Les Miserables: Film v Stage
If you know me, you'll know I've been both way too excited and terribly frightened by the prospect of Les Miserables coming out in the cinema. Well, it opened in Dublin this weekend and I went.
Right off the bat, I'm sorry to tell you, I'm just not on the Anne Hathaway train. Ok, she acted well. I will give her that. However her inability to hold a tune or finish a phrase was just way too detracting from her overall performance to make me think she deserves anything, much less an Oscar. Unlike when I even just LISTEN to the Broadway recordings, her performance left me dry-eyed. Completely. Frankly, the cynic in me says that certain changes of order in the songs were done specifically because if she had to actually sing it out like they do on stage she would've sounded even worse by comparison. In reality, I found Hathaway's I Dreamed a Dream more like a child having a tantrum than someone who was downtrodden and desperate.
And about the changes in the libretto? Overall, not happy. The movie felt like there was a lot of exposition that was unnecessary and, more importantly, badly sung. They cut a lot of songs out, short or just parts out of them and kept lots of the fluff that can be skipped without much loss of continuity. As one of my friends mentioned on the walk home with the play at least folks have the programme to explain what's going on, but I'm still not convinced the movie needed it. It felt like it often threw focus on people or events that weren't really relevant and then didn't stay there long enough for it to make sense or make you care for them.
There were also little changes that were clearly jarring, and possibly, as another friend said, there to catch out those of us singing along with the recordings. Why on earth do you reverse the order of two lines? Why?? Why do it when it means they no longer rhyme? If you didn't want it to rhyme why are you doing this musical??? You didn't CHANGE the lines, so why change the order??? (Yes, there were changes to lines too that I didn't like as well, but really!)
The one change that I actually did sort of like was the new song for Valjean. It was, sadly, Hugh's best singing in the whole movie but it was kind of nice. Unfortunately, the music for it just did not feel like it belonged with the rest and it came at a time when I was anxious to move on to Paris and it changed Valjean's reasoning in a way that didn't particularly make sense. He'd already turned a leaf, he didn't need additional changes of heart because of Cosette. If it'd been in another movie, I probably would've liked it quite a bit as a song, but as it was I was so taken by how out of place it felt that I couldn't just enjoy it at the time.
I was actually quite worried up until Castle on a Cloud and Master of the House. I remember sitting in my seat going "Oh my god, I'm going to have to sit through this whole thing" because there's no way I couldn't and I'd had to. HAD TO. Then Castle on a Cloud came on which surprised me because I all of a sudden went "Oh there's the musical I know and love." It was even more surprising because I normally HATE Castle on a Cloud and have loved the transfer to mp3 where I can auto skip instead of fast forwarding my tape to death. They shortened it, which I didn't mind as it didn't have time to get nasally annoying, and they actually let that little girl sing. Which she did, well.
That was actually quite a recurring theme throughout the movie though- if they let the actors really SING, they did well. I'm talking Empty Chairs at Empty Tables, Red & Black, On my Own. Shockingly, as I was expecting to be in tears because of how awful they were, I quite enjoyed Crowe's Stars & Suicide and had tears in my eyes for other reasons. When he was let really sing, he wasn't terrible. He's not going to do a Broadway run of it, but at least he was on key unlike some of his costars. True, the rest of the time he was pretty dire, but the big pieces, saved him imo. (and I'm a HUGE Javert fan)
I really, really enjoyed SBC and HBC as the Thenardiers. I quite loved the dynamic between them, the characterisation and the way they played it. Some of the changes to their roles I wasn't gone on but I actually would've liked to see their stuff that got cut put back in (which I can't say I ever felt about the Thenardiers onstage). They were great.
Mercifully, once the Broadway stars showed up, the calibre of the songs dramatically improved. (Hmm, and yes my list of singing well does fairly well correspond to those stars, doesn't it?) Gavroche was quite entertaining and I was happy to see they didn't cut his death scene as had been rumoured (although by cutting the earlier version of Little People you did kinda have to guess how it ended if you didn't know the song). I did bawl like a baby anytime Colm Wilkinson was on screen, although that was probably entirely for non-movie related reasons, although the symbolism of that last scene with Valjean and the Bishop had a lovely feel to it even if its meaning really came from outside movie knowledge. I like to think that Wilkinson was absolving Hugh Jackman for his crimes against the character.
I was rather put out with the changes to Eponine's story, which isn't really a surprise considering how much of a fan of her I always have been up to and including at least one year going as her as my Halloween costume in my teens. Grr and argh. It felt like they belittled her love with the changes they made and that interfered with her death scene. Ok, I still bawled, but I was irked. And I did not like that interfering with my tears. The friendship between Marius and Eponine didn't feel like a friendship, more of her just making puppy dog eyes at him which was never how I'd felt it before. I also didn't like the cutting of the lads chivalrously trying to send her away from the action. I know she was dressing like a boy, but come on, no one was fooled and in the play the nod to that gives the lads some chivalry they were kind of lacking in the film.
