Oscars Fortnight: Les Misérables

Les Misérables (2012)

85th Academy Awards (2013)
Nominations: 8
Wins: 3

Well, here we are with another Oscars Fortnight in the books. I thought doing these reviews after the Oscar ceremony this year would make the two-ish weeks feel a little less exciting, but that wasn’t really so. After all, the Oscars live on throughout the year, in newer, lesser movies trying to milk recent Oscar winners’ appearances or in the slow-building buzz of various film festivals over the Summer and Fall in anticipation of next Oscar season. It also leaves you with a renewed sense of needing to catch up with Oscar winners past and present. My final review this year is of a film that I had ample opportunity to see in theaters when it came out, since it was released at a time when I had little in my life going on outside of watching movies. And yet, something about Les Misérables just seemed very skippable, and after finally watching it, still mostly feels that way.

I’m not sure I feel particularly compelled to get too much into the plot of Les Misérables, since it’s one of those musicals where the plot and characters are a little hard to parse at times, which is smoothed over by the fact that there’s lots and lots of singing. But, the film centers on Jean Valjean (played by Hugh Jackman), a French prisoner who has been sentenced to spend 19 years in jail for stealing bread. When he’s released from jail, he has a hard time adjusting to civilian life, but eventually decides to go clean, and we cut to eight years later where he is a respected factory owner. However, he comes under suspicion from Javert (played by Russell Crowe), a former guard at the prison Valjean was imprisoned at, who’s now a police captain in Montreuil, and suspects Valjean may be a prisoner he remembers from years ago.

One day, one of Valjean’s workers, Fantine (Anne Hathaway), is fired when it is revealed that she has an illegitimate child. This leads her to a life of prostitution and she dies in poverty before giving birth to Cosette, whom Valjean pledges to raise as his own adopted daughter. We then cut to years later, where Cosette (played by Amanda Seifried) is a young woman and the French Revolution is in full bloom. She and a young revolutionary named Marius (Eddie Redmayne) become smitten with each other, while the now middle-aged Valjean watches on as the streets of Paris become fortified for political conflict, which eventually plays out in many boisterous set pieces.

I feel like a nice byproduct of Oscars Fortnight is that it has given me the chance to become familiar with famous musicals that have had serviceable film adaptations that haven’t quite become legendary. Les Misérables is certainly one of the more famous musicals out there (particularly in the U.K.), as well as an adaptation of a seminal novel by Victor Hugo. And while I have plenty of issues with this movie (which we’ll get to), I’m still glad I got to see what the appeal of this musical is, which I think does shine through in the film adaptation, even if what this musical is going for isn’t entirely for me.

And what this musical is going for is a lot of pomp and circumstance, but also a disarming amount of sincerity. I feel like I’m so used to most musicals having a bit of wink and nudge to their tone, but Les Misérables is a decidedly unfun musical, taking itself very seriously and committing very hard to its emotional directness. And that’s not such a bad thing in theory! The most successful example of this sincerity is in Anne Hathaway’s raw performance of “I Dreamed A Dream”, which more or less won her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress that year, since there isn’t much more to her performance than that one scene, but it’s just devastating and hard not to be moved by.

But at the same time, this earnestness and self-seriousness can be fairly exhausting, and kind of just annoying for lack of a better term. I would say that overall I’m not a huge fan of the film’s visual style, though I like that they at least tried something unique by using a bunch of different camera styles, much of them more rough around the edges than your typical musical. Though at the same time, this movies just looks very dark and dank. I realize many of these characters are living through poverty and societal strife, but it’s hard to be all that roused when so many of the images on screen are so uninspiring. I’m just not sure that Tom Hooper had the visual grace to be a great musical director, which seemed to be affirmed when he directed the abysmally-received Cats a few years later, which at this point feels like it may have sunk his career.

Since it’s something that’s often talked about in regard to this film, I feel like I do need to address the singing in Les Misérables, even though I’m not sure it’s the part of this movie I feel most passionate about criticizing. Much was made at the time of the movie’s release (especially in a behind-the-scenes trailer that played in theaters in 2012) about the fact that all the singing was done live on set. I feel like this is actually a cool idea, and one that influenced later musicals. It also does make for a more visceral type of musical performance, again best captured in the “I Dreamed A Dream” sequence. But also, it makes it more apparent that they probably could’ve cast better singers in this film.

The most obvious example of this is Russell Crowe, whose questionable singing I was well aware of before seeing Les Misérables. However, I don’t think I was prepared for the sheer volume of Crowe’s “Bowie with a cold” bellowing we hear over the course of the film. I would honestly just think it was funny that the 30 Odd Foot of Grunts frontman got to sing in Les Mis, but the fact that he probably sings more than anyone in the film (save for Hugh Jackman) just leaves one scratching their head over why the hell they decided to do this. That said, you do have to appreciate Crowe’s commitment to the performance. He’s definitely not phoning it in, which it feels like he’s been doing ever since this movie, which may be related to the critical drubbing he received for this performance.

While there are certainly some iconic songs in Les Misérables, I think the thing that struck me about it is just how old-fashioned the musical came off as. The original stage production debuted in the ’80s, but the songs feel as caked in dust as a French history book. Which perhaps is the point, but in a post-Hamilton world just feels like such a passé pop culture interpretation of history. While I wouldn’t say this interpretation completely fails at applying this historical approach to the musical, it just feels like it could’ve done a little more to make it worth hearing the songs of these angry men.