{"id":1270,"date":"2013-01-22T02:28:39","date_gmt":"2013-01-22T02:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1270"},"modified":"2013-01-23T15:50:32","modified_gmt":"2013-01-23T15:50:32","slug":"the-oscars-2013-les-miserables","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2013\/01\/22\/the-oscars-2013-les-miserables\/","title":{"rendered":"The Oscars 2013 – Les Miserables"},"content":{"rendered":"

My Oscar quest begins in earnest with a trip to see Les Miserables<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Director Tom Hooper has come in for some stick in some quarters, with some grumps regarding The King\u2019s Speech<\/i> as too safe, too stagey and too limited in its scope to be a reasonable Best Picture nominee. But compared for example to the horribly TV-like An Education<\/i> (also nominated, remarkably), Tom Hooper\u2019s direction does I think elevate the material. A tyro in the Fincher, or Boyle or Tarantino mode he may not be, nor a true original like the Coens, David Lynch or Soderbergh, but he\u2019s rather more than a plodding journeyman.<\/p>\n

And he certainly made life difficult for himself here, taking on a beloved stage property \u2013 a musical no less \u2013 and then getting his cast to sing the whole thing live instead of miming to a pre-recorded track. (Not the very first time this has been done \u2013 among other obscurities, I believe this technique was used on Billy The Kid And The Green Baize Vampire<\/i> which is worth putting on if you can bear to see yet another musical-snooker-horror-western.)<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s have a little chat about musicals. Once de rigeur<\/em>, the form has fallen into disuse, if not total disrepair roughly since Hello Dolly<\/i> and many contemporary directors are concerned that modern audiences won\u2019t accept the conceit of characters suddenly bursting into non-diegetic song \u2013 possibly correctly. Various techniques are available to help sugar the pill. You can shoot the whole piece in a very stylised way, so that the scenario never seems to be taking place in the real world (Sweeney Todd, Moulin Rouge<\/i>). You can relegate the song-and-dance numbers to a fantasy world and shoot the rest normally (Chicago<\/i>). Or you can just shoot the movie like any other and hope no-one notices that people keep singing their thoughts (Mama Mia<\/i>).<\/p>\n

None of these options is really open to Hooper, shooting a story on film which is told almost entirely in song. There are a few snatches of recitative but no real dialogue to speak of. He should be thankful there\u2019s (almost) no dancing. So, having got through the production company logos in tasteful silence, we are confronted with the absurdity of dramatic singing right from the outset.<\/p>\n

It helps that the opening shots are absolutely spectacular, entirely cinematic and matching the energy and drive of the music perfectly. It also helps that the first person to do any real singing is Hugh Jackman, whose Jean Valjean is at first weakened and feral, slathered in grime, then genial and sleek in fine clothes, later pinched and haunted and finally emptied out by everything he has endured. It\u2019s a masterful performance and Hooper\u2019s approach is not simply to capture it but to let it pour out of the screen at us. The first big number, Valjean\u2019s Soliloquy, is played out almost entirely in a moving close-up shot as Jackman flings himself in and around the bishop\u2019s house. The live singing technique is incredibly valuable here, allowing Jackman to act with his face, body, voice and soul. Hooper hasn’t entirely rid himself of the visual tic of framing people in the lower left or right corner of the screen, but it’s less pronounced here than in The King’s Speech <\/em>I’m pleased to report. He’s determined to have the actors sing to us, the cinema audience, and the huge close-ups in which so many of the big numbers are photographed mean that many performance subtleties are possible which would simply be invisible in a large theatre.<\/p>\n

But this approach also leaves nowhere to hide, which is great if you are as accomplished as Jackman \u2013 or for that matter Samantha Barks as Eponine or lustrous Anne Hathaway who seizes this opportunity and in about 15 minutes of screen time creates an absolutely indelible version of Fantine, motivating everything Valjean does from that point on.<\/p>\n

With Russell Crowe, it\u2019s another matter. True, his singing can\u2019t match those I\u2019ve just mentioned, but to be fair to him, he never goes full Pierce Brosnan either. But although on paper Crowe is excellent casting as the relentless Javert, the liveliness of the score leaves him looking stiff and stolid. He somehow never manages to mate his own brand of driven intensity to the kinetic power of the music and his rendering of the part is amazingly limited for such a well-regarded actor. There\u2019s so little depth here that when he eventually commits suicide by plunging himself into a weir (spoiler, but to be fair it\u2019s a 25 year old musical of a 150 year old book) it looks less like the psychic collapse of a man whose moral framework has been shaken to its foundations and more like one of those robots in bad sixties sci-fi films who get confused to death when somebody gives them an insoluble riddle.<\/p>\n

There are other problems too. I\u2019m apparently in a very small minority when it comes to the performances of Borat and Mrs Tim Burton. Mrs Tim Burton, I suppose is bearable, but Borat has been allowed to indulge himself to a baffling degree, with constant face-pulling, demented gesticulations and a wandering accent which virtually makes him into a one man production of \u2019Allo \u2019Allo<\/i>. I never found him funny and his mere presence undermined the drama of several key scenes.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s in the barricade sequences that the wheels really come off. On stage, this is often when the production becomes most epic, but in the movie version, the art director seems to have gone off for an early lunch, leaving the second unit to shoot most of the footage in somebody\u2019s back bedroom. It really does look cheap and poky and artificial, clearly a set, erected on a modest sound-stage and worlds away from the epic scope of the opening shots and the earlier location work.<\/p>\n

By the end, of course, as Hugh Jackman\u2019s life finally ebbs away, and Amanda Seyfried (fine) and Eddie Redmayne (fine) try and comfort him, I start to get a lump in my throat. The power of the story and the impact of the music are undeniable \u2013 save the new song \u201cSuddenly\u201d which is entirely inessential.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s really the achievement here. This was never a project for a firebrand director to put his or her personal stamp on. Tom Hooper has been lucky enough to be given a beloved property which after 25 years of careful development is pretty much flawless. His challenge was to demonstrate that he had the skill, the care \u2013 above all the taste \u2013 not to fuck it up. By and large he succeeded. Crowe is limited, but no doubt his involvement helped get the film made. The revolutionaries look like escapees from a minor British public school, but making them a bit wet and spindly also makes their merciless execution in a hail of musket-fire all the more affecting. Borat and Mrs Tim Burton are apparently amusing to some. But Anne Hathaway\u2019s rendition of I Dreamed A Dream, Hugh Jackman\u2019s version of Who Am I and Samantha Barks singing On My Own are reason enough to make this film and reason enough to see it.<\/p>\n

If you like that sort of thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Oscar quest begins in earnest with a trip to see Les Miserables. Director Tom Hooper has come in for some stick in some quarters, with some grumps regarding The King\u2019s Speech as too safe, too stagey and too limited in its scope to be a reasonable Best Picture nominee. But compared for example to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25,11],"tags":[314,319,315,318,321,13,19,320,317,316],"class_list":["post-1270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","category-culture","tag-314","tag-chicago","tag-les-miserables","tag-mama-mia","tag-musicals","tag-oscars","tag-reviews","tag-sweeney-todd","tag-the-kings-speech","tag-tom-hooper"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-ku","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1270"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1274,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270\/revisions\/1274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}