In fact, the whole revolution was rather lacking. I really didn't feel the tragedy of the whole thing, probably because they cut so much out. I missed the whole revolution stuff, Enjolras standing up and rousing the troops. It all seemed over in a flash and was barely a speedbump in the plot. My favorite stories always have grand surroundings in them and by removing so much of the revolution stuff, I don't feel like it gave due to the circumstances, reasons, or action. The focus really was on Valjean and Javert, but the narrowness of it made me feel like so many of the other good characters and plots got short shrift.
The cinematography also bothered me. Closeups are quite effective at times, but when that's all you do it loses the impact. The Parisian sets and many others were great, but underused. I quite liked when they panned out and let you see the set- like in Stars and Javert's Suicide, but the rest of the time the closeups were pretty much all there was which was disappointing especially for a costume junkie like me. The other problem with pretty much only doing closeups is when there are ensemble pieces you can't see everyone at once. The stage allows this to be dealt with pretty easily- everyone's on stage. Easy peasy. However, I found that the shifting between various closeups on a lot of the ensemble pieces to be very annoying and sometimes almost too fast to follow. One Day More was a perfect example of this where you almost don't get what the hell is going on with the various plot lines as you're skipping between everyone so fast. Also, when there's a duet, its nice to see the two together- which you didn't. A Heart full of Love felt a bit disjointed as the two lovers were never on the screen at the same time. Even one shot of them staring lovingly at each other would have been nice.
The live singing thing doesn't work for me if it equates to bad music. If your voice, your tone, your tuning is bad it detracts enough that I don't enjoy the performance. I cringe, I wince, I frown. And if I'm doing that, I'm not enjoying myself or getting into the performance enough to care about what's going on or happening to your character.
Hooper seems to believe that singing should be the same level as speaking, and its really difficult (at least for me) to sing well and keep your voice down. I'd rather he'd let the singers sing out and then readjusted the level to quieter later if that's what he wanted. And as stage performances for years have proven, you can act really well and sing live. When the music is as important for the emotional content as it is in this, you need to make sure the music is good, even if that means its not sung live if your actors can't hack that.
And that's what I missed the most- the music. Its a shame that the beautiful music of Les Miserables was so often dampened down and not let swell and the melodies carry the emotion. In fact, most of the times that I spontaneously burst into tears was when it would pan out and they would ramp up the music as the sets changed because THAT MUSIC MOVES ME and it was missing through most of the film. Instead I got unsteady voices and missed notes which means this morning thinking back on it, I remember the film as mostly a grating sensation instead of the beautiful ebb and soul-touching music it should be. In fact, my favorite moment may be when Valjean tears up his parole papers and the camera follows a bit into the air because the music is blaring and gorgeous and evocative. And it didn't help that as the last note of a song was being held that they'd cut straight into the next song instead of finishing that one WHILE THE NOTE WAS BEING HELD, which made it feel rather disjointed and could be quite jarring.
This is a lot of negativity, but I should say that today I'm incurably humming/singing to myself ever since walking out of the cinema so it must have done something right. Its a little disappointing that I'm not inspired to immediately go out and buy this-version-of-the-musical-that-I've-just-watched which is my normal modus operandi. Instead, I went back to listening to the original recordings I've loved all my life.
I can't say that I hated it, but I'm not planning to go rewatch it anytime soon. I wonder if they'll release a director's cut that actually has the entirety of the plot in it, but right now I'm not in a hurry to watch that either as I'd have to sit through that first bit again, which was quite painful.
There were definitely some beautiful spots. I liked the ending. I liked the way the movie allowed France and Paris to come to life. I liked Stars & Javert's Suicide (and I was really shocked by this, but basically all my complaints about the general film were solved in that Hooper let Crowe sing out, showed off the beautiful sets, wasn't all closeup, and let the music & melody shine. Funny how that works...). Many of the parts I usually skip through in the recordings and could take or leave in the play, I really enjoyed in the movie. Unfortunately, that leaves a lot of what I do love lacking.
Overall, I think its best summed up by the fact that I now feel I'll have to drag my other half to see it live. I can't quite let the movie stand as the definitive version. And I wouldn't be giving it any awards either were I asked.
Right off the bat, I'm sorry to tell you, I'm just not on the Anne Hathaway train. Ok, she acted well. I will give her that. However her inability to hold a tune or finish a phrase was just way too detracting from her overall performance to make me think she deserves anything, much less an Oscar. Unlike when I even just LISTEN to the Broadway recordings, her performance left me dry-eyed. Completely. Frankly, the cynic in me says that certain changes of order in the songs were done specifically because if she had to actually sing it out like they do on stage she would've sounded even worse by comparison. In reality, I found Hathaway's I Dreamed a Dream more like a child having a tantrum than someone who was downtrodden and desperate.
And about the changes in the libretto? Overall, not happy. The movie felt like there was a lot of exposition that was unnecessary and, more importantly, badly sung. They cut a lot of songs out, short or just parts out of them and kept lots of the fluff that can be skipped without much loss of continuity. As one of my friends mentioned on the walk home with the play