| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 12/20/2012 : 01:16:16
160 minutes. I'll just say that again. 160 minutes. So if you think this review is going on too long -- hah! just wait till you get to see the film.
Depending on how you feel about filmed musical theatre you'll either be wiggling and wriggling in your seat as those minutes tick-tock by, or you'll be enraptured and forget you have to pee.
Tom Hooper's long awaited film of the hit stage musical that's paid the rent on so many buildings for so long has finally arrived. Ka-pow! I did see it during its first run in London. I could see then how it divided the audience. I must admit, it divided me as well. Then and now.
The film is a spectacle and we both know it will be mentioned as award material in every category. So I'm paying it the attention the media believes it deserves. I'm not so entirely convinced, but here goes.
First of all the whole project is a tad too close to opera for me. I don't mean because there's singing instead of dialogue. I loved Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and am a big fan of the rock musical Hair [not least because my late husband and I were staying in London with its director Tom O'Horgan, and we contributed a bit to its development in rehearsal - yeah I'm a name dropper, sue me].
I mention this because both those shows sort of switch on internal spotlights - yes, there's some tragedy, and especially with Umbrellas, there are profound relationships. But both have many moments of sheer joy.
Whereas Les Mis tends to emphasize the Miz. If it said music and lyrics by Morrissey it probably wouldn't be a big surprise. Of course, that's just my naughty sense of humor. Which - humor, that is - is what I kept hoping might pop up every now and then like a rainbow through the gloom, or a bright blossom poking up from the mud. And, trust me, those droopy cliches are Shakespeare compared with some of the dozy dialogue that's needlessly set to music. Why? Why? Why?
Actually there are a couple of characters who bring light relief to the tale in quite a Brechtian way. Mr & Mrs Th�nardier - Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter - as the ultimate con-artist innkeepers they'll rob you blind and make you grateful they did.
It's they whom the unfortunate factory girl Fantine has paid from her meager wages to care for her beloved but illegitimate daughter Cosette while she tries to hold down a job. Anne Hathaway nearly turns her innards out to prove how degraded she's willing to become to provide safety for her child. Such a shame she hasn't seen through the con-couple's ruthlessness.
When factory owner with a past Jean Valjean realizes Fantine's plight, he vows to do right by the much abused kid. And so the social web tangles and tangles.
Victor Hugo's novel is, after all, quite deliberately a study in irony and social contrast. Long? you betcha! It takes a tome, nay, a historical documentation to explore themes of compassion, forgiveness, and, above all, the divine power of love. Epic themes related in saga form through decades against a backdrop of the raggedy aftermath of a messy revolution. Whew!
Hugo was well aware of the socially conscious works of his contemporaries such as Dickens and Dostoevsky; the first who continually brought wit into even the direst of dilemmas, and the second who tended to sink even further into the black mud underpinning the glamor of privilege.
Yep, Hugo's seminal literary tool was a well-developed sense of irony. His book is so very long because of the infinite pains he takes to acquaint us with every nook and cranny of the embroidered Parisian salons side-by-side with the sewer stench of the poor.
Nowhere is that particular aspect of social contrast made plainer than the section about Marius. Once the product of the debauched rich, the kid finally sees the light of political reason and joins The ABC Club, seat of a revolutionary movement led by the handsome radical Enjolras.
The latter is one of the most important in the story, yet the film just has time to plunk him in the midst of the people's barricade against the soldiers - leading the righteous in song and flag-waving. Golly, just like Tahrir Square. We really don't know who he is, what he's doing there, and why so many ordinary people would risk their lives in the bloody June Revolution of 1832.
This complex story segment is how Hugo ups the ante on the personal battle between Inspector Javert [Russell Crowe in a tour de force of self-doubt] and Hugh Jackman's dynamic Jean Valjean. By the time we meet the newly aware Marius and watch the love bloom between him and Valjean's ward Cosette, the personal has embodied the political.
For contemporary French society of the 1860s, recently adjusting to transition from monarchical tyranny, Hugo's novel jolted them to a sense of personal responsibility in defining freedom as the moral duty to help each other.
