Les Miserables
I just got back from the film version of Les Misérables. This is kind of a big deal for me, because I cut my fangirl teeth on Les Mis. It wasn't the first story I fell in love with, but it was the first story I loved with access to an internet connection. It also provided the first practical answer to the question 'What is the internet for, anyway?' It's for obsessing, that's what it's for. So, you know, I have a soft spot for it. On the other hand, I also sat all the way through the film of Phantom of the People Who Can't Carry a Tune, so it's not as though I was unprepared for disappointment.
The most prominent murmur of dissent I heard about the film - I didn't read reviews, just caught glimpses of things - had to do with Russell Crowe's performance as Javert. This actually surprises me. Oh, don't get me wrong. I've heard much stronger Javerts. Looking at Javert, you could see that the only thought going through Crowe's head during his scenes was 'Am I on key? Somebody would tell me if I were off, right?' It is undeniably distracting. I was always aware that I was watching Russell Crowe playing a part, and generally my response to his songs was 'Good try!' rather than any emotional reaction to Javert's character arc. But Crowe was trying. He ploughed grimly through Stars and Javert's Suicide and sang every damn note, which is mostly why I felt I should applaud his efforts. It was a bad idea to cast an actor who can only just barely carry a tune if he concentrates until his eyes cross in a leading role, but since he was there I thought he made a go of it.
My problem was with Hugh Jackman, who often seemed to be deeply embarrassed that he was making, you know, a musical. Jackman can sing, and has plenty of theatre experience. So what on earth possessed him to talk his way through half his songs? I started getting twitchy when he decided to chat his way through What Have I Done? and by Who Am I? I was ready to strangle him. Listen to Colm Wilkinson (whom I was amused to see appear as the bishop, although it was a problem that he outsang Jackman every time he appeared), and the difference is clear, even with the shoddy audio quality. Wilkinson begins with a half spoken style, but as the music rises behind him and his determination to do the right thing grows, he becomes ever more musical - until he thunders out 'Who am I? I'm Jean Valjean!' at full volume, reclaiming his identity and his guilt in one fell swoop. Because this is a musical, and when you feel passionately about something in a musical, you don't bloody mutter about it. Jackman did.
Of course, the conventions of the stage and the screen are quite different things. Film is much more likely to rely on realism than theatre. I've often thought this was less of a problem in Les Mis than in, say, Oklahoma! because Les Mis has virtually no spoken dialogue. You're not randomly bursting into song in the middle of conversations, you're just in a medium where everybody sings instead of speaking - and it's no more odd than the fact that everybody speaks English in Paris. But still, I got the impression that that was what Jackman was struggling with. You don't generally have epiphanies at full volume, so he mumbles his way through most of his solos as though he's afraid someone might overhear him.
But if that was the problem, he wasn't even consistent about it. There was obviously no way he was going to talk his way through Bring Him Home. That's Valjean's most famous song, and his big chance to reduce the audience to tears. He was always going to sing it. Now, since at this point he's up on the barricade and the doomed students are attempting to catch a quick nap before fighting to the death with the National Guard, if Valjean were really blundering about yelling about how Marius is like his son, really, even though they've never spoken, someone would have hit him over the head with a rifle butt to shut him up and the story would have ended early. It's clear to anybody who isn't a complete idiot that a musical solo is the equivalent of a Shakespearian soliloquy: we are being given an insight into what is going on in the character's head, and aren't meant to believe that they are literally saying these things out loud. Jackman's peculiar interpretation even got in the way during several dialogue scenes - sometimes a character would sing a line to him, and he'd speak the answer back. Then on other occasions, he'd hold up his end of the bargain and sing along and the scene would work. Whatever was going on, I spent a lot of time mouthing 'Fucking sing!' at him.
That makes it sound like I hated the movie. But the thing is, I didn't. I just felt that the younger generation completely stole the show. Anne Hathaway's Fantine suffered from much the same problem as Hugh Jackman's Valjean - despite occasional outbursts of musicality, she seemed to believe firmly that a woman dying of TB would mumble and mutter and whisper and generally not sound very good. Realistic? Maybe. Missing the point? Definitely. But the story really picked up once we hit the streets of Paris in 1832 in the middle of a student uprising. Suddenly there were all these people who got that it's possible to sing and act at the same time, and that you can use the music itself to express emotion and shape your character.
