Jan. 02, 2013 - Issue #898: Apocalypse Not?
Les Misérables
It’s unclear—other than the profit (it’s already grossed $120-million)—why Les Misérables, Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 novel and a hit 1980s musical, would need to be turned into a 2012 movie-musical. Director Tom Hooper doesn’t make it any clearer. This two-and-a-half-hour sing-song through early 19th century French strife never pauses for breath, gravitas or political power, and ends up none too note-worthy.So much of the movie’s in close-up, it seems better made for TV. Scene transitions are non-existent and the pace is relentless: Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), just freed from jail in a port town, immediately wanders in the mountains; Fantine (Anne Hathaway) plummets from employment to prostitution to death in mere minutes; her grown daughter Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) magically appears beside beloved Marius (Eddie Redmayne) after Valjean rescued him from the 1832 revolution’s street barricade. The effect is to drain coincidence—a staple of 19th-century literature—of its drama and to make early 1800s French under-class life a paper-thin backdrop.
Making the woe worse, what’s visually obvious is hammered home in song: “I journey through the night” (yes, you’re travelling at night), “I love him” (already blindingly obvious), etc. Some songs bleed together into the violins’ burble, muddying like the bluish-grey palette Hooper insists on having most shots become overshadowed by. Action sequences whir along confusingly. As the musical rushes on, the movie becomes more non-cinematic.
In those rare times the movie slows, the prose-force of degradation hits home: Valjean’s debasement by the “law”; Fantine’s shame and poverty. The comic relief, from Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter as the thieving Thénardiers, is a welcome dollop of colour and juice ... that still seems out of Oliver! (if it’s the 19th century, you’ll never out-comic Dickens).
Les Misérables quickly abandons its themes of the time, especially the conflict between Christian duty and Christian mercy (not that religion is subtly suggested when the camera swoops over a church’s cross). Its misty-eyed view of children, Javert (Russell Crowe) as stalking avenger, and the breeziness of love over politics are conventionally modern day. All this over-the-top selling of emotion is enough to make you look around for a moment before exiting—where’s the theatre’s gift shop, hawking more Hugo-not spinoffs and memorabilia?
Now playing
Directed by Tom Hooper
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