Les Misérables (2012): Imperfect Yet Earnest

Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables is a flawed movie that knows exactly what it wants to be. I can still imagine the actors' facial expressions when they were first told they would be singing through the entire script. We’re doing what? Contrary to popular belief and my own recently debunked assumptions, much of this story is not about the French Revolution itself; it focuses instead on the June Rebellion of 1832, a separate uprising in France in which the governing elite tried to impose themselves as kings, to the dismay and anger of the governed. But that’s not really what this story, this movie, is about, even if Les Misérables would never have been the same without it. Rather, it is about Jean Valjean, a man who was willing to turn his life around, even if his life circumstances didn’t always feel the same about his shot at redemption.

This isn’t an original story, as the novel was completed in 1862, and the stage musical first performed in 1980. Hooper hopes only to capture the emotions of a classic story, nothing more, and nothing less, which is likely a big reason why he asked the cast to sing the whole thing, that and wanting his adaptation to stand out, which it does for both the right reasons and the wrong ones. The bottom line is that it successfully does what it sets out to do. It captures the jolliness, the angst, the tragedy of the story, not without a few cogs that don’t fit into the machine as well as Hooper had obviously hoped. It works primarily because of Hugh Jackman’s tortured performance as Valjean, which is the glue that holds the rest of the movie together, though its weaker elements sometimes threaten to tear it apart.

While not every line in this Les Misérables is sung, most of them are. That makes it something of an acquired taste, so know what you’re getting into. It doesn’t necessarily feel fake because it’s not as though it’s trying to feel grounded and working around the music to get there. Les Misérables doesn’t shy away from peculiarity, and it challenges you to keep up. Jackman’s incredible portrayal of Valjean is the heart and soul of the film, and though you can tell that singing almost an entire screenplay is a new experience for him, between the pain in his eyes and his restrained, tortured facial expressions, there’s something so primal about his interpretation of Valjean, not to mention that his vocals are out of this world. He is a beacon of compassion and empathy in a movie where it seems that everyone else is driven by pride, idealism, selfishness, or even an excitedly opportunistic form of discrimination.

The rest of the cast is impressive as well, and Russell Crowe’s oft-mocked portrayal of Inspector Javert nails the essence of the character, though his vocals could have used another six months of training and a delayed release window for the movie as a whole. Anne Hathaway’s Fantine is another bright spot of the cast, with pipes equally as impressive as Jackman’s, and bad luck that absolutely no one would trade her for. One long take of her belting a heartbreaking tune after life dealt her the worst hand you can imagine is breathtaking, and not once does she break character. Sacha Baron Cohen (The Dictator) gives the most amusing performance in this movie as the corrupt, saucy, degenerate innkeeper Thenardier, a whirlwind of visual gags and probable STDs that is hilarious and more than a little bit gross. Hooper typecasts his movie, but it works.

I applaud his insistence upon making a pure-blooded musical, but Les Misérables doesn’t always know how to be both a musical and a movie at the same time, and you will often get the sense that it’s trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Its ambition also outruns its ability, as it is shot with the ineptitude of a blind man. Seriously, this movie is ugly. Characters the camera should be focusing on are sometimes out of frame for no apparent reason, as if the movie is trying to look cool by imitating how other movies were shot without understanding why they were shot that way. The visuals are a constant distraction from the emotions the movie desperately needs you to feel, and the combination of bad framing and restless camera movements is disorienting to watch in a way that might make you question whether you’re really drunk, and not seeing the movie for how it actually looks – which you most certainly are. Hooper insisted on capturing live vocals, which I can understand, but the visual gymnastics he had to go through just to make sure that a boom microphone doesn’t show up in the shot are obvious. This movie is like a shocking painting by someone hoping to hide the fact that he knows he’s not the best artist money can buy.

Yes, Les Misérables can't always realize its ambition, but it still captures the essence of what makes the story so timeless. This is Jean Valjean’s movie, and he is the most interesting thing about it by far. Some of the ways this movie interprets the story it’s adapting are, at best, misplaced, but Jackman grounds the whole affair in raw humanity. A pained glance here, a voice crack that betrays deep emotional scars there, and I was left wondering why the rest of the cast didn’t measure up to him, not that they’re necessarily bad, but just because Jackman is so good. It doesn’t always do everything the way it should, but Les Misérables does everything from the heart, and you'll feel it.

This story is a cautionary tale about both a black-hearted monarchy and red-blooded resistance to it, though not an outright condemnation. It critiques ideological zeal while rewarding kind men like Valjean for looking out for those less fortunate than he. Les Misérables captures both the excitement of a revolution and the sobriety of the consequences that come as a result of it, because no one imagines that the dead body lying in the street in the aftermath of the violence would be their friend, their child, or their lover. It captures the emotional complexity of the story, if not to the level it had obviously hoped to, and I’m always eager to reward ambition. Yes, you can hear the people singing in this movie, and though they don’t always hit all the notes, there is a beauty to hearing them sing, nonetheless.

Les Misérables (2012) – 7/10

Luke 6:32-36