Eponine, amusingly, was having none of this 'realism' bullshit and wailed her despair to the Parisian streets; later, despite a bullet wound to the chest, she sang her way prettily through A Little Fall of Rain. If lovelorn Eponine is more engaging than the hero of the damn show, there's a problem - but in no way is it Eponine's fault. Cosette was nicely performed, although admittedly it is kind of a thankless role. Other people get to attempt to overthrow governments, flee obsessed policemen down darkened alleys and generally have fun. Cosette gets hauled from place to place and until the final scene nobody tells her anything. 'Frustration' is her biggest emotion. There was a nice scene, though, set after Valjean's disappearance, that allowed her and Marius to bond over their mutual grief. That was good, and adds some depth to a relationship that is otherwise little more than 'So love at first sight is a thing, then?'
The students (including little Gavroche) were all excellent. Despite the fact that the names were thrown around really bloody quickly, I was able to sort out who was who and assign a few character traits to each. Given how little they had to work with, that's amazing. Enjolras was never going to be the singer Anthony Warlow was, but he was more than competent and gave the hopeless idealist a disarming touch of pathos. Grantaire was funny and clearly dubious about the whole thing, but nevertheless deeply committed because his mates were. Aside from Marius, those are the biggest (relatively speaking) student roles, but you could easily say a few words for all of them. Despite the fact that I knew it was coming, I was very sad when the barricade fell because these daft lads were so intensely likeable - and the fact that the camera could give you all their deaths in close up made it particularly affecting.
Of course, none of this works without Marius. The younger generation's story is really his story, and everyone else is just an extra in it. And I really have to give him credit for giving far more of a damn than Hugh Jackman. Singing and acting, will wonders never cease. Marius was completely ridiculous about Cosette, hot and cold about the revolution but nevertheless fond of the other students, deeply suicidal on the barricade, believable in his grief in the shattered café and utterly daft at all times. During the scene where Valjean reveals his identity, the camera cuts briefly to Marius's expression of polite bafflement - and it reduced me to helpless giggles. Marius can stay.
Note that I haven't mentioned the names of any of the actors playing the minor roles. I don't know what they were. I could look them up, sure, but that's the point - I was able to think of them as the characters, not as actors blundering their way through a part.
Otherwise - well, I hope one day Helena Bonham Carter stops substituting ridiculous 'witchy' hairstyles for an ability to act, but she was only in it for a few minutes so it's not like this was Sweeney Todd. Thénardier, whoever he was, was fine but forgettable. And that's pretty much everybody.
Some of the songs were juggled around, although mostly that doesn't bother me. Do You Hear the People Sing? is separated from Red and Black, but doesn't suffer for it. One Day More is a song that was just waiting for somebody to film it - being able to see everyone preparing in their separate ways makes it frantic instead of semi-incoherent. They did add a few bits and pieces, mostly for Valjean, and take away a few pieces, mostly from the students. Under other circumstances, this would not bother me. Valjean is the hero of the piece; if there's new material it should go to him. If you must cut stuff, cut it from the minor roles. But in practice it meant that they were taking things away from people who were good and interesting in order to give things to somebody who was boring me to tears. I should care most about Valjean and Javert. Their story is the heart of Les Misérables. But when Valjean is muttering his way through the lyrics half-heartedly like he thinks this is so much sillier than Wolverine, and Javert seems to be constipated from the stress of staying in tune ... yeah, they're not my favourite people. More students, please!
Some of the lyrics were changed, too. Mostly that didn't bother me either, but there were exceptions. One I remember that pulled me up was having the bishop sing 'I have saved your soul for God' instead of 'I have bought your soul for God'. No. 'Bought' is the whole point. There is religion in Les Misérables. While I wish there weren't, it would be silly of me to deny it. Religion is often erroneously mixed up with virtue and goodness, and some of that happens in Les Mis too. But religion is not the point. Money is. Les Misérables is a story about crushing poverty. Most of the characters either are poor or become poor. It never makes things better. Even the bad guys - insofar as there are 'bad guys' beyond poverty itself - sink further and further into savagery the poorer they become. Master of the House is cheery in its wickedness; Dog Eats Dog is really not.
