Given the novel’s social realism as well as its scope, it makes perfect sense for a film adaptation to reflect this. This, however, is not an adaptation of the novel but of the stage musical it inspired. Traditionally speaking, musicals are not “realistic”. They are fantasies, idealized visions of us and our world. Lars Von Trier made a brave attempt to deconstruct this with “Dancer In The Dark”, which similarly tried to combine a certain degree of social realism with Griffithian sentimentalism. In my opinion, “Dancer In The Dark” was a fascinating failure – its primary success being a spellbinding lead performance by Björk – undone by an uncharacteristically lazy attitude towards conveying increasing blindness by jittering a handheld camera around its actors.
Tom
Hooper, a passable but far less talented filmmaker than Lars Von Trier, follows
a slightly similar logic: He wants us to simultaneously feel the story’s epic
scale and the character’s psychological turmoil. His way of conveying that is
to both recording the singing live and shooting their
performances in a semi-handheld way with lots of wide-angle lenses and Dutch
angles. The result is a bloated, aggressive mess
with choppy, poorly-edited spectacle scenes (the barricades come to mind) and a
camera that is so close to the actors' faces it often feels like they're
screaming at yours, trapping you with them and forbidding you any emotional or
intellectual distance. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of
itself, but it doesn’t work well for what is supposed to be a romantic musical.
More on that later.
The only time Hooper's approach really works is with Anne Hathaway's heart-wrenching rendition of "I Dreamed A Dream". Her face is contorted with pain and anguish, she hyperventilates and yet it never feels forced or calculated, and her singing is always spot-on. It's filmed all in one take, and we really feel Fantine's pain and lost dreams. It works here because it's warranted, because Hathaway is embarking us in a whirlpool of emotions which I didn't suspect the song contained. It acquires an almost Cassavetesian grandeur. A more talented director could have succeeded at making the entire film that way, but Hooper is no more a John Cassavetes than he is a Ken Russell. A combination of both directors would have been required to make the approach work.
Ken
Russell’s 1975 rock masterpiece “Tommy”
was a pure musical, without any spoken dialogue, as close to a visual album as
a film ever got. The transition between songs was fluid and smooth. By
contrast, “Les Misérables” mostly
feels like one, long, continuous song bellowed at the camera for almost 2 ½
hours with varying degrees of talent. It’s loud, tiring, and, quite ironically,
distracts from the character’s emotions that they are so aggressively
displaying.
This is
where the John Cassavetes comparison comes in. In such films as “Minnie And Moskowitz”, “The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie” and “Gloria”, Cassavetes showed a great gift
for taking the basic outlines of specific film genres – the romantic screwball
comedy, the film-noir and the gangster thriller respectively – and stripping
them from their codes, conventions and artifices, leaving only characters.
Complicated, unpredictable characters, pure creatures made of motion and
emotion. Cassavetes would then invite us to spend an hour or two in the lives
of these characters, uncomfortably close to their faces and feelings.
Cassavetes, like Bergman and Dreyer before him, seemed to believe the human
face to be the most fascinating subject a filmmaker could want to shoot. Hooper
seems to believe that too, but with the exception of the aforementioned “I Dreamed A Dream” scene, he does not
reach the intended emotions. Unlike Bergman or Cassavetes, Hooper doesn’t seem
to want to get close to his actors and actresses’ faces in order to study their
emotions but to try and aggressively snatch an emotional response from his
audience. This is why his approach is wrong-headed: Instead of commanding his
actors to feel what their characters are feeling, he is commanding the audience
to feel what he thinks we should feel.
A
Cassavetes-inspired approach is not entirely incompatible with the musical
genre, but it would perhaps require a radical re-writing of the film’s content.
It would demand a greater interest in showing us what the characters feel, and
require the film’s more spectacular content to be toned down considerably.
Sobriety over sentimentality. Humility over grandeur.
I can
only imagine how challenging the shoot must have been for the actors, having to
sing live with Tom Hooper’s camera close to their faces. Their efforts are
clear, but regrettably few manage to make them worthwhile. Anne Hathaway
certainly tops the cast in spite of – or maybe because of – her limited amount
of screentime, and deserved her Academy Award nomination though Amy Adams
should have won it for “The Master” –
on which I hope to write more another time.
While most critics – particularly fellow bloggers– mocked Russell Crowe for his perceived subpar singing as the unfettered Inspector Javert, I actually found him to be one of the better performers in the film. I will admit his too-fast delivery did elicit a few sniggers from me in his first two songs, but he improved tremendously as the film went on. Crowe carries the role of Javert with gravity and compassion, doing a particularly good job of displaying his character’s inner turmoil with his eyes.
Jackman is a competent and likeable actor, and
good Lord is he trying his hardest, but it unfortunately isn’t good enough. He
is disastrously miscast in every way imaginable. As an actor, he lacks the
gravitas, world-weariness and ruggedness to be a convincing Jean Valjean. As a
singer, his voice is too high-pitched to suit the songs. It was actually quite
painful to listen to an otherwise good singer spending most of the film singing
off-key in so loud a voice you can practically hear the strain on his vocal cords.
As the Thénardiers, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen share good chemistry and are a lot of fun to watch. The downside to these good performances is that they kept reminding me of just how superior in every way Tim Burton’s adaptation of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street” was.
On a more completely positive note, I advise
moviegoers to watch out for Samantha Barks. She’s sure to be an actress to
follow. Her subtle, heartfelt performance as Eponine is one of the film’s
saving graces, and indeed should have been the center of more of the film’s
attention. Her character – whom I could see reimagined as a Lars Von Trier
heroine – is one of the most fascinating and complex of the story, and appears
to typify its themes of love, self-sacrifice and guilt. However, having to my
shame neither read Victor Hugo’s epic novel nor seen any previous film
adaptations, I cannot comment much further on her character.
I cannot fault Tom Hooper for being ambitious,
nor can I deny the obvious hard work that went into making this film. However,
I would advise him to be a little more humble in picking his next project, and
to learn from his disaster. For it is a disaster, but one that, in spite of all
the annoyances it caused me, I can respect for what it was trying to do.
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