les miserables

It had been a toss-up between The Hobbit and Les Miserables on Boxing Day. In the end, we chose the former because we wanted something more light-hearted on Boxing Day.

I remember we jokingly said that if we didn't end up crying through Les Miserables then it would have meant we didn't quite get our money's worth.

Well, let's just say at approximately 15 minutes before the movie drawing to a close, I was thinking, "Damn it, something good better happen in the next 15 minutes because otherwise I really haven't gotten my money's worth!!!"

And then Valjean sat dying in his chair and everyone in the cinema burst into tears, including me, so I felt a little bit more placated. Questionmark.

So according to the above, if I were to summarise the experience in one sentence, it would be, "I nearly sat through all of Les Miserables without crying until Hugh Jackman sat down to die."

Having never watched a stage production of the musical, I'm not going to comment on the music itself. There are some wonderful numbers, and then there are others that clearly bridge one scene to another, and are half-spoken, half-sung, with the unfortunate effect of being half-melodic, half-tuneless.

There are some questionable directorial choices; the much-touted live-singing both a gift and the cause of its flaws. There are excruciatingly long lingering shots during some of the most emotionally piquant songs, and it never really capitalises on its medium as a film to bring the story to life. It never leaves the stage, and in many ways suffers for it.

It is a movie in which you realise that there really is such thing as charisma, that there really are actors who can engage and carry a scene even when all else fails. The more veterans actors in particular - Jackman, Hathaway, and Crowe - both Jackman and Hathaway make their extremely long scenes watchable just by the power of their acting; and Crowe, despite being a little bit distracting with his lack of musical range and hence inability to fully achieve the impact of some of Javert's more powerful songs, still manages just by the weight of his presence.

Once the story moves forward and the younger actors appear, apart from the wonderful Samantha Barks as Eponine, the rest of them were difficult to care about, which is a great pity when their story becomes the whole film's climax. As much as I've liked Amanda Siegfried, the extremely high-pitched range of Cosette fails her, and the story of the lovers never makes any emotional impact.

I heard Gavroche's role had been expanded especially for this film, but instead of making him easy to sympathise with - him being supposedly the face of the evolution, the young, the idealistic, the warm-hearted - it just made him rather an annoyingly precocious little twerp.

I feel it was a wasted opportunity. The live-singing brings a rawness of emotion that unfortunately becomes disconnected by the artificiality of the camera work. It never elevated above being a filmed musical; it could have been a lot more mobile, a lot more dynamic, a lot more complex, a lot more engaging. All the ingredients were there, but they didn't quite come out fully baked.



As an aside, I see where all the Les Miserables references are now in The Night Watch. The uprising of the poor, the flower pinned to their lapel, the watchmen becoming embroiled in the fight, the barricades, the riots.

And Vimes, watching the inevitable snowball forward and stood in its way. Well, we'd hardly compare him to Javert.