Valjean was born poor. He stole to feed his family, and it was all downhill from there. He had little opportunity to be virtuous. No one would let him, or believe in his goodness if he tried. The bishop buys Valjean's virtue by lifting him out of poverty. There are plenty of stories about wealth corrupting people, but Les Mis isn't one of them. Having money makes Valjean good, and when next we see him he is a business owner and a politician and doing good deeds all over the place. Of course it's not quite that simple: being removed from poverty makes it possible for Valjean to forget about it. The tragedy of Fantine happens because Valjean delegates, and he simply does not notice this woman being ground into dust by an unjust society until it is too late to save her. But the solution to this problem is not to become poor again, it's to pay attention. The bishop talks about his god because he's a priest and they do that. But he talks about money because it's thematically important. In the book it is made clear that the bishop is actually a wealthy man - it's just that he uses all his funds to try to help the poor, and lives simply as a result. Money saves. What did they think all the chorus bits about the plight of the poor were about?
Ah, well.
The film adds a lot of neat little extras for people who have read the book - and mercifully, not one was a 100-page digression on convents (Victor Hugo is not an author for the faint of heart). Fantine has her teeth pulled out - much easier to do on the screen than the stage. Valjean takes refuge in a convent. Gavroche's elephant features prominently. Marius's grandpa shows up in the earlier scenes and is really grumpy at him, and shows up at the end and is really relieved that he's not dead. The students' last stand in The Corinth is fairly faithful to the book - ending with Enjolras and Grantaire clinging to each other before a firing squad. Most of this is nice. I mean, they never do say what Marius and his grandfather were fighting about, but Marius is a bit daft and Grandpa is ... well, grumpy, so if you haven't read the book I'm sure you could get the basic gist. One bit I thought didn't quite work was their attempt to have it both ways with Marius and Eponine. In the book, Marius and Eponine scarcely know each other; she's kind of his creepy (although tragic, because, well, crushing poverty and abusive family) stalker and she decides it would be really romantic if they got killed together. In the musical, they're friends; Eponine runs errands for Marius and Marius looks extra daft (and maybe a little mean) for not noticing the puppy-dog eyes she's always giving him. The film swung wildly from one to the other - in some scenes they were distant, in some friendly; in some scenes Eponine was trustworthy, in others not. Look. This is a fairly minor character. Don't overcomplicate things. Pick a story and go with it.
There was a nice thread through the film of bad stuff happening because of minor errors with big consequences. Obviously, Valjean goes to prison for stealing a single loaf of bread. A tense but largely peaceful protest turns into a revolt because a bunch of soldiers show up and one of them panics and accidentally shoots a woman in the crowd. Later, when the soldiers call for the students to surrender it's implied that they might well have (at this point, after all, Enjolras is trying to organise an evacuation, although he has made it quite clear that he intends to stay till the bitter end) had those same soldiers not just shot a small child who was out foraging for ammunition - and they cut to the soldier who did it, who looks like he might throw up. Add in a few bits of foreshadowing - the first shot you see of the completed barricade unnervingly forces your eyes to settle on the coffins at the very front, and Valjean repeatedly escapes Javert by making death-defying leaps off high things; Javert always comes to a sudden stop behind him, because when he leaps it will be a very final act - and I think they made good use of what film allows them. The film looks gorgeous, alternately grim and grubby and bright and hopeful, and the costumes manage to recall the ones in the musical without looking so much like, well, costumes.
So what did I think? Well, I liked it. I've done a lot of whinging for a film I really enjoyed, but that's the thing. The show really took off once we reached the revolution bit. I found I could still recall a lot of the words and had to restrain myself from singing along. Many of the characters were both likeable and tragic, so the story tugged on the heartstrings, just as it should. Les Misérables is a great big story with a huge ensemble cast; one of the things that makes the musical remarkable as an adaptation is that they just about manage to pack all 1,300 pages (minus the history of convents and the history of sewers and the entire fucking battle of Waterloo) of story in there. It's entirely possible to enjoy Les Mis without worrying too much and Valjean and Javert. It's just also impossible to watch it without noting that they should both be a hell of a lot more interesting than they are.
