One time when I was a missionary, I really wanted to bake something. But I couldn't go to the store and I didn't have much time, so in a mad act of domestic desperation I mixed pancake mix, a can of pumpkin, 9 packs of Swiss Miss powder, and a little milk, and slopped it into a 9-inch round to bake for 40 minutes. I don't recommend the recipe, but by a missionary miracle, it turned out really good. My companion thought I was Martha Stewart. There were some shriveled marshmallows from the hot chocolate mix, but they were easy enough to ignore.
In a heavy-handed metaphor, that's how I perceive Tom Hooper's insane and strange Les Mis adaptation. As I sat there, I kept having the impression that I was watching a bizarre experiment that surprised and moved me, but was a little sloppy and had maybe a little too much sugar.
Before we get into the acting, I have to say that watching Les Mis as a full-scale movie (not in concert) really revealed to me the play's striking flaws. It has enormous pace issues. The overture is all of 10 seconds, which in the movie doesn't give us time to settle in. It may have helped if our first shot wasn't a disorienting and completely unnecessary aerial swoop over men dragging a ship by hand, but even still, the events of that opening song were happening faster than you could keep track of them. Before the movie hit 5 minutes we had met Valjean and Javert in an unnecessarily epic chain-gang scenario in which these two tell each other their names and not to forget one another for absolutely no reason other than for the audience. Maybe Russell Crowe should have just looked into camera and said "Do not forget my name, do not forget me!" so we could know who he was really talking to.
This is more of an adaptation issue, but I bring this up because in an original screenplay, all of this would happen either before the movie starts or during the opening credits without any dialogue. But theatre is a verbal medium. The play needs to show us this stuff with words, a weakness that film doesn't carry. This problem exists throughout the movie--characters repeatedly singing things that could easily be shown without dialogue. I suppose the built-in fan base, not unlike in the Harry Potter franchise, would be up in arms if you cut too much, especially the iconic if pointless opening number.
The movie does feature a whole herd of added moments, whether through dialogue or new songs/snippets of song. Almost all of these made me think "Of course! Why didn't I ever realize that storytelling moment should be there?" The biggest example is the new full song that Valjean sings as he takes the young Cosette to safety and realizes his own capacity for love. Smaller examples include actually establishing Eponine's character both as a child and as an adult, adding Javert's presence to Thenardier's attack on the house, improving the believability of Javert's suspicion that the mayor is Valjean, and Valjean actually gaining the trust of the revolutionaries as he volunteers.
Many of the lyrics of the added snippets are pathetically written, but their presence is necessary to give weight to the most important beats of the plot. This is wonderfully counterbalanced by cutting entire verses of songs that aren't as important, e.g. In My Life, Turning, and that demonically bad song when Thenardier and Eponine "pick a bone in the street," my favorite rhyme of which is "I'm gonna warn them here/ --One little scream and you'll regret it for a year!" (a lyric that made it into the movie more for its plot importance than for its elegance and wit). My point with all this is that after the first few minutes of the movie, the poor pacing of the play is corrected by the shortening and lengthening of various moments. Maybe not an improvement in light of some of the poor writing, but at least a correction in terms of pace.
The only other significant complaint I had outside of acting was the camerawork. There's an astounding portion of the movie in which a featured singer (more often Hugh Jackman) is dead center in the frame, while the camera shakes and wobbles in an uncomfortable follow shot that's reminiscent of an episode of the Office. I really can't think of any reason for employing this style other than Tom Hooper's desire to violate the expectations for a big-budget Broadway musical. If that's the case, then why he opened the movie with that enormous CGI ship depot is beyond me. I would have liked to see more still, well-composed framing and camera movement. Not much to ask, since The King's Speech was chock-full of that.
More than anything else, I was shocked, moved, and driven to tears by Anne Hathaway's performance. She may have started in Disney little-league and only slightly improved toward her performance in The Dark Knight Rises (which was fine but bland--not her fault, it was in the script), but she's gained my sincere respect after Les Mis. She better than anyone in the movie strikes a perfect balance between realism and musical beauty. She isn't too polished, she doesn't always carry through the notes or stay on rhythm, but you believe that in her world singing is a heightened language for dealing with intense emotion. And I could stay with the melody of her songs despite her acting through them. She's sure to get an Oscar nod.
Now, I might be Hugh Jackman's biggest male fan who doesn't like the X-Men movies, but in this movie he only had moments of passing brilliance. No one can doubt his emotional connection, or his desire to "act" through the songs (which half the time meant "change the rhythm beyond recognition"), but I would have liked to see him just sing a little more. His dilemma is telling of the movie as a whole. It wants to be a musical, but it wants to do everything as if it weren't--no studio-recorded songs or lip syncing, experimentally awkward camerawork, and (in Hugh Jackman's case) a style of acting that came this close to pretending there was no music at all. But man, that moment when he tears his parole papers with a passionate "another story must begin!" knocked my socks off. And he managed (with a lot of help from Hooper) to make the Finale actually interesting, which was impressive. Despite the occasional flare of solid, emotional work, I would have liked to have seen him embrace the songs a little more--and no, singing Bring Him Home without a single note of falsetto doesn't count. That's just something he wanted to show the world he could do, and to me it was the second-worst choice of the movie.
The first was Russell Crowe, who didn't actually appear in this movie, or if he did, he was all but present. I think his consciousness was in a back room with a vocal coach somewhere trying to focus on his placement. There's really nothing more I can say than that he took arguably the most interesting character in the story and made him blander than if he had been played by Orlando Bloom.
Of course, the story of Les Miserables is emotional, inspiring, depressing, and beautiful. The movie captures all of that in a display that's at least as good as watching it on stage. If you didn't like the play, you might like the movie, but if you hate the play, I doubt you'll love the movie. If you know nothing about it, you'll like it, but leave a little depressed and maybe a tad confused. It's a strange experiment that at moments works, and at others reveals that it was baked using hot chocolate powder and pancake mix. But given the ingredients, it's mighty impressive. It might be worth seeing just for Anne Hathaway, something I never thought I'd say.
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