Tom Hooper (2012)

Edward Lawrenson is spot on when he writes in The Big Issue this week that he felt he ‘was watching a 157-minute trailer for a film I didn’t want to see’.  The characters in Les Misérables keep experiencing extreme highs and lows yet the picture is one of the most unnuanced I can remember.   Tom Hooper wants every moment to be a highlight – that goes even for the few quiet bits (and for the very few seconds when the soundtrack is utterly silent).  Hooper never allows a mood to develop or settle before it’s supplanted by a new surge of emotion or another visual flourish.  You wouldn’t want the film to be longer but it’s so hectic and arrhythmic that you keep thinking something’s been cut.  (One example:  on Marius and Cosette’s wedding day, an occasion which should be fraught with mixed feelings for the bride and groom, Hooper barely shows them before focusing on the rascally Thénardiers gatecrashing the reception, as if they were what we wanted to see.  Thénardier and his wife do provide some relatively light relief to the prolonged anguish of the movie – but that’s not really the point.)  Many of the vast numbers of people who’ve seen Les Misérables on stage may bring to the cinema with them an awareness of emotions they felt in the theatre and which they want the screen adaptation to allow them to recover.  If the film succeeds in doing that, it may be enough for them.   But my experience of the stage musical doesn’t extend beyond hearing its best-known numbers sung on television talent shows; I’ve not seen any of the numerous earlier film versions nor read the novel.  For me, Hooper’s Les Misérables is not only uninvolving but rather baffling too.

 The bafflement derives partly from Hooper’s approach and partly from problems with the leads, Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean and Russell Crowe as Inspector Javert.  (The screenplay – written by William Nicholson with the show’s authors Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Herbert Kretzmer – may also be a problem but the rushed, flashy direction would be liable to blot out the virtues of even a good script.)  What links Valjean and Javert, the two poles of the story, is that neither of them ever stops suffering – the aptest lyric in the whole thing is Valjean’s description of his life as a ‘never-ending road to Calvary’.  But whereas Jackman keeps telling us about Valjean’s plight, Crowe, by far the better actor, keeps showing us.  His Javert is so evidently a troubled and divided spirit that you never feel the chill of a powerful man’s pathological commitment to upholding the law.   Russell Crowe’s singing is unconfident; that makes it not only distinctive but rather attractive in the context of the film as a whole.  But you sense it’s not right for the story that Crowe’s voice exudes weakness and his face speaks death-wishing self-hate.  His performance is coherent but incongruous.  As for Valjean, it was only near the end of the film, when he mentions that he spent much of his life hating before learning the error of his ways, that I realised I’d missed his transformation.  Of course Valjean is angry as well as miserable in his days as a convict (he serves nineteen years for stealing bread to feed his starving kin) and he resorts to desperate measures when he’s let out on parole.  But he’s a man more sinned against than sinning from the word go; and Hugh Jackman doesn’t appear to have a malicious bone in his body.  I felt guilty watching him in the early stages:  he’s a remarkable image as the emaciated convict and he’s all too clearly giving the part his all but that’s nowhere near enough in terms of what he communicates.  Once Valjean is a respectable citizen, Jackman’s looks increasingly match the blandness of his personality as an actor.   He was more dynamic talking about the role on The Graham Norton Show than he is in the movie.

Javert – who seems to be single-handedly responsible for law enforcement the length and breadth of Paris – devotes himself to an obsession to bring to justice Jean Valjean, who breaks parole to start a new and better life.  In the closing stages, a bishop (Colm Wilkinson, who played Valjean in the original London stage production) tells the hero that ‘To love another person is to see the face of God’, while the students leading the June Rebellion of 1832 are impelled by their desire for a socially reformed world. The personal and larger motivations that seem to form a pattern in the story don’t connect in the story that Tom Hooper tells.  Part of the problem may be that the motive force of the source material is religious belief.  At any rate, Hugo wrote towards the end of the novel:

‘The book which the reader has before him at this moment is, from one end to the other, in its entirety and details … a progress from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsehood to truth, from night to day, from appetite to conscience, from corruption to life; from bestiality to duty, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God. The starting point: matter, destination: the soul. The hydra at the beginning, the angel at the end.’

There are other, more specific mysteries.  Why is Valjean so utterly solitary until he adopts the waif Cosette?  (Did he decide not to get married in case Javert caught up with him?  If so, why doesn’t he tell us, given his insatiable propensity for telling us what he’s feeling?)   What is the physical cause of his death – or the death of the lovelorn Éponine?

There were only two numbers which I found at all affecting:  ‘On My Own’, Éponine’s account of her unrequited love for Marius; and his lament for his comrades killed in the June Rebellion, ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’.  These are the only occasions when the singer builds recognisable human emotion; and Eddie Redmayne as Marius and Samantha Barks as Éponine are the two most appealing members of the cast.  It may well because she’s an inexperienced screen performer that Barks looks more real and performs more simply than the others.  Eddie Redmayne has a naturally open and gentle quality; he may lack the sense of something hidden and the friction needed in a major screen actor but he’s very effective in supporting roles.   It struck me that the cast have to do a lot of singing of high notes:  the male voices often sound nasally inexpressive as a result but Redmayne is an exception when he sings in a higher register.  He doesn’t, however, have any connection with Amanda Seyfried’s Cosette (he has more connection with Barks’s Éponine, whom Marius is supposed not to love).  Seyfried is proficient and has the sweetest voice in the cast but she’s a glazed, remote presence.  The combination of yearning and determination that Samantha Barks gets across makes Éponine, rather than Cosette, seem the daughter of the doomed Fantine.

Anne Hathaway is nearly certain to win an Oscar for singing one song (just as Jennifer Hudson did in Dreamgirls for ‘And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going’).  Hathaway is a star, a fine actress and a strong singer.  She does convey’s Fantine’s terrible situation powerfully but her rendition of ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ is so devastating that I was very aware of admiring the performer (considering that she seems to have reached a climax within the first couple of lines, it’s amazing how Hathaway keeps pulling out more) rather than feeling involvement with the character she was playing.  I’ve never been so glad to see Helena Bonham Carter as I was here:   after trying not to laugh at the deadly serious histrionics of the film’s first half hour, it was good to be smiling with pleasure at the agile wit of her Madame Thénardier, which Bonham Carter sustains throughout, even by the point at which Tom Hooper seems to be relying too automatically on her and Sacha Baron Cohen as Thénardier for comic counterpoint.   Baron Cohen does supply this too, although in a more negative way.  His blatant egocentricity makes what he does on screen eventually weightless: that’s preferable, though, to this movie’s prevailing heavy-handedness.

So what of the music?  Some very snotty things have been written about it in the New Yorker but you can’t argue that there are tunes it’s difficult to get out of your head (even though I kept thinking the melody of ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ is oddly like ‘A Day In the Life’ from Sergeant Pepper and ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’ reminiscent of ‘The Holly and the Ivy’).  The film isn’t entirely sung through – there are a few lines of dialogue which are spoken without musical pretension.  The recitative (if that’s what you call it) drove me mad in the early stages – I kept wanting to tell the cast either to speak or sing – but I got used to it.  Most of the action looks to be taking place within constructed sets, however large and elaborate these may be; and the sudden shift to the Royal Naval Dockyards at Greenwich for the June Rebellion confrontations is jarring.  (I must admit for the record that I was relieved when the spunky street urchin Gavroche (Daniel Huttlestone) was gunned down by the militia.)  The final ‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’ sequence, also in Greenwich, is both anti-climactic (almost inevitable, given how many climaxes there’ve already been) and bizarre, as characters dead and alive reunite to incite us to share their hope for a better tomorrow.   This may well work in the theatre, where it’s easier for the distinction between the dramatis personae and the actors to be broken down at the end of a show.  Here it just seems weak supernaturalism.  Victor Hugo may have wanted to show God’s hand at work in Les Misérables but I don’t think this was what he had in mind.

12 January 2013