Hooper's film, by contrast - and by implication the stage show it's based upon - tries to cover all those twists and turns over all that time. But it's forced to stop short. Because, dammit, 160 minutes isn't nearly long enough to recreate Hugo's intricate portrait, but way too long to expect cine-goers to shut up, sit still and just watch the bloody screen.
Yeah, who do those Frogs think they are - damn cheese-eating surrender monkeys!
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| 7 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| randall |
Posted - 05/10/2013 : 22:45:32
quote:
Originally posted by BaftaBabe
quote:
Originally posted by randall
I *also* saw LES MIZ in its original London iteration before it jumped the Pond, as well as PHANTOM, ditto ditto, on that same late-80s trip. I wonder how many of you realize that no less an eminence than Alfred Hitchcock once expressed interest in filming LES MIZ as a musical. Naw, I didn't think so.
It works on stage better than on film, b/c how else can you get that final burst of blaataah? However, this is a very credible interpretation of the thing that has caused a worldwide sensation. If you can get past the musical-theater conceit, the rest of the production is astonishingly good, from casting thru focus-pulling. In 1986 London, they sold LES MIZ-branded hankies in the theater lobby. This is a very fair representation [in cinematic terms] of what we saw.
BTW, Baffy, 160 minutes, so what? As you note, the source material ain't exactly a short story...
Yeah, but it FEELS like 160 days, and still doesn't deal with the Hugo-heart!
I would have to say negative to both clauses. But opinion is what separates us sentient beings, innit? |
| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 05/07/2013 : 17:43:55
quote:
Originally posted by randall
I *also* saw LES MIZ in its original London iteration before it jumped the Pond, as well as PHANTOM, ditto ditto, on that same late-80s trip. I wonder how many of you realize that no less an eminence than Alfred Hitchcock once expressed interest in filming LES MIZ as a musical. Naw, I didn't think so.
It works on stage better than on film, b/c how else can you get that final burst of blaataah? However, this is a very credible interpretation of the thing that has caused a worldwide sensation. If you can get past the musical-theater conceit, the rest of the production is astonishingly good, from casting thru focus-pulling. In 1986 London, they sold LES MIZ-branded hankies in the theater lobby. This is a very fair representation [in cinematic terms] of what we saw.
BTW, Baffy, 160 minutes, so what? As you note, the source material ain't exactly a short story...
Yeah, but it FEELS like 160 days, and still doesn't deal with the Hugo-heart!
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| randall |
Posted - 05/06/2013 : 02:45:42
I *also* saw LES MIZ in its original London iteration before it jumped the Pond, as well as PHANTOM, ditto ditto, on that same late-80s trip. I wonder how many of you realize that no less an eminence than Alfred Hitchcock once expressed interest in filming LES MIZ as a musical. Naw, I didn't think so.
It works on stage better than on film, b/c how else can you get that final burst of blaataah? However, this is a very credible interpretation of the thing that has caused a worldwide sensation. If you can get past the musical-theater conceit, the rest of the production is astonishingly good, from casting thru focus-pulling. In 1986 London, they sold LES MIZ-branded hankies in the theater lobby. This is a very fair representation [in cinematic terms] of what we saw.
BTW, Baffy, 160 minutes, so what? As you note, the source material ain't exactly a short story... |
| demonic |
Posted - 01/31/2013 : 01:11:18
The "Les Mis" movie bothered me sufficiently enough to rant about it at length on my facebook timeline for anyone bored enough to read it - as it turned out many did and there was a lot of comment. Forgive me if I just copy and paste - but you may be interested in my take, humble West Ender as I am...
"Les Miserables" then. I think this may end up being a very long post. All in all, it was a disappointment. I didn't really care for it.
Some context: I love the musical. I've seen many, many times over the last twenty years. It was the show that got me interested in musical theatre and inspired me to sing. Tough crowd.