And, yeah, I was kind of amused at the end by the implication that heaven is a really big barricade. One more reason why I'm glad I'm an atheist: I've no idea how to load a musket.
The most prominent murmur of dissent I heard about the film - I didn't read reviews, just caught glimpses of things - had to do with Russell Crowe's performance as Javert. This actually surprises me. Oh, don't get me wrong. I've heard much stronger Javerts. Looking at Javert, you could see that the only thought going through Crowe's head during his scenes was 'Am I on key? Somebody would tell me if I were off, right?' It is undeniably distracting. I was always aware that I was watching Russell Crowe playing a part, and generally my response to his songs was 'Good try!' rather than any emotional reaction to Javert's character arc. But Crowe was trying. He ploughed grimly through Stars and Javert's Suicide and sang every damn note, which is mostly why I felt I should applaud his efforts. It was a bad idea to cast an actor who can only just barely carry a tune if he concentrates until his eyes cross in a leading role, but since he was there I thought he made a go of it.
My problem was with Hugh Jackman, who often seemed to be deeply embarrassed that he was making, you know, a musical. Jackman can sing, and has plenty of theatre experience. So what on earth possessed him to talk his way through half his songs? I started getting twitchy when he decided to chat his way through What Have I Done? and by Who Am I? I was ready to strangle him. Listen to Colm Wilkinson (whom I was amused to see appear as the bishop, although it was a problem that he outsang Jackman every time he appeared), and the difference is clear, even with the shoddy audio quality. Wilkinson begins with a half spoken style, but as the music rises behind him and his determination to do the right thing grows, he becomes ever more musical - until he thunders out 'Who am I? I'm Jean Valjean!' at full volume, reclaiming his identity and his guilt in one fell swoop. Because this is a musical, and when you feel passionately about something in a musical, you don't bloody mutter about it. Jackman did.
Of course, the conventions of the stage and the screen are quite different things. Film is much more likely to rely on realism than theatre. I've often thought this was less of a problem in Les Mis than in, say, Oklahoma! because Les Mis has virtually no spoken dialogue. You're not randomly bursting into song in the middle of conversations, you're just in a medium where everybody sings instead of speaking - and it's no more odd than the fact that everybody speaks English in Paris. But still, I got the impression that that was what Jackman was struggling with. You don't generally have epiphanies at full volume, so he mumbles his way through most of his solos as though he's afraid someone might overhear him.
But if that was the problem, he wasn't even consistent about it. There was obviously no way he was going to talk his way through Bring Him Home. That's Valjean's most famous song, and his big chance to reduce the audience to tears. He was always going to sing it. Now, since at this point he's up on the barricade and the doomed students are attempting to catch a quick nap before fighting to the death with the National Guard, if Valjean were really blundering about yelling about how Marius is like his son, really, even though they've never spoken, someone would have hit him over the head with a rifle butt to shut him up and the story would have ended early. It's clear to anybody who isn't a complete idiot that a musical solo is the equivalent of a Shakespearian soliloquy: we are being given an insight into what is going on in the character's head, and aren't meant to believe that they are literally saying these things out loud. Jackman's peculiar interpretation even got in the way during several dialogue scenes - sometimes a character would sing a line to him, and he'd speak the answer back. Then on other occasions, he'd hold up his end of the bargain and sing along and the scene would work. Whatever was going on, I spent a lot of time mouthing 'Fucking sing!' at him.
That makes it sound like I hated the movie. But the thing is, I didn't. I just felt that the younger generation completely stole the show. Anne Hathaway's Fantine suffered from much the same problem as Hugh Jackman's Valjean - despite occasional outbursts of musicality, she seemed to believe firmly that a woman dying of TB would mumble and mutter and whisper and generally not sound very good. Realistic? Maybe. Missing the point? Definitely. But the story really picked up once we hit the streets of Paris in 1832 in the middle of a student uprising. Suddenly there were all these people who got that it's possible to sing and act at the same time, and that you can use the music itself to express emotion and shape your character.
