama.
The one scene in Les Misérables that has attracted the most attention is Anne Hathaway’s rendition of the musical’s best-known song, “I Dreamed a Dream.” Hathaway sings it as well as anyone has, though her voice is choked by tears during some parts of the performance. One can see why the song, about a dream of a better life crushed by the most brutal social misery, connects with so many who struggle in their daily lives. And the right performer, like Hathaway, can at times lift the piece above its limitations. But this song, like the rest, is terribly overwrought and melodramatic. More than a “tearjerker,” the song and performance reach out and absolutely wring the tears from audience members’ eyes.
All of this adds up to an experience that is simply exhausting. At the end of the almost three-hour film, the viewer leaves the theater as if returning to the surface after a long time working underground, and not much wiser for the experience.
Hiram Lee serves as a critic with the World Socialist Web Site, affiliated with the Social Equality Party.
ADDENDUM
The anti-musical
Joe Baltake, Passionate Moviegoer
“Les Miz” – kinda strange for a musical
Tom Hooper’s film of the cult pop opera, “Les Misérables,” is one of those movies that’s oblivious to criticism.
It has a built-in audience, a rather sizable one, which loves it, and anyone who doesn’t love it is, well, a wretch (to borrow from and translate the production’s title), someone clearly deserving of his/her misery.
Me? I didn’t like it. Yes, it’s bad, but actually, the worst thing that I can say about “Les Misérables,” whose stage productions I managed to avoid for more than two decades now, is that it’s exactly what I expected it to be – an extravaganza for tourists, at turns middle-brow and pretentious.
Also tedious, bloated and exhausting.
Given that it’s based on the imposing Victor Hugo tome, in which just about everyone suffers and then dies, it’s no surprise that this is yet another danceless musical, despite a credit to Liam Steel. Dancing would be way too joyful for the funereal mood that pervades the material here. Still, I missed that particular element. My hunch is that Hooper directed everything in “Les Miz” all by himself, handling all of it, even those many “songs,” with the same dull, monotone touch.
A musical without dancing? Kinda strange for a … musical. A musical without dancing is, well, only half a musical.
Finally, most of the buzz around “Les Miz” has to do with Hooper’s decision to have the film’s interminable list of songs – all 50 of them – sung “live,” as if that was an edgy decision. But, frankly, there was no other way to film this material, given that most of the “songs” here aren’t songs at all but long stretches of sustained dialogue, set to droning music.
Hooper’s only other option was to dub/loop the entire movie.
The songs in Les Miz” are, more or less, internal monologues. Its characters “sing” to themselves or directly to the audience, mostly to themselves, but rarely to other characters. They don’t connect musically.
“Les Misérables,” in the end, isn’t a musical at all. It’s an anti-musical.
THERE’S STILL HOPE FOR PEOPLE WHO LOVE “LES MIS”
by David Denby, The New Yorker
I want to render a public service. I want to suggest that even if you were deeply moved by “Les Mis,” you can still save your soul. I don’t think you are damned forever. Salvation awaits. I realize that we are not supposed to argue about taste. De gustibus non est disputandum, as some Latin fellow said. But, in fact, critics do nothing but argue about taste. And I realize that emotion is even harder and riskier to argue about. But, as we have new experiences, emotions change. Therefore, in the interest of public health, I will try to bring cures to the troubled. But first, a few words about the movie version of “Les Misérables.”
I had never seen the show or heard the score; I came to the material fresh, without preconception, and throughout the entire hundred and fifty-seven minutes I sat cowering in my seat, lost in shame and chagrin. This movie is not just bad (“bombast,” as Anthony Lane characterized it in a wonderful review in the current issue of the magazine). It’s terrible; it’s dreadful. Overbearing, pretentious, madly repetitive. I was doubly embarrassed because all around me, in a very large theatre, people were sitting rapt, awed, absolutely silent, only to burst into applause after some of the numbers, and I couldn’t help wondering what in the world had happened to the taste of my countrymen—the Americans (Americans!) who created and loved almost all the greatest musicals ever made.
Didn’t any of my neighbors notice how absurdly gloomy and dolorous the story was? How the dominant blue-gray coloring was like a pall hanging over the material? How the absence of dancing concentrated all the audience’s pleasure on the threadbare songs? How tiresome a reverse fashion show the movie provided in rags, carbuncles, gimpy legs, and bad teeth? How awkward the staging was? How strange to have actors singing right into the camera, a normally benign recording instrument, which seems, in scene after scene, bent on performing a tonsillectomy?
Hugh Jackman, as the aggrieved Jean Valjean, delivers his numbers in a quavering, quivering, stricken voice—Jackman doesn’t sing, he brays. Russell Crowe as Javert, his implacable pursuer, stands on parapets overlooking all of Paris and dolefully sings of his duty to the law. Then he does it again. Everything is repeated, emphasized, doubled, as if to congratulate us on emotions we’ve already had. The young women, trembling like leaves in a storm, battered this way and that by men, never exercise much will or intelligence. Anne Hathaway, as Fantine, gets her teeth pulled, her hair chopped, and her body violated in a coffin box—a Joan of Arc who only suffers, a pure victim who never asserts herself. Hathaway, a total pro, gives everything to the role, exploiting those enormous eyes and wide mouth for its tragic-clown effect. Like almost everyone else, she sings through tears. Most of the performances are damp.
The music is juvenile stuff—tonic-dominant, without harmonic richness or surprise. Listen to any score by Richard Rodgers or Leonard Bernstein or Fritz Loewe if you want to hear genuine melodic invention. I was so upset by the banality of the music that I felt like hiring a hall and staging a nationalist rally. “My fellow-countrymen, we are the people of Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin! Cole Porter and George Gershwin, Frank Loesser and Burton Lane! We taught the world what popular melody was! What rhythmic inventiveness was! Let us unite to overthrow the banality of these French hacks!” (And the British hacks, too, for that matter.) Alas, the hall is filled with people weeping over “Les Mis.”