Anne Hathaway. Anne Hathaway. It's basically her film, and she has, what?, twenty minutes screen-time. I don't think I've ever really heard "I Dreamed a Dream" before - not like that. I was deeply moved. Her voice was terrific, her acting is sublime, and it makes many of the other solo performances weaker as a result. Award winner, full stop.
Jackman is better than I expected, he brings the character to life for sure, very physically and emotionally engaging, however - the new song was totally forgettable (and inexcusable - why does Les Mis have to win a Best Original Song at the Oscars? It doesn't. It won't.) and his "Bring Him Home" was a terrible waste. A great singer can make this song chill you. Where was the musical director? He strains every note when he could and should have floated it. Does he have no head voice? And why doesn't he age throughout - at all? He looks older at the beginning than at any other point in the film. It's a huge part, and he grapples with it very well, but he's let down a little by not being as good a singer as he is an actor.
Russell Crowe has had the most flak about his Javert. It's not good, but it's not the disaster I'd heard. I mostly liked his reading of the part, but his singing voice is terribly weak, falling off the end of every line (in general diction is poor actually), no power, no quality. "Stars" was absolutely terrible, a non event, and no amount of unlikely wandering about on CGI parapets can change that. His death soliloquy was similarly badly sung and, worse, comical as he snapped in half. A smidgen of subtlety would have been nice at that supremely tragic moment, possibly my favourite part of the show. Similarly for the students at the barricade - not only betrayed in the screenplay by oddly retreating into the cafe like cowards in the face of their inevitable deaths, but Aaron Tveit (fine, strong, but not as good as many of thrillingly sung versions I've heard of Enjolras) had to fall out of the window in the most unlikely death pose solely as a nod to the stage version. It's done with more drama and pathos in the West End every night.
Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter were terrible. Possibly the least funny, most mannered Thenardiers ever. I really missed "Dog Eat Dog" his great song in the sewer, but in retrospect he would have wasted it.
A big surprise for me was that Amanda Seyfried as Cosette has a lovely voice, well controlled, and she made the most of that tricky, often 2D, role. "In My Life" in particular was very good. Eddie Redmayne was a bit bland as Marius and sounded quite a lot like goat to me. His voice was fine, wobbly head and all, but honestly? I don't believe he would have got through the audition for the West End on the quality of his singing alone. I felt that about a lot of the performances. Good, but not good enough. Not enough to give you the shivers or make you want to hear them sing the song again. And not for a film that will eventually exist longer than the stage show will.
The rest were fine, but not spectacular, I expected more of Samantha Barks - after all the "star is born" fuss she's definitely strong but, like Enjolras, not as good as many I've seen sing the role before. For the ensemble - it was fun seeing so many familiar faces having their moments, although a little distracting at times. Sometimes I was wishing for various friends to step up and take over.
The hefty cuts to the score mostly made sense unless we were going to have a four hour version, but many of them were entirely detrimental to the pace of the story. Reducing a musical to the main solos and trimming out the supposed "filler" is a terrible idea. I felt in parts like a long sequence of three minute emotional climaxes that didn't have any light and shade and didn't build to anything. Some of the many rewrites and lyric changes made no sense either. Just one that sticks in my mind - "I have saved your soul for God" says the Bish of Wilkinson. The original "bought your soul" makes more sense and is a better line. Why rewrite it? Bizarre.
The overall direction, cinematography, editing was uneven, at worse weak - the film took forever to settle down, mainly because the opening twenty minutes or so of handheld camera-work was deeply distracting - it's a choice - making it feel immediate and personal is all well and good but this is an epic story and that "docu" style strips out the grandeur. I wanted to shout at Tom Hooper - lock down the camera for god's sake, let me watch it, stop wobbling the camera and reminding me you're there. There were lots of odd choices. Butterflies flapping about at the Rue Plumet. What for? And by the way, butterflies aren't nocturnal. The finale was slightly wrecked by the strange setting too. Heaven is an enormous barricade, and everyone is dirty (apart from Anne Hathaway who had time for a wash). I thought that was quite funny.