Eponine, amusingly, was having none of this 'realism' bullshit and wailed her despair to the Parisian streets; later, despite a bullet wound to the chest, she sang her way prettily through A Little Fall of Rain. If lovelorn Eponine is more engaging than the hero of the damn show, there's a problem - but in no way is it Eponine's fault. Cosette was nicely performed, although admittedly it is kind of a thankless role. Other people get to attempt to overthrow governments, flee obsessed policemen down darkened alleys and generally have fun. Cosette gets hauled from place to place and until the final scene nobody tells her anything. 'Frustration' is her biggest emotion. There was a nice scene, though, set after Valjean's disappearance, that allowed her and Marius to bond over their mutual grief. That was good, and adds some depth to a relationship that is otherwise little more than 'So love at first sight is a thing, then?'
The students (including little Gavroche) were all excellent. Despite the fact that the names were thrown around really bloody quickly, I was able to sort out who was who and assign a few character traits to each. Given how little they had to work with, that's amazing. Enjolras was never going to be the singer Anthony Warlow was, but he was more than competent and gave the hopeless idealist a disarming touch of pathos. Grantaire was funny and clearly dubious about the whole thing, but nevertheless deeply committed because his mates were. Aside from Marius, those are the biggest (relatively speaking) student roles, but you could easily say a few words for all of them. Despite the fact that I knew it was coming, I was very sad when the barricade fell because these daft lads were so intensely likeable - and the fact that the camera could give you all their deaths in close up made it particularly affecting.
Of course, none of this works without Marius. The younger generation's story is really his story, and everyone else is just an extra in it. And I really have to give him credit for giving far more of a damn than Hugh Jackman. Singing and acting, will wonders never cease. Marius was completely ridiculous about Cosette, hot and cold about the revolution but nevertheless fond of the other students, deeply suicidal on the barricade, believable in his grief in the shattered café and utterly daft at all times. During the scene where Valjean reveals his identity, the camera cuts briefly to Marius's expression of polite bafflement - and it reduced me to helpless giggles. Marius can stay.
Note that I haven't mentioned the names of any of the actors playing the minor roles. I don't know what they were. I could look them up, sure, but that's the point - I was able to think of them as the characters, not as actors blundering their way through a part.
Otherwise - well, I hope one day Helena Bonham Carter stops substituting ridiculous 'witchy' hairstyles for an ability to act, but she was only in it for a few minutes so it's not like this was Sweeney Todd. Thénardier, whoever he was, was fine but forgettable. And that's pretty much everybody.
Some of the songs were juggled around, although mostly that doesn't bother me. Do You Hear the People Sing? is separated from Red and Black, but doesn't suffer for it. One Day More is a song that was just waiting for somebody to film it - being able to see everyone preparing in their separate ways makes it frantic instead of semi-incoherent. They did add a few bits and pieces, mostly for Valjean, and take away a few pieces, mostly from the students. Under other circumstances, this would not bother me. Valjean is the hero of the piece; if there's new material it should go to him. If you must cut stuff, cut it from the minor roles. But in practice it meant that they were taking things away from people who were good and interesting in order to give things to somebody who was boring me to tears. I should care most about Valjean and Javert. Their story is the heart of Les Misérables. But when Valjean is muttering his way through the lyrics half-heartedly like he thinks this is so much sillier than Wolverine, and Javert seems to be constipated from the stress of staying in tune ... yeah, they're not my favourite people. More students, please!
Some of the lyrics were changed, too. Mostly that didn't bother me either, but there were exceptions. One I remember that pulled me up was having the bishop sing 'I have saved your soul for God' instead of 'I have bought your soul for God'. No. 'Bought' is the whole point. There is religion in Les Misérables. While I wish there weren't, it would be silly of me to deny it. Religion is often erroneously mixed up with virtue and goodness, and some of that happens in Les Mis too. But religion is not the point. Money is. Les Misérables is a story about crushing poverty. Most of the characters either are poor or become poor. It never makes things better. Even the bad guys - insofar as there are 'bad guys' beyond poverty itself - sink further and further into savagery the poorer they become. Master of the House is cheery in its wickedness; Dog Eats Dog is really not.