Is it sacrilege to point out that the Victor Hugo novel, stripped of its social detail and reduced to its melodramatic elements, no longer makes much sense? That the story doesn’t connect to our world (which may well be the reason for the show’s popularity)? Jean Valjean becomes a convict slave for nineteen years after stealing some bread for his sister’s child. He has done nothing wrong, yet he spends the rest of his life redeeming himself by committing one noble act after another, while Javert pursues him all over France. Wherever Valjean goes, Javert shows up; he’s everywhere at once, like the Joker in “The Dark Knight,” who was at least intended to be a fanciful creation.
Doesn’t Javert have anything else to do with his life? He seems less a relentless avatar of the law than merely daft—and a melodramatic contrivance. He doesn’t even have a streak of perversity—in his own stupid way, he’s meant to be noble, a man of conscience. Dare I suggest that the mutual obsession of Valjean and Javert is actually boring and morally insignificant? The relationship never develops; the two men never push beyond the surface of each other’s characters. And the implications of Jean Valjean’s complete innocence are dismaying. Suppose he had actually committed some sort of crime as a young man. Are we to infer that he wouldn’t be worth our tears if—like the rest of us—he were even slightly culpable? Saints do not make interesting heroes.
Every emotion in the movie is elemental. There’s no normal range, no offhand or incidental moments—it’s all injustice, love, heartbreak, cruelty, self-sacrifice, nobility, baseness. Which brings us to heart of the material’s appeal. As everyone knows, the stage show was a killer for girls between the ages of eight and about fourteen. If they have seen “Les Mis” and responded to it as young women, they remain loyal to the show—and to the emotions it evoked—forever. At that age, the sense of victimization is very strong, and “Les Mis” is all about victimization. That the story has nothing to with our own time makes the emotions in it more—not less—accessible, because feeling is not sullied by real-world associations. But whom, may I ask, is everyone crying for? For Jean Valjean? For Fantine? Fantine is hardly on the screen before she is destroyed. Indeed, I’ve heard of people crying on the way into the movie theatre. It can’t be the material itself that’s producing those tears. “Les Mis” offers emotion… about emotion.
But, you say, what’s wrong with a good cry? What harm does it do anyone? No harm. But I would like to point out that tears engineered this crudely are not emotions honestly earned, that the most cynical dictators, as Pauline Kael used to say, have manipulated emotions with the same kind of kitsch appeal to gut feelings. Sentimentality in art is corrosive because it rewards us for imprecise perceptions and meaningless hatreds. Revolution breaks out in “Les Mis.” What revolution? Against whom? In favor of what? It’s just revolution—the noble sacrifice of handsome, ardent boys taking on merciless power. The French military, those canaille, gun down the beautiful boys. It’s all so generic. The vagueness is insulting.
And now, the real point: our great musicals were something miraculous. They were a blessed artifice devoted to pleasure, to ease and movement, exultation in the human body, jokes and happy times, the giddiness of high hopes. Even the serious musicals, like “Carousel” and “West Side Story,” had their funny moments. (In fairness, there is comedy in “Les Mis,” in the form of the larcenous innkeepers played by Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen, but they do the same damn pickpocket joke so many times that they hardly provide relief.) If you want emotion in a musical, please, if you’ve never seen it, catch the George Cukor version of “A Star is Born,” in which Judy Garland (John Lahr agrees with me on this) produces the single greatest moment in film-musical history. Late at night in a club, when she thinks no one is listening (while James Mason lurks in the shadows), she sings the Harold Arlen torch song “The Man That Got Away.” Overwhelming.
Here are my two cures for those suffering from absorption in “Les Mis.” Both of them are obvious.
Cure No. 1: Download the Astaire-Rogers “Top Hat” from Amazon. Throw it on a big screen if you can. Or download “Singin’ in the Rain,” with Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds, or “The Band Wagon,” with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, or “An American in Paris,” with Kelly again. I will tell you right now that these movies will not make you cry. But if you’ve never seen them before, they may open an entirely new path to pleasure. See them twice, and you will put aside the maudlin nonsense of “Les Mis” forever.
Cure No, 2. “Les Mis,” as everyone knows, is sung all the way through, like an opera. It’s an opera, however, with music not worth listening to. But if you enjoy the convention of an entirely sung play, I suggest listening to another successful piece of musical theatre based on a work by Victor Hugo—Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” which has been running continuously more or less everywhere since 1851. “Rigoletto” is an adaptation of the Hugo play “Le Roi S’Amuse.” Another cruel and melodramatic story: A hunchback in a royal court tries to save his daughter from the overwhelming attractions of a seductive and handsome duke. He fails, the daughter dies, and the hunchback is crushed by fate, by curses, by his own efforts to save her. The entire piece, which is almost an hour shorter than “Les Mis,” exhibits a conciseness, power, and lyrical invention that remains devastating on the tenth hearing. No one would call “Rigoletto” sentimental. It is heartless and fragile, enraged and wounded, frivolous and tragic. Genuine emotions. The old Maria Callas performance, with Tito Gobbi as Rigoletto and Giuseppe di Stefano as the Duke, and with Tullio Serafin conducting the La Scala forces, is still the best version, and it can be had for exactly $11.99 from ArkivMusic. Walk gingerly into the dark, an act at a time. Therein lies salvation.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/01/theres-still-hope-for-people-who-love-les-miserables.html#ixzz2J2dKZaLy