Singing live - an interesting idea. It certainly makes it emotionally immediate and less "staged", but on the flip side the tendency for characters to improvise little spoken lines during songs was a bad idea. As soon as characters spoke rather than sang the dialogue it made all the recitative pointless. In a convention were people can converse without singing it makes it ridiculous when they do. I've never felt quite so uncomfortable suspending my disbelief of sung dialogue when watching a musical. Many may feel the opposite to this I expect.
There were moments I was transported, and moments I was bored. It did seem long, never a good sign, especially when you love the material. Being a fan definitely didn't help. Another key question for me - will I watch it again? Probably not. I'd rather listen to it sung thrillingly than see it filmed semi-realistically.
On balance it's a 3/5 from me. |
| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 01/30/2013 : 11:02:31
Nice Miserable takes, both of you! I love it when crits are so specific and apposite.
tortoise - how GREAT to see you back here. I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like you to come out of your shell more often. 
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| tortoise |
Posted - 01/29/2013 : 12:28:57
Popping momentarily out of lurkdom... whilst I can't argue with BaftaBabe's analysis of Hugo's original opus and its socio-political evisceration in stage/cinematic form, I guess I'm shallow enough to have really enjoyed the musical, both back-in-the-day onstage and now on the big screen. I felt moved to put together a little actors' scorecard...
My verdict, first on the principals:
Hugh Jackman (Jean Valjean): 8/10
A good piece of casting - especially on the big screen, the role demands stature, depth and versatility, and Jackman has these in spades. But to be honest (and I know I'm in a minority here), I didn't much care for his singing. It was ok, the intonation and the interpretation were all there, but his voice was just - I dunno - coarser, less full-bodied than I imagined from Jackman. So, a commanding performance visually - but that won't come across on the soundtrack.
Russell Crowe (Javert): 7/10
I've said it elsewhere: if this movie had been made 10 or 12 years ago, we'd have been looking at Crowe in the Valjean part: his reputation for intensity and brooding presence would have made sure of that. But what of his Javert? Well, it grew on me - somewhat. His opening scene face-off with Jackman didn't fill me with confidence - but then, musically, it's written in a way that's difficult to pull off whether on screen or on stage. And whilst Crowe's vocal expressiveness and dynamic range remained rather too limited, it was clearly not for want of effort. Kudos to his vocal coach for getting him this far.
Anne Hathaway (Fantine): 10/10
A confession: I used to feel that Hathaway was overrated. Just another A-lister-du-jour trading more on perceptions of looks and glamour than on actual performing credentials. Not that I disliked her acting: I was just never particularly taken with it. For me, that all changed in 2012: with the single word "Oops" from her Catwoman/Selina Kyle early in The Dark Knight Rises. For the rest of that movie, and from then on, I realised that I had been wrong, that here was someone who knew exactly how to craft every last inch of her performance. As for her performance here: there aren't enough superlatives. Visually and vocally, it is stellar. She doesn't just nail it - she knocks it out of the park. Despite Fantine's limited time onstage/onscreen, Hathaway establishes her character at the emotional heart of the whole production. In fact, forget 10/10: she turns the dial up to 11.
Amanda Seyfried (Cosette): 8/10
Let's face it: in this musical, the grown-up Cosette doesn't have an awful lot to do. She's got some pretty musical lines, but the torch songs and showstoppers are left to others. So the prospect of Seyfried in the role was just fine for me: a recognised name, but nothing special. But hang on - I'd forgotten just how high in the vocal range Cosette's part reaches! And I found myself thinking - is that actually Seyfried singing? Because she does the job well, reaching up to a very creditable top C. It's not the most rounded singing voice, but it's clear that Mamma Mia didn't represent the limits of her vocal abilities - she handles the very different style with competence and confidence.
Eddie Redmayne (Marius): 8.5/10
Whenever I'm watching Redmayne in anything, I always get distracted wondering whether he's ever been/will be cast as Prince Harry. He's got that look. I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting much from him - but I was pleasantly surprised. He seemed able to inhabit the top-end of the vocal register with ease, making an effortless mid-phrase transition into falsetto once or twice - no mean feat. I wasn't quite so impressed with his acting: on those occasions when we were supposed to see him 'smiling through the tears', there was rather more smiling than tears.
