Let the theater piece stay a theater piece: A review of ‘Les Mis’

Watching the so-called “cinematic masterpiece” that is Les Miserables has left this theaterati somewhat impassioned, and not in a good way. Sure, the movie won Best Motion Picture—Musical or Comedy at the recent Golden Globes, also Best Supporting Actress for Anne Hathaway who played Fantine, and Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for Hugh Jackman who played Valjean (both well-deserved). But the accolades it received didn’t, in any way, justify the fact that certain roles were miscast and that the film left much to be said about the play’s structure, not to mention that Tom Hooper’s approach might not have been the best take on the film. Aficionados such as myself were thus left unsatisfied and irrevocably underwhelmed.

Let’s do this report card-style, shall we? Best Actor – Jackman. A+. His experiences as a theater actor in Oklahoma and Tony Award-winning turn in The Boy From Oz served him well in this film. He attacked the role of escaped convict 24601 with such depth and gravitas, especially in his rendition of The Confrontation at the convent where he contemplates the benevolence of the Bishop of Digne, and then tears up a piece of parchment that floats into the air right before he becomes mayor years later. Segue to the iconic opening bars of One Day More, this is easily one of the best scenes in the film.

Best Supporting Actress – Hathaway. A+. Her tour de force rendition of I Dreamed A Dream makes her a contender for this year’s Oscars. If you get over the fact that she’s not really a singer but an actress who sings, then you can’t help but devour her fresh take on the role. Actually, given Hooper’s live-singing approach to the film, methinks you can’t really deliver a well-placed, beautifully sung I Dreamed a Dream when you’re bawling your brains out. It also helped that Hathaway went at great lengths (literally starving herself to almost-death and chopping of her locks) to get into character.

Best Picture? Subject to debate.

Written and composed by the creative team of Alain Boubil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, Les Miserables is undeniably an icon of musical theater. Its music is so powerful that its songs have become the go-to audition pieces for most actors, with a Tony Award-winning score that is as immaculate as it is forward thinking, and a run that is unprecedented on both Broadway and the West End. Lest we forget, its crossover to pop culture via the iconic illustration of little Cosette and Joey Potter’s nasal rendition of On My Own on Dawson’s Creek. Admit it, it’s the sh*t show performance, à la Lana del Ray in SNL, that you haven’t quite forgotten.

Speaking of sh*t show, teen queen Amanda Seyfried who seemed always short of breath in trying to sing Cosette’s coloratura soprano seemed to have given fellow teen queen Katie Holmes in Dawson’s Creek, a run for her money (Samantha Barks who played Eponine in the film didn’t fair any better). While she remains one of Hollywood’s most ravishing beauties, Seyfried’s horrific showing makes you kind of miss talented “Little Cosette” a whole lot after she has grown up. In fact, the actress’s only acceptable scene was when Marius first sees her as she was walking through the streets of Paris — acceptable in that she didn’t have to sing or say anything at all.

And then there’s Russell Crowe. His Oscar turn in The Gladiator didn’t serve him much in portraying Inspector Javert — a role that should have been the menacing shadow to a Valjean on the run. They ought to have at par as yin is to yang. Instead, Crowe’s rendition of Stars registers as more of a Parils Hilton Stars Go Blind comedy act than actual singing, which kind of makes you wish that his character had committed suicide earlier. 

One performance that ought to have been decorated though is Eddie Redmayne’s Marius. A true theater actor who won a Tony for the play Red, Redmayne sang the role with such heart and tenderness that wasn’t at all annoying or cheesy. Seriously, who falls in love with someone at first glance? His commitment to this delusion of puppy love in the midst of a revolution makes this plot thread (not his fault) seemingly forgivable. Similarly, his Empty Chairs and Empty Tables is a breath of fresh air and a diamond in the rough that is the film’s muddled middle part (a.k.a. post-dying Hathaway and pre-dying Valjean).

If anything, after sitting through this two-and-a-half-hour debacle, I was reminded of how much of an ensemble piece Les Miserables really is, and to see it any other way (i.e., Hooper’s star vehicle approach) is a travesty. An ensemble piece is only really as strong as its weakest link.

The material in itself calls for simultaneously moving clogs working together to carry out the full quality and potential of the material. Such that when you have the iconic One Day More finally dawn on the film — a song which traditionally takes place onstage in a revolving platform, with the ensemble engaged in some form of momentous march — you are supposed to be ushered into a full auditory climax. Instead, you are baffled with the lopsided singing (Redmayne’s dreamy tenor vs. Seyfried’s sex sounds, Crowe, and even Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter who do much for the acting but hardly for the singing) and then Hooper’s cut-scene to cut-scene progression which is not as effective as when all the actors are inhabiting the same stage. It kind of makes you appreciate the scenes being performed solely by theater actors (such as Do You Hear The People Sing?) even more.

There is also something to be said about how the play was adapted to the screen. Aficionados often complain that film adaptations of books like Harry Potter or The Lord of The Rings often deviate from their literary versions, thus the disappointment of fans and enthusiasts. However, Hooper’s decision to remain truthful to the stage play, largely to a fault, makes it difficult as a moviegoer to latch on to any storyline, other than Fantine’s which saw a proper beginning-middle-end.

Either it was a lack of screen time for the love triangle of Marius, Cosette and Eponine to take root and move you to feel sorry for Eponine when she sings On My Own, or a lot of blanks being provided by the curious civil uprising that never really escalates into a French Revolution that you can care about. Maybe, for the lack of exposition in the play (and Hooper’s loyalty to it), he could have maybe used the text and time prompts he added before each milieu à la Star Wars to explain where we were at at such and such point, so as not to be confused. The lack of context made it seem like it was a love story or a revolution that came out of nowhere. The movie could have literally curtained down when Valjean retrieved little Cosette.

While the film did have its redeeming qualities (Hathaway, Jackman and Remayne’s master class performances), they weren’t enough to salvage everything else that happens in between. I only have Hooper to blame. Maybe an abstract approach like what Rob Marshall did for Chicago or Baz Luhrmann for Moulin Rouge? The abstractness could have possibly repaired all the flaws in the material when adapted to film. Let’s not even get into all those dizzying close-ups that Hooper employed, which might have worked for I Dreamed A Dream or The Confrontation, but reduced the grandeur and scale of Les Mis altogether.

Would I watch it again? Probably. I’m a theater fan after all. Would I recommend it? Sure, Les Mis is a treasure as much as it has become an important part of our cultural history. But really, I would have wanted to leave the theater as I did when I watched Chicago — mind blown since the film might have actually been better than the play. In this case, catch Les Mis in a live theater and see how a Broadway musical ought to be done — by real theater actors.