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Les Miserables musical
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Review: ‘Les Misérables’ Features Good Talent But Director Tom Hooper Is Hardly Master of the House
Movie Review By Caitlin Hughes on December 20, 2012 | Be the First To Commen
There is a lot of buzz about the live singing on the set Les Misérables. All of the actors sang as the cameras rolled rather than recording in a studio first, and that’s a great accomplishment since many of the actors have wonderful singing voices and don’t exactly need autotuning. This live singing in combination with the film’s grand scope – finally, a film of the legendary Boublil/Schönberg musical! – is supposed to make this a great film. But, very sadly, it does not. While the film is filled with a lot of great talent and certainly is watchable, it buckles under the often mind-blowingly heavy-handed direction by Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) and never becomes the epic piece of cinema that it so clearly set out to be.
The story is fairly common knowledge (and quite involved), but Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) is finishing up his prison sentence for breaking into a house and stealing a loaf of bread. He thinks he is free, but because of being on a stringent parole at the hand of Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe) he cannot get employment after his sentence is over. Valjean vows to make another go of it and when we find him years later, he is living under an assumed identity as the mayor of a small town.
Valjean pays his good fortune forward when he helps factory worker-come-prostitute Fantine (Anne Hathaway). After Fantine’s death, he bails her young daughter Cosette (Isabelle Allen) out of an abusive boarding house run by Thénardier and his wife (Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter).
Cosette eventually grows up (and becomes Amanda Seyfried) and she falls in love with French Revolutionary Marius (Eddie Redmayne). But can Valjean learn to let go of his little girl, especially when they are still constantly under siege by lawman Javert?
The main issue here is that Hooper ultimately did a very poor job of directing. The film is shot in a staggering series of close-ups with little purpose — an odd choice, given the amount of the film budget that likely went to costumes and sets. The close-ups drastically shrink the potentially large scope of the film. It’s as if Hooper went to see The Expendables and took notes on how to make it look like someone left the TV on the “zoom” setting.
Hooper’s mistakes don’t end there, however. There are many clichéd shots of people singing off balconies à la Evita. There is even one shot that goes to the heavy-handed lengths of Javert singing off a rooftop next to a giant stone eagle. Get the symbolism?
The sets and costumes are also extremely inconsistent, running the gamut from highly stylized to “gritty” and realistic. For instance, the sets of historical French landmarks like Notre Dame look like the real thing and the majority of the principle actors look fairly authentically dressed. However, the prostitutes and the Thénardiers look like they stepped out of a Tim Burton movie, the poor people are so hideous that they look like zombies on The Walking Dead, and some of the village sets look like they were taken off the stage of the Broadway show in that they are extremely artificial-looking. Because of the unevenness, the look and feel of the film never quite gels, especially when Hooper resorts to his frequent use of an obvious green screen.
Of course, Hooper’s frequent missteps cannot obscure the amazing music that is featured in the film, and most of the actors do a tremendous job at performing, both in action and in song. Jackman and Crowe are fine as the warring Valjean and Javert and, for one example, they bring it in “The Confrontation.” Much has been said against Crowe’s singing voice not being up to snuff, but he is actually quite effective since he acts the hell out of the songs and his voice never sounds forced or inauthentic. Even though he’s been on Broadway in real life, Jackman could take a few pointers from Crowe – he warbles a bit too much and butchers classics like “Bring Him Home.”
With a few exceptions, the rest of the cast also delivers. Hathaway is a standout as Fantine and squeezes the maximum amount of emotive power from her limited time on screen. Seyfried and Redmayne work quite well as the vanilla young lovers Cosette and Marius, and their singing voices are more-than Broadway caliber. Though the real stars here are Samantha Barks (Eponine), Aaron Tveit (Enjolras), and Daniel Huttlestone (Gavroche). Barks and Huttlestone starred in the recent London production of Les Misérables, and Tveit starred in the recent Broadway production of Catch Me If You Can. Their French Revolutionaries breathe much-needed life into the film’s third act, and their voices capture an impassioned take on the material.