Sacha Baron Cohen (Th�nardier): 8/10
Not much to say here - an obvious casting choice, but a good one nonetheless. Baron Cohen has been proving lately that there's more to him than the essentially one-trick-pony mock-doc of Ali G, Borat, Bruno et al. If I have one criticism, it's that the decision to slip into a French accent when the customers arrived seemed oddly superfluous.
Helena Bonham-Carter (Mme Th�nardier): 9/10
Again, a clear-cut casting choice and rightly so. She's now the go-to actress for this kind of dangerously deranged part. But more than this: it takes a performer of great calibre to snatch back the audience's attention, her first appearance following so soon after Fantine's tour-de-force I dreamed a dream and death scene. Bonham-Carter simply delivers - she inhabits the role completely.
... and now for some of the supporting cast:
Samantha Barks (�ponine): 10/10
Always a tricky one to cast: a character who is essentially marginal (yes there's the business with the letter, but the story could quite feasibly be made to proceed without that plot point), yet who has one of the biggest stand-out songs to herself and who gets to share in the best of the duets. More than a cameo, but less than a headline spot. Divas need not apply: what's needed is a performer who makes you sit up and say 'where on earth did she come from?'. And Barks proves to be exactly that: where on earth did she come from?
Aaron Tveit (Enjolras): 8/10
I had to look him up afterwards to confirm whether I'd seen him in anything before (I hadn't) - he has that look of immediate familiarity, which I'm sure will serve him well in future. A solid, intent performance.
Colm Wilkinson (The Bishop): 6/10
It's a touching and entirely appropriate gesture to give a part to Wilkinson: the man was Jean Valjean in the glory days of the show's run in London and on Broadway. He pioneered and put an indelible stamp on that part. Here, he's suitably benign as the cleric who saves Valjean. But it's a performance that confirms what we began to see in the show's 25th Anniversary gala a few years back: his voice is a shadow of its former self. So very sad to see how the mighty have fallen.
Isabelle Allen (young Cosette): 7/10
A good find by the casting directors, in a part that is arguably no less important than the adult Cosette. Although her screen time is short, she is given more to do than simply sing the little girl's song (and it's one of those songs that may sound simple but needs a confident child to sing it well). Charmingly undaunted by the stars surrounding her.
Daniel Huttlestone (Gavroche): 9/10
He's played Gavroche on the stage, and it shows: Huttlestone bounds onto the screen with all the upbeat bravado that you expect from the streetwise Gavroche. I've always thought it a pity, though, that early in the show's stage run Gavroche's part was reduced: originally Little people was Gavroche's moment to shine; now it's just a short reprise of a song that's no longer there.
And one final thought about the production:
The Barricade: 4/10
Maybe I'm missing something but as a band of revolutionaries choosing where to build your barricade, wouldn't you select somewhere more strategically significant than a narrow side-street - one that indeed looks as if it could very possibly be a cul-de-sac? A set design like that will work on the stage from which it's borrowed, but (CGI aerial shots notwithstanding) the big screen demands something a bit more - well - revolutionary. |
| Beanmimo |
Posted - 01/19/2013 : 23:02:25
Bafta said laid out the plot long and loud so I am just going to give you my opinion.
I saw a matinee of the stage production in Dublin,1993 after sleepless flight from Boston earlier that day.
I was worried that I'd fall asleep but the musical captivated me and proved why it has been a success for the previous eight years (opened in The Barbican in 1985).
The film does not quite have the same impact as the live experience.
But people who enjoyed the stage musical will enjoy the film mainly because it will remind then of their first Les Mis experience.
people who enjoy musicals and who have not seen the stage version of les Mis should deifnitely give it a shot but if you enjoy neither stage or screen than this is the mother of all musicals to avoid.
More on my bliog here ==> http://wp.me/p1MbTJ-iP |
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