The Miz

I watched the Les Misérables movie on Thursday night, which turned out to be a good use of my time. Girlfriend is taking one of her classes to see it tomorrow, too, which I think might actually be a good use of their time. This surprises me, but it is so.

As another big novel adaptation of the winter movie season (albeit with a major intermediate step), Les Mis bears comparison to The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Observation number one: Victor Hugo's approximately-one-million-word novel was reasonably adapted into a reasonably long movie. J.R.R. Tolkien's much shorter novel cannot, apparently, on the other hand, fit in three unreasonably long movies. You would think it had been Tolkien who couldn't shut up about nuns.

A lot of love for the book and the musical evidently went into this movie. It's a useful lesson in how you can lovingly adapt a work without necessarily rubbing every word of your source material into a tremendous lather. The battle between Fred and Satan (which I mentioned regarding TH:UJ) played out quite differently in these two movies. I actually found Satan's influence quite small in Les Miz.

Les puts a lot on the actors' acting ability. Do you remember that scene in Rocky, during the training montage, when Rocky is running past a docked freighter? The camera starts close on Sylvester Stallone and then pans out slowly in a long shot, until it registers with the audience that Stallone must actually be in really good shape. Well, about two hours' worth of Lez consist of that moment, with varying results. The songs are shot in merciless, continuous closeup.

Just how close, and how continuous, seemed to be a function of the character's billing. The bigger the part and the actor, the more the movie relied on their face and voice to tell the story, to the exclusion of all other dramatic expedients. Consequently, I spent a lot of time trying to see around Hugh Jackman's head. Much of Anne Hathaway's torso is allowed to appear in "I Dreamed a Dream." The supporting cast end up in the movie's sweet spot, since it's assumed that they could benefit from some actual mis-en-scene. In almost every case, the relentless camera work reflects well on the actors.

It's been popular among reviewers to find fault with Russell Crowe's performance. He does seem to be the only one who needs to spare concentration from his acting for singing--except when Hugh Jackman falters while running the falsetto gauntlet that is "Bring Him Home." Sweeney Todd did a pretty good job of establishing that it doesn't take a strong singing voice to drive a movie musical. It turns out, though, that while you don't need to be able to project to the cheap seats, you do need to be able to sing and act simultaneously. And Crowe's Javert would have been suitably intense in a Mis cast like Todd; he could have gone rasp for rasp with Johnny Depp. In his present company, though, he comes off as introspective at best, and weak at worst.

Nothing in this movie is totally bad, though. Its flaws are almost entirely the result of too much faith placed in the abilities of extremely talented actors, and that sort of thing can only go so wrong.