On the other end of the spectrum, Sacha Baron Cohen is the only actor in the film who made the odd choice to intermittently alternate between the Thénardier-traditional cockney and a French accent. Hooper probably should have reined that one in.
Les Misérables is certainly a great musical, but it would have been interesting to see what a different director would have done with the material. At about two and a half hours, the film feels even longer, even though a lot of the songs were cut out and the plot would likely be hazy for people not overly familiar with the book or the stage musical. There was a lot of anticipation behind the release of this film, and it’s likely that many people will still like it and shell out the cash to see it in theaters, but it mainly reads as a big missed opportunity to be something great.
The Upside: The majority of the cast really delivers, especially the stage-based newcomers Aaron Tveit and Samantha Barks.
The Downside: Tom Hooper’s direction is unbelievably heavy-handed and his insistence on using so many close-ups is almost baffling.
On the Side: Paul Rudd and David Wain do a humdinger of a job at singing “The Confrontation.” Drink it in here.
Movie Review By Caitlin Hughes on December 20, 2012 | Be the First To Commen
There is a lot of buzz about the live singing on the set Les Misérables. All of the actors sang as the cameras rolled rather than recording in a studio first, and that’s a great accomplishment since many of the actors have wonderful singing voices and don’t exactly need autotuning. This live singing in combination with the film’s grand scope – finally, a film of the legendary Boublil/Schönberg musical! – is supposed to make this a great film. But, very sadly, it does not. While the film is filled with a lot of great talent and certainly is watchable, it buckles under the often mind-blowingly heavy-handed direction by Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) and never becomes the epic piece of cinema that it so clearly set out to be.
The story is fairly common knowledge (and quite involved), but Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) is finishing up his prison sentence for breaking into a house and stealing a loaf of bread. He thinks he is free, but because of being on a stringent parole at the hand of Inspector Javert (Russell Crowe) he cannot get employment after his sentence is over. Valjean vows to make another go of it and when we find him years later, he is living under an assumed identity as the mayor of a small town.
Valjean pays his good fortune forward when he helps factory worker-come-prostitute Fantine (Anne Hathaway). After Fantine’s death, he bails her young daughter Cosette (Isabelle Allen) out of an abusive boarding house run by Thénardier and his wife (Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter).
Cosette eventually grows up (and becomes Amanda Seyfried) and she falls in love with French Revolutionary Marius (Eddie Redmayne). But can Valjean learn to let go of his little girl, especially when they are still constantly under siege by lawman Javert?
The main issue here is that Hooper ultimately did a very poor job of directing. The film is shot in a staggering series of close-ups with little purpose — an odd choice, given the amount of the film budget that likely went to costumes and sets. The close-ups drastically shrink the potentially large scope of the film. It’s as if Hooper went to see The Expendables and took notes on how to make it look like someone left the TV on the “zoom” setting.
Hooper’s mistakes don’t end there, however. There are many clichéd shots of people singing off balconies à la Evita. There is even one shot that goes to the heavy-handed lengths of Javert singing off a rooftop next to a giant stone eagle. Get the symbolism?
The sets and costumes are also extremely inconsistent, running the gamut from highly stylized to “gritty” and realistic. For instance, the sets of historical French landmarks like Notre Dame look like the real thing and the majority of the principle actors look fairly authentically dressed. However, the prostitutes and the Thénardiers look like they stepped out of a Tim Burton movie, the poor people are so hideous that they look like zombies on The Walking Dead, and some of the village sets look like they were taken off the stage of the Broadway show in that they are extremely artificial-looking. Because of the unevenness, the look and feel of the film never quite gels, especially when Hooper resorts to his frequent use of an obvious green screen.
Of course, Hooper’s frequent missteps cannot obscure the amazing music that is featured in the film, and most of the actors do a tremendous job at performing, both in action and in song. Jackman and Crowe are fine as the warring Valjean and Javert and, for one example, they bring it in “The Confrontation.” Much has been said against Crowe’s singing voice not being up to snuff, but he is actually quite effective since he acts the hell out of the songs and his voice never sounds forced or inauthentic. Even though he’s been on Broadway in real life, Jackman could take a few pointers from Crowe – he warbles a bit too much and butchers classics like “Bring Him Home.”
