Les Misérables (2012) Tom Hooper

Les Misérables (2012) Tom Hooper [2:37]

You should know a few things from the outset:

1 - I do not like musicals. I loathe musicals. I played trumpet in pit orchestras for several musicals in college (out of obligation) and for the first few years I taught (to make extra money). To this day, there are only two musicals I can stand to listen to or watch: West Side Story and Evita. You may take from that what you will.

2 - I promised Cindy and a couple of our friends that I would watch Les Misérables and that I would watch it with an open mind.

So Cindy (for the second time) and I watched the film Friday night.

I’m going to assume you know the basic story of Les Misérables, so I won’t go into it here. What I will go into is a brief discussion of how different genres and aspects of the arts work in and out of translation:

Anytime you “translate” a work from its original form to another medium, the change of format automatically changes the original story, even if you’re as faithful as possible to the original material. I’m not talking so much about translating Victor Hugo’s novel to a musical - although that certainly will involve monumental changes due to the nature of the materials used/abandoned - but from one similar medium to another.

Let’s say that you go see a play in a theater. Maybe it’s just a simple play with two characters. You’re in the audience and you experience the play. Fine.

Now let’s say that someone (legally or illegally) filmed the play that you just saw and showed it to your spouse or friend. That spouse or friend is going to have a completely different experience from the one you had. The play is the same, but the format changes everything: the lighting, the sound, the visuals. It changes everything even if the camera recording the play is immobile. It has become a different format. 

Now imagine that you’ve seen the Broadway musical Les Misérables live. In order to translate that to the medium of film, many decisions have to be made. The camera can go anywhere the director wants it to go. Your eyes are being manipulated in a way they aren’t in the theatre. Choices in set design, costumes, actors, music, instrumentation, lighting, special effects, make-up... all of these things have now changed because you’re in a different format. Regardless of whether the film version frees the director to expand on the original material or to make it more or less focused in certain areas, decisions have to be made. 

Next, let’s talk about film genres and how they work. We expect certain genres to do certain things. They have certain unspoken rules about what can and can’t happen and when you violate those rules, unfortunate things tend to happen. 

In musicals, it’s not uncommon (heck, it’s practically obligatory) for characters to break out into song. It is a musical, after all. Those moments normally allow the characters to sing about something going on internally in their lives. It might be a solo about what’s on that character’s heart or it might be a two people expressing something in sort of a “mind meld” that they don’t want the rest of the cast at that moment to know about. Time stops, they sing. 

That’s fine. But such songs usually do not exist solely to summarize who the character is and what he/she has done. Most of the early songs of Les Misérables do just that. We don’t get to see what Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) is like because he keeps telling us in song. The same thing with the police inspector Javert (Russell Crowe). Showing is always better than telling, even in musicals.

Maybe the Broadway music does the same thing, but director Tom Hooper thrusts these characters onto the screen and moves them around so quickly that they don’t have time to show us what their characters are like. One of Valjean’s factory workers Fantine (Anne Hathaway) gets ridiculed, loses her job, becomes a prostitute and dies, all in a matter of a few minutes. These characters have no depth because we’ve spent so little time developing them. They become one-dimensional characters with their songs serving as their resumés.   

It’s been awhile, but I don’t think musicals typically do this. 

The best scene in the whole film, the one that does act like a musical, is the  “Master of the House” scene in which we meet Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter as two thieves. The scene (and the song) shows you who these characters are while they are singing about what drives them. This is not a recitation of a resumé, but an exploration of character. By the end of the song, there’s no mistaking who these people are because we’ve seen it for ourselves and have the lyrics that support and enhance these characters. That’s what good musical numbers do. 

In film you can also do close-ups that you can’t do onstage, so Hooper thinks he should take full advantage of that. Let’s completely block out everything else going on during these songs, especially the ravages of the French Revolution, the pain and suffering, the devastation, the starvation, the complete collapse of everything and zoom in closer so we can see every glistening tear on Anne Hathaway’s face, every sweat-filled pore on Hugh Jackman’s face. The close-up is a great invention, but a little goes a long way.

Some of this, no doubt, is to accentuate the much-publicized fact that the actors are doing their own singing as the cameras are rolling. To me this is no great attraction. I’d rather see the actors singing in reaction to and in horror of the grand scale of their surroundings. 

And speaking of the grand scale of the French Revolution, we sure don’t see much of it. I was expecting much more visually, a panoramic view of the scale and scope of the revolution, but we get very little of that, mostly at the beginning and the end of the film. Even the battle scenes seem truncated and clipped. 

In short, it’s very non-cinematic. 

I kept thinking that I would probably like this film if the music were taken out and we just had the basic story. (I know, it’s been done before, but so has just about everything else.)  

Also if I ever did want to see a musical, I’d like to see and hear one in which the principals can actually sing. Some of them can; Jackman does pretty well. Hathaway is passable; with all the emotional turmoil going on in all of her songs, I’ll cut her some slack. Russell Crowe? You’ve got to be kidding. If Javert is going to be a major character with several important songs, you’ve got to have a singer, not a movie star. 

Did I think I was going to enjoy Les Misérables? No. Did I make up my mind to dislike it before I saw it? I don’t think so. I watched it with an open mind and in fact wanted it to be better than I thought it would be. It turned out to be worse, much worse. I don’t know if Les Misérables is a bad musical, but it’s a pretty bad movie. 

1.5/5