If nothing else, Tom Hooper (who rode his last film, the
even squarer The King’s Speech, to
Oscar glory) has adapted Les Misérables in
a way that’s determinedly earnest. It’s the kind of movie where characters are
constantly having their lives turned upside down by momentous emotion and
revelations happen in the blink of an eye. One glance and you’re the most in
love you’ve ever been with a girl you just met. Receive one kind gesture and a
criminal is instantly a better man, or an authority figure is instantly
conflicted about his duty. Hooper underplays some of this quite nicely, but
that will bury motivations from time to time. (There are a few character
moments that left me lost.) Had the film been under the direction of a flashier,
more competent visual stylist, there might have been an embrace of some of the
more swoony elements in a way that could have led to greater clarity. Still,
Hooper has been handed strong material and he’s smart enough not to mess it up.
The story, set in the mid-1800s, starts with Jean Valjean
(Hugh Jackman), a prisoner who skips out on parole and, with inspiration from a
kind priest, decides to start a new life as an honorable man. Too bad, then,
that after several years of successful remaking, the policeman long in pursuit,
Javert (Russell Crowe), eventually catches up. This story crosses paths with Fantine (Anne Hathaway), who
is tragically unemployed and sickly, barely able to provide the money she needs
to send to her very young daughter Cosette (Isabelle Allen), who has been left
at a boarding house run by a couple of careless cons (Helena Bonham Carter and
Sacha Baron Cohen). Valjean promises Fantine that he’ll find the girl and make
sure she’s taken care of. He does, but one step ahead of Javert, he and the
girl flee. He starts over yet again.
The plot picks up years later in Paris, where the frustrated
public, among them idealistic students Marius and Éponine (Eddie Redmayne and
Samantha Barks), plan a revolution. All of the other characters are in the
general vicinity of the conflict as well, leading to Marius glimpsing Cosette
(now grown into Amanda Seyfried) and deciding that he’s in love. Good thing she
decides in the same instant that she loves him too, no matter how protective
her adopted father is. And we haven’t even gotten to the revolution yet! This
is a tragedy and a romance with an epic historical sweep that finds along the
way menace and kindness, humor and heartbreak, romance and retribution. There’s
lots of plot packed into a quick (relatively speaking, I suppose)
two-and-a-half hours, leading to some moments where I was intellectually moved
by the proceedings without getting my heart involved. There’s just no downtime
here as we hurry from peak to peak and I felt a bit of a burden to fill in the
gaps myself. And yet, this is sometimes powerful, always hardworking storytelling
that soars on the back of memorable sung-through melodies and motifs.
Rarely stopping to catch a breath, the characters sing their
hearts out. Hooper has one or two good ideas on how to capture the
performances. First, there’s the live singing. Unlike most movie musicals,
which record the vocal performances separately, leaving the actors room to
maneuver through the scenes and dances without worrying about hitting all the
right notes while filming, Hooper captured the singing right then and there on
set. This results in many stirring moments of musical cinema in which
characters are raw and emotive in ways that sound spontaneous. You can hear
characters straining at times, warbling away from big notes when a swell of
emotion chokes them up, weeping through swallowed notes or swelling with
prideful energy. The singing is undoubtedly rough around the edges at times,
but the cast does a fine job nonetheless. I was surprised how moved I was by
Jackman’s clipped, half-swallowed bubbling in his most dramatic moments.
Hooper’s second good idea helps the cast’s singing as well.
When the constantly swirling melodies part to let a character step forward and
sing a solo soliloquy, his restless camera stops to capture the song in steady
shots that keep the performance in close frames that regard the emotion that
plays out with the notes. These moments could have failed a weaker cast, but
here they are simple and effective. When Banks sings of unrequited love in “On
My Own,” when Redmayne mourns in “Empty Chairs At Empty Tables,” and when
Jackman sings his epiphany in “Valjean’s Soliloquy,” the effect is a rather
lovely work of cinematic theatricality, putting us not just front row, but on
the stage for a terrific feat of musical acting. The clear standout sequence of
this kind is Hathaway’s astonishing performance of what has to be the musical’s
most well known number, the heartbreaking “I Dreamed a Dream.” It plays out in
more or less one shot, each note a twist of the knife in this character’s sad
trajectory.
Though the film feels so big with production design that
feels like heightened grubby realism and soaring music that helps fill the
frames with operatic emotions, Hooper’s closeness occasionally makes the whole
thing feel small and cramped. (You wouldn’t really want to sit on the stage to
watch the show now, would you?) He’s not a particularly visual director and
when he’s called upon to manage a small group number – “At the End of the Day,”
say, or especially with “Master of the House” – the shots don’t add up. When it
comes to matching rousing unison and harmonies with nimble visual compositions
to match, he’s not up to the task. Here he breaks with his old-fashioned
material and old-fashioned approach for the sake of a misguided method of keeping
editing choppy and shots close and ill framed. There’s a sense that he’s trying
to stay away from precisely the bigness and exaggeration that makes the best
movie musicals work so well. It doesn’t work for the material here, but it’s
something that one can learn to overlook if determined to ride the emotion underlying
it all.
After all, there’s a great story here, or at least so I
gather. Some of the rushed storytelling left me scratching my head and the pacing in the final
half hour or so goes strangely slack, but the broad strokes of pain, romance,
and tragic revolution resonate well. The performers sell each and every big
moment, a great cast, singing memorable, endlessly hummable tunes. Less a great
movie, more a movie in which you can find greatness, Les Misérables is never better than when its director can get out
of his own way.
No comments:
Post a Comment