With a few exceptions, the rest of the cast also delivers. Hathaway is a standout as Fantine and squeezes the maximum amount of emotive power from her limited time on screen. Seyfried and Redmayne work quite well as the vanilla young lovers Cosette and Marius, and their singing voices are more-than Broadway caliber. Though the real stars here are Samantha Barks (Eponine), Aaron Tveit (Enjolras), and Daniel Huttlestone (Gavroche). Barks and Huttlestone starred in the recent London production of Les Misérables, and Tveit starred in the recent Broadway production of Catch Me If You Can. Their French Revolutionaries breathe much-needed life into the film’s third act, and their voices capture an impassioned take on the material.
On the other end of the spectrum, Sacha Baron Cohen is the only actor in the film who made the odd choice to intermittently alternate between the Thénardier-traditional cockney and a French accent. Hooper probably should have reined that one in.
Les Misérables is certainly a great musical, but it would have been interesting to see what a different director would have done with the material. At about two and a half hours, the film feels even longer, even though a lot of the songs were cut out and the plot would likely be hazy for people not overly familiar with the book or the stage musical. There was a lot of anticipation behind the release of this film, and it’s likely that many people will still like it and shell out the cash to see it in theaters, but it mainly reads as a big missed opportunity to be something great.
The Upside: The majority of the cast really delivers, especially the stage-based newcomers Aaron Tveit and Samantha Barks.
The Downside: Tom Hooper’s direction is unbelievably heavy-handed and his insistence on using so many close-ups is almost baffling.
On the Side: Paul Rudd and David Wain do a humdinger of a job at singing “The Confrontation.” Drink it in here.
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How disappointing is Les Misérables? For the rest of this critique, I’m not even going to give it the courtesy of an accent aigu (that’s the “e” with a little diagonal line on top of it, you leptons). You only get one, Les Miserables, and that was just for Anne Hathaway. The rest of Les Miserables is the kind of film that makes you just want to slap it and yell, “From the DIAPHRAGM!”
The film, an adaptation of the over 30-year-old stage production (previously a concept album) based on Victor Hugo’s 1832 novel, has decades if not centuries of reputation behind it. Normally, one would imagine that this history of classic literature and wildly successful stage productions – and at least one disappointing film version starring Liam Neeson – would raise the expectations for Les Miserables, setting it up for inevitable failure. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. That very legacy has the tragic effect of making Tom Hooper’s new adaptation of Les Miserables seem better than it really is. The music, from a compositional standpoint, is stirring enough on its own that the film itself is nearly incidental. You could close their eyes and think that Hooper’s Les Miserables is pretty darned good; or at least, you could if more than half the cast could handle the enormity of the music they’ve been given to perform.
But keeping your eyes open for Les Miserables doesn’t do Hooper’s movie any favors. Tom Hooper’s previous film, The King’s Speech, was a decent if unmemorable Oscar-winner, and boasted performances fine enough to overlook exactly how humdrum the actual cinematic storytelling was. The director was thoroughly capable of letting The King’s Speech, a small-scale production about British people having conversations in good-looking rooms, play itself out straight. The larger scale of Les Miserables, taking place as it does over the course of decades and climaxing in a revolutionary conflict, demands more complexity than Hooper seems able to provide. He opens strong, with an impressive image of prisoners hauling an enormous ship into a harbor with their bare hands, but the grandiosity peaks early, and for the rest of Les Miserables’ production we’re treated to such brilliant filmmaking techniques as instructing actors to sing up into the sky and then cutting to a shot of them from a bird’s-eye view.
