LES MISERABLES Rerview

LES MISERABLES Review

By Darin Skaggs

     The musical movie genre was once the king of the movie business in the 1950’s with classics like Singin’ in the Rain, Gigi and The Sound of Music.  Ever since then it slowly disappeared.  In the early 2000’s however it has made somewhat of a comeback with movies like Moulin Rouge!, Chicago and Once.  The majority of these films are filled with silliness and humor with little drama.  Rarely does a musical explore drama full on.  Tom Hooper, the director of The King’s Speech, tries to accomplish this with his new effort Les Miserables and with very much success.

     Les Miserables is a musical adapted from a stage musical that is adapted from a stage play that was adapted from a novel written hundreds of years ago.  Clearly this story has been told many different times and this is just one more addition to the many adaptations.

     The story begins with hundreds of slaves pulling a huge boat into shore.  In this scene we met Jean Valjean a criminal slave, played by Hugh Jackman, and Javert a prison guard, played by Russell Crowe.  Valjean is released on parole; he has a change of heart after meeting a forgiving priest.  He meets a women and promises to protect her daughter.  Obviously it’s called Les Misribles, or translated it’s called The Retched Ones so things get worse from there.

     Tom Hooper makes a very risky decision for the filmmaking process.  Instead of prerecording the songs he made the actors sing on set and record them live. Luckily this worked out great, you could see what the characters were going through and the occasional cracks in people voice fit with the emotions they were feeling, with one exception.

     The singing and acting in this film is pure brilliance.  All the kids and young adults were great along with a wonderful performance by Hugh Jackman.  The greatest performance of the film is Anne Hathaway.  Her early big song gets your emotions to just the right place and that song called “I Dreamed a Dream” carries that feeling throughout the rest of the film.  There are lesser performances from the comic relief played by Sasha Baron Coen and Helen Boman Carter, which does not keep in tone with the film as a whole.  The worst performance comes from Russell Crowe.  His singing is alright, but they could have found someone with a better voice.  He is stiff and looks really awkward during the entire course of the film. It feels like there was a point where Hooper regretted his decision but didn’t have the heart to fire Crowe.  His character felt like he should have been bigger but he just felt like a side character that was inconveniencing Valjean’s life.

     The transitions in the film are on the weak side.  The film has a lot of big moments and goes from one big scene to the next with no breathing room.  Some of the character development is not believable.  I don’t know how the book or play is but characters earn each other’s trust way too quickly throughout the film.  They could have added more scenes to add to the story and character development.  The film also has many close-ups while a character is having big monologue type moments.  Some of these don’t work, but the majority of them work really well.  I think Hooper did this because you can’t get that close on a stage. He wanted the viewer to see all the emotion on the face of the characters.

     The film is a great achievement and a step up from his 2010 film The King’s Speech.  It has amazing sets, great looking costumes and make up.  The songs in the film are beautiful and moving; the acting is some of the year’s best and should deserve to win some Oscars.  I love a good musical and I am glad to add this one to the list.