Movie Chile Review

Les Miserables

By: Jonathan Richards
Published online: Friday, December 21, 2012
Appeared in: Pasateimpo

Capsule review

The stage musical version of Victor Hugo’s great novel is the longest- running musical of all time. It has been seen by more than 60 million people in all sorts of languages and countries. This movie could put an end to all that. In the hands of director Tom Hooper, who guided The King’s Speech with such subtlety and grace, it is garish, shrill, and breathtakingly over the top. The songs are still there, up close and personal like you’ve never seen and heard them, and be careful what you wish for. The cast (headed by Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe) performs bravely, if not always wisely or too well. Opens Tuesday, Dec. 25. Rated PG-13. 158 minutes.

Full Review

Les Misérables, musical, rated PG, Regal Stadium 14, onion

I should begin with a disclaimer. I am not among those who love Les Misérables — the stage musical, not Victor Hugo’s great novel of crime, punishment, and redemption. I saw a production of the Claude-Michel Schonberg/Alain Boubil musical years ago when the play was in its infancy, only beginning its gargantuan rise on its way to become “the world’s longest running musical, seen by over 60 million people,” as the film’s website proclaims. They used to say 60 million Frenchmen couldn’t be wrong. I don’t think they still say that. In any case, these can’t all be Frenchmen.

I saw a performance of Les Misérables from the last rows of a vast auditorium in Los Angeles, and I was inclined to make allowances for my disappointment on the grounds that not much could be expected from that distance. It seemed like a bunch of people stomping around a postage-stamp stage in the semi-darkness singing urgent, endless, unmemorable songs. If I had seen it from the expensive seats, I thought, it might have held up better.

Now I have seen the movie, and I realize what a bullet I dodged back then. The close-ups! The prosthetic veins standing out on Hugh Jackman’s forehead! The tears and mucous glistening on Anne Hathaway’s face below a skull of brutally hacked hair! Russell Crowe’s grim brooding stare as he gamely pushes uncertain sounds from his untrained throat! And all this magnified to several stories of height and acres of breadth on an enormous screen; well, it’s something to threaten with to keep unruly children in line.

The Les Misérables musical is much beloved, and love is a thing that can’t be explained. But to the ear tuned to the works of Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, and Stephen Sondheim, it comes as chalk on a blackboard to hear a lyric like: “Well, of course he now denies it,/You’d expect that of a con,/But he couldn’t run forever,/No, not even Jean Valjean!”

The bones of Hugo’s stirring epic find the convict Jean Valjean (Jackman) serving out a sentence of 20 years at hard labor in the prison galleys — five years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving family, the rest tacked on for attempts to escape. Paroled, but unable to find work or shelter because of his convict’s passport, he steals the church silver from a priest who has shown him kindness. When he is apprehended, the priest tells the police he gave Valjean the silver, sparing him from a return to prison for life.

It is impossible here to sum up the serpentine twists and turns of one of literature’s greatest, and longest, novels. Valjean changes identity, becomes a respected citizen, adopts Cosette, the child of the dying Fantine (Hathaway), raises her to lovely womanhood as his beloved daughter (Amanda Seyfried), selflessly saves the unfortunate, but cannot escape his past. He is pursued by Inspector Javert (Crowe), an obsessive instrument of the law for whom the word implacable might have been coined. The Paris student revolt of 1832 erupts, Cosette falls in love with one of its leaders, Marius (Eddie Redmayne), a lot of people are killed, and much misery is endured before it all rolls, tragically but happily, to a close.

The Hugo story is a cherished classic. But the execution here, in the hands of director Tom Hooper, who guided The King’s Speech with such subtlety and grace, is garish, shrill, and breathtakingly over the top. Hooper never misses a chance to worship at the shrine of the obvious, from the bearded Valjean silhouetted beneath a cross on a Calvary-like hill to a plucky urchin dying on the barricades.

One of the ballyhooed features of this production is that it presents its singing (and it is virtually all singing) live — which is to say that the actors perform the songs directly in front of the cameras, not lip-synching to recording studio-produced efforts as is the traditional practice. This does give immediacy to the performances, but it also exposes the weaknesses of the voices, even the good ones, and they’re not all good. Crowe in particular suffers from this lack of cover. Jackman, with his musical-theater roots, probably fares the best, although they all hit some notes that will set your teeth on edge.

Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter provide the comic relief, such as it is, in the form of the unscrupulous innkeepers the Thénardiers, roles they attack with such unrestrained gusto that it becomes an avalanche of elements of Sweeney Todd, Cinderella, and the Three Stooges.

It may be that the stage musical’s legions of fans will embrace this movie in spite of its grievous short- comings. The songs that thrilled those 60 million are still there, up close and personal like you’ve never seen and heard them, and be careful what you wish for. The cast performs bravely, if not always wisely or too well. Hathaway sacrifices her hair and a few teeth in a grand gesture of selflessness, although her return at the end will reassure audiences that hair continues to grow, and be groomed, after death.