It seems daring the first time Hooper lets an entire song to play out in a medium shot, allowing Anne Hathaway – one of the few performers in Les Miserables who can both sing and act simultaneously – to act the hell out of the film’s show-stopping number, “I Dreamed a Dream.” After a while you stop seeing her performance altogether and instead your brain starts uploading images of her Oscar getting engraved months in advance, since it’s the kind of song – like Dreamgirls’ “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” – that would earn any actor an Academy Award for simply performing it with base competence. Anne Hathaway is far beyond the rest of Les Miserables’ production, and imbues her number with a special kind of power that, indeed, makes all the Oscar talk seem understandable, albeit not necessarily necessary.
But not every performer in Les Miserables can handle the wall-to-wall music with the same level of craftsmanship. Russell Crowe, in particular, seems to have been handed a part – that of the obsessed lawman Javert – far beyond his vocal range, and Hugh Jackman has a tendency to give up singing altogether whenever real acting is necessary. Although most of the main cast, consisting of prominent Hollywood talent like Crowe, Jackman, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, is thoroughly capable of conveying their characters, they often seem stymied by the requirement to belt out operatic musical numbers at the same time. As such, minor characters – soldiers, for example, with only one lyric to their credit in the movie – manage to outshine all the award-winners, probably (one suspects) because they have actually received the training necessary to properly convey this kind of material.
The story of Les Miserables is a potent one, and like the music, it elevates the actual filmmaking by its enduring power. Jean Valjean (Jackman) has been imprisoned for 19 years after stealing a loaf of bread, and after his release finds God and breaks parole to carve out a new life, free of the harsh persecution of former convicts. He becomes such an upstanding member of the community that the lawman Javert (Crowe) no longer recognizes him. But Valjean discovers that another man is going to be sent to jail for his crimes and, unwilling to bear the weight of the guilt that would bring him, he reveals his identity. Javert begins a dogged chase, motivated as he is by the letter of the law regardless of context, and Valjean retreats once again into hiding with a young child, Cosette (Isabelle Allen), whom he has vowed to protect after her mother, Fantine (Anne Hathaway), has had her life destroyed because Valjean was too distracted by Javert’s investigation to help her. Eventually, Cosette grows up into Amanda Seyfried, and her story of young love with the French revolutionary Marius (Eddie Redmayne) becomes another obstacle to her safety, and Valjean must again has to weigh the risk of doing the right thing in God’s eyes against making his own, already difficult life nearly impossible to manage.
The themes of morality vs. practicality remain as potent as ever, and the sweeping arc of Valjean and Javert’s journeys, set against a thematically meaningful time in French history, give the actual story of Les Miserables a grandness that Hooper’s film can never seem to match. It’s capable filmmaking in service of one of the great works of literature, and a musical with overwhelming theatricality trusted to a cast at best sporadically capable of performing their parts on the multiple levels necessary to actually do their jobs right. They gave a barrel of nails to a team of craftsmen wielding socket wrenches, and to their credit, those nails wound up in the wood; bent, certainly, and barely keeping the structure intact, but they are at least where they need to be. Les Miserables gets the deed done, but deserves no extra credit for all its hard work. It’s as good as it can be and still adequately hide behind its source material. Any worse and we’d see Les Miserables clearly for the disappointing production it really is. Any better and it might have been a genuinely great film.
The film, an adaptation of the over 30-year-old stage production (previously a concept album) based on Victor Hugo’s 1832 novel, has decades if not centuries of reputation behind it. Normally, one would imagine that this history of classic literature and wildly successful stage productions – and at least one disappointing film version starring Liam Neeson – would raise the expectations for Les Miserables, setting it up for inevitable failure. In fact, the opposite seems to be true. That very legacy has the tragic effect of making Tom Hooper’s new adaptation of Les Miserables seem better than it really is. The music, from a compositional standpoint, is stirring enough on its own that the film itself is nearly incidental. You could close their eyes and think that Hooper’s Les Miserables is pretty darned good; or at least, you could if more than half the cast could handle the enormity of the music they’ve been given to perform.
