Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Day 83: Do You Hear The People Sing?

LES MISÉRABLES (2012)
Directed by Tom Hooper
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter, Aaron Tveit, Samantha Barks, Daniel Huttlestone, Colm Wilkenson

You're probably wondering why I haven't posted here in...*looks at watch*...five months.  To be honest, I just lost interest in the project.  I just couldn't find any movie that I really wanted to write about.  What fun is it to watch the classics - films everyone knows are great - only to watch them and find out, surprise! they're great!  Volumes have been written about them, so there's really nothing new I can bring to the discussion. 

To be even more honest, there really hasn't been that much going on at the cinemas, either.  Nothing that has been coming out for the last year or so has done much to pull me in or part me from my hard-earned cash.  That is, until I saw the trailer for what is probably the most anticipated musical film adaptation in years: Les Misérables.

The first trailer I saw featured Anne Hathaway, head shorn and body beaten, playing Fantine and tearfully warbling through I Dreamed a Dream over a montage of images from the filmThis did more than just pique my interest.  Those images and that sound told me that I absolutely had to see this filmI swore I would see it on Christmas Day, the day it opened.  But it turned out I had to work on Christmas, so I had to wait until the day after.

All of this can make it seem like I've seen the stage show hundreds of times and knew every song inside and out.  But I haven't and I don't.  I own the original Broadway soundtrack and came to love it very much, but I have yet to see the show on stage.  And since the stage version was pretty much unknown to me, my knowledge of the story was incomplete.  Most soundtrack versions were also incomplete, as the score features a lot of recitative (that is, talk-singing) between numbers.  Album producers consider this nothing more than filler, so they don't include it, even though these sequences can contain key plot points. It should also be noted that I have yet to slog my way through all 1,463 pages of Victor Hugo's novel, though I have attempted it numerous times.

The story is, indeed, immense, spanning decades and involving a massive cast of characters.  In fact, it's so immense, that I'd need a couple hundred pages to describe it all.  If you've never seen the show or read the book, it concerns a man named Jean Valjean (Jackman), a convict turned upright citizen, and a police inspector named Javert (Crowe), who hunts him down to the ends of the earth for breaking his parole.  Along the way, we see the plight of the lower rungs of society, from a prostitute (Hathaway) and her estranged daughter (Seyfried) (whom Valjean adopts as his own), to a pair of crooked innkeepers (Baron Cohen, Bonham-Carter), to a group of privileged university students who rebel against the government.  All the while, the themes of sin, redemption, right and wrong and mercy versus the rigid arm the law are all explored.

The thing that I remember loving about the original soundtrack was the emotional arc of it.  Most of that emotion was retained in this film version, though it was through a method that was very much unheard of in the realm of musical films: live singing.  Every note of every song was filmed live on camera.  This goes against the usual practice of recording the vocals weeks - even months - ahead of time, then having the actors mime to their own singing.  Director Tom Hooper wanted the maximum amount of emotion from all his actors, and this was a downright revolutionary way to go about it.  But the problem is, it doesn't always work.  Don't get me wrong, there are times when it works wonderfully - especially, in I Dreamed a Dream, which is not only sung live, but done in one, long, heart-wrenching take, in which Anne Hathaway bears her very soul to the camera.  But there are many times when it seems that the backing track (which was recorded later) seems to be playing catch-up to the actors' performances.  The effect is like that of an orchestra without an conductor.  Everyone is just reacting off of everyone else, thus the music can sound sloppy and unpolished at times.  Granted, this may be what Hooper was going for, but the end result ends up sounding improvisational at best and unprofessional at worst.

As far as the vocal performances go, live singing doesn't leave any room for studio magic.  I've already said that Anne Hathaway was wonderful, but so was Hugh Jackman.  I knew he was a wonderful singer, after I saw his performance as Curly in Oklahoma!  But I didn't know he had the range he has.  His musical acumen really surprised me.  The same could be said for Amanda Seyfried as Cosette and Eddie Redmayne as Marius.  Both showed an incredible amount of musical talent, while not making the acting seem strained and over-reaching.  The same cannot be said about Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham-Carter (Mr and Mrs Thenardier).  They look and act as if they'd wandered off the set of Sweeney Todd just to ham it up for their roles in this film.  But the most glaring miscast in the entire film was Russell Crowe as Javert.  It's not that he lacks the gravitas required for the role - it's just that he lacks the musical chops.  Les Miz is, more or less, an opera, but Crowe sings his part with a rock-and-roll baritone that seems extremely out of place.  I'm sure there were more qualified actors who might have been considered for the role, and I think some more thought should have been given to them.  Crowe seemed out of place the entire time.

But despite its flaws, the most important aspect of the story - the emotional arc - is left comepletely intact.  The ending is one of the most bittersweet I have ever seen in any film.  And believe me when I tell you that there was not a dry eye in the house, including mine.  All the suffering and all of the sorrow finally finds closure, and all of the weary souls who had been trod upon from the beginning of the film find rest.  And while the ending scene comes off as a bit overly-theatrical, the message of swords being beaten into plowshares is enough to make even a jaded film-school graduate tear up.  And that takes some doing.