Valjean was born poor. He stole to feed his family, and it was all downhill from there. He had little opportunity to be virtuous. No one would let him, or believe in his goodness if he tried. The bishop buys Valjean's virtue by lifting him out of poverty. There are plenty of stories about wealth corrupting people, but Les Mis isn't one of them. Having money makes Valjean good, and when next we see him he is a business owner and a politician and doing good deeds all over the place. Of course it's not quite that simple: being removed from poverty makes it possible for Valjean to forget about it. The tragedy of Fantine happens because Valjean delegates, and he simply does not notice this woman being ground into dust by an unjust society until it is too late to save her. But the solution to this problem is not to become poor again, it's to pay attention. The bishop talks about his god because he's a priest and they do that. But he talks about money because it's thematically important. In the book it is made clear that the bishop is actually a wealthy man - it's just that he uses all his funds to try to help the poor, and lives simply as a result. Money saves. What did they think all the chorus bits about the plight of the poor were about?
Ah, well.
The film adds a lot of neat little extras for people who have read the book - and mercifully, not one was a 100-page digression on convents (Victor Hugo is not an author for the faint of heart). Fantine has her teeth pulled out - much easier to do on the screen than the stage. Valjean takes refuge in a convent. Gavroche's elephant features prominently. Marius's grandpa shows up in the earlier scenes and is really grumpy at him, and shows up at the end and is really relieved that he's not dead. The students' last stand in The Corinth is fairly faithful to the book - ending with Enjolras and Grantaire clinging to each other before a firing squad. Most of this is nice. I mean, they never do say what Marius and his grandfather were fighting about, but Marius is a bit daft and Grandpa is ... well, grumpy, so if you haven't read the book I'm sure you could get the basic gist. One bit I thought didn't quite work was their attempt to have it both ways with Marius and Eponine. In the book, Marius and Eponine scarcely know each other; she's kind of his creepy (although tragic, because, well, crushing poverty and abusive family) stalker and she decides it would be really romantic if they got killed together. In the musical, they're friends; Eponine runs errands for Marius and Marius looks extra daft (and maybe a little mean) for not noticing the puppy-dog eyes she's always giving him. The film swung wildly from one to the other - in some scenes they were distant, in some friendly; in some scenes Eponine was trustworthy, in others not. Look. This is a fairly minor character. Don't overcomplicate things. Pick a story and go with it.
There was a nice thread through the film of bad stuff happening because of minor errors with big consequences. Obviously, Valjean goes to prison for stealing a single loaf of bread. A tense but largely peaceful protest turns into a revolt because a bunch of soldiers show up and one of them panics and accidentally shoots a woman in the crowd. Later, when the soldiers call for the students to surrender it's implied that they might well have (at this point, after all, Enjolras is trying to organise an evacuation, although he has made it quite clear that he intends to stay till the bitter end) had those same soldiers not just shot a small child who was out foraging for ammunition - and they cut to the soldier who did it, who looks like he might throw up. Add in a few bits of foreshadowing - the first shot you see of the completed barricade unnervingly forces your eyes to settle on the coffins at the very front, and Valjean repeatedly escapes Javert by making death-defying leaps off high things; Javert always comes to a sudden stop behind him, because when he leaps it will be a very final act - and I think they made good use of what film allows them. The film looks gorgeous, alternately grim and grubby and bright and hopeful, and the costumes manage to recall the ones in the musical without looking so much like, well, costumes.
So what did I think? Well, I liked it. I've done a lot of whinging for a film I really enjoyed, but that's the thing. The show really took off once we reached the revolution bit. I found I could still recall a lot of the words and had to restrain myself from singing along. Many of the characters were both likeable and tragic, so the story tugged on the heartstrings, just as it should. Les Misérables is a great big story with a huge ensemble cast; one of the things that makes the musical remarkable as an adaptation is that they just about manage to pack all 1,300 pages (minus the history of convents and the history of sewers and the entire fucking battle of Waterloo) of story in there. It's entirely possible to enjoy Les Mis without worrying too much and Valjean and Javert. It's just also impossible to watch it without noting that they should both be a hell of a lot more interesting than they are.
And, yeah, I was kind of amused at the end by the implication that heaven is a really big barricade. One more reason why I'm glad I'm an atheist: I've no idea how to load a musket.