But keeping your eyes open for Les Miserables doesn’t do Hooper’s movie any favors. Tom Hooper’s previous film, The King’s Speech, was a decent if unmemorable Oscar-winner, and boasted performances fine enough to overlook exactly how humdrum the actual cinematic storytelling was. The director was thoroughly capable of letting The King’s Speech, a small-scale production about British people having conversations in good-looking rooms, play itself out straight. The larger scale of Les Miserables, taking place as it does over the course of decades and climaxing in a revolutionary conflict, demands more complexity than Hooper seems able to provide. He opens strong, with an impressive image of prisoners hauling an enormous ship into a harbor with their bare hands, but the grandiosity peaks early, and for the rest of Les Miserables’ production we’re treated to such brilliant filmmaking techniques as instructing actors to sing up into the sky and then cutting to a shot of them from a bird’s-eye view.
It seems daring the first time Hooper lets an entire song to play out in a medium shot, allowing Anne Hathaway – one of the few performers in Les Miserables who can both sing and act simultaneously – to act the hell out of the film’s show-stopping number, “I Dreamed a Dream.” After a while you stop seeing her performance altogether and instead your brain starts uploading images of her Oscar getting engraved months in advance, since it’s the kind of song – like Dreamgirls’ “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” – that would earn any actor an Academy Award for simply performing it with base competence. Anne Hathaway is far beyond the rest of Les Miserables’ production, and imbues her number with a special kind of power that, indeed, makes all the Oscar talk seem understandable, albeit not necessarily necessary.
But not every performer in Les Miserables can handle the wall-to-wall music with the same level of craftsmanship. Russell Crowe, in particular, seems to have been handed a part – that of the obsessed lawman Javert – far beyond his vocal range, and Hugh Jackman has a tendency to give up singing altogether whenever real acting is necessary. Although most of the main cast, consisting of prominent Hollywood talent like Crowe, Jackman, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, is thoroughly capable of conveying their characters, they often seem stymied by the requirement to belt out operatic musical numbers at the same time. As such, minor characters – soldiers, for example, with only one lyric to their credit in the movie – manage to outshine all the award-winners, probably (one suspects) because they have actually received the training necessary to properly convey this kind of material.
The story of Les Miserables is a potent one, and like the music, it elevates the actual filmmaking by its enduring power. Jean Valjean (Jackman) has been imprisoned for 19 years after stealing a loaf of bread, and after his release finds God and breaks parole to carve out a new life, free of the harsh persecution of former convicts. He becomes such an upstanding member of the community that the lawman Javert (Crowe) no longer recognizes him. But Valjean discovers that another man is going to be sent to jail for his crimes and, unwilling to bear the weight of the guilt that would bring him, he reveals his identity. Javert begins a dogged chase, motivated as he is by the letter of the law regardless of context, and Valjean retreats once again into hiding with a young child, Cosette (Isabelle Allen), whom he has vowed to protect after her mother, Fantine (Anne Hathaway), has had her life destroyed because Valjean was too distracted by Javert’s investigation to help her. Eventually, Cosette grows up into Amanda Seyfried, and her story of young love with the French revolutionary Marius (Eddie Redmayne) becomes another obstacle to her safety, and Valjean must again has to weigh the risk of doing the right thing in God’s eyes against making his own, already difficult life nearly impossible to manage.
The themes of morality vs. practicality remain as potent as ever, and the sweeping arc of Valjean and Javert’s journeys, set against a thematically meaningful time in French history, give the actual story of Les Miserables a grandness that Hooper’s film can never seem to match. It’s capable filmmaking in service of one of the great works of literature, and a musical with overwhelming theatricality trusted to a cast at best sporadically capable of performing their parts on the multiple levels necessary to actually do their jobs right. They gave a barrel of nails to a team of craftsmen wielding socket wrenches, and to their credit, those nails wound up in the wood; bent, certainly, and barely keeping the structure intact, but they are at least where they need to be. Les Miserables gets the deed done, but deserves no extra credit for all its hard work. It’s as good as it can be and still adequately hide behind its source material. Any worse and we’d see Les Miserables clearly for the disappointing production it really is. Any better and it might have been a genuinely great film.
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