Les Misérables

Spare yourself a miserable evening. Before you buy tickets for this film version of the popular West End musical, check out whether you can stand the songs or not. These days, there are lots of ways of doing that. I know that many people get goose bumps when they hear the dramatic music of the Frenchman Claude-Michel Schönberg and the lyrics of Alain Boublil (in the original French version) and Herbert Kretzmer (who did the English libretto). But the songs just don’t do it for me. One crescendo hammers at your eardrums and there comes the next one already: there is no end to the bombast. There are a few nice tunes, but they are repeated so often that you are fed up of them long before the lights come on. The lyrics are stilted, simplistic, and/or doggerel. Millions of people don’t agree; the musical has been packing theatres ever since the early 1980s. Tom Hooper, who directed The King’s Speech, takes advantage in the opening scene of the extra resources available to him. He can allow himself as many changes of scenery as he feels like and can incorporate as much as he feels like in the way of natural disasters and starry skies. So I don’t really understand why he goes on to shut his actors up in rooms so much of the time.

[video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIWjUW_qk1I]

The decision to have the actors sing live on the set – and not to work with studio material recorded later – does work out well. Perfect singing is not essential: it’s about emotion. Hugh Jackman is in his element as Jean Valjean, the petty thief who takes on a new identity after serving a period of hard labour. Russell Crowe is a less gifted singer (which doesn’t matter) and gives a rather wooden performance as the heartless police inspector (which does matter). Anne Hathaway only has a small part as a dying mother/prostitute, but pulls out all the stops to make “I Dreamed a Dream” a tearjerker you will never forget. Hooper films his singers so close up that you’re scared he is going to try to push his camera down their larynxes. Now and again the emotion does grip you, as for example during the lengthy finale, which romanticises the French rebellion against the monarchy in 1832. As for the photogenically applied streaks of mud and other forms of poverty chic, you just have to put up with them.

Les Misérables ●
UK, 2012, dir.: Tom Hooper, act.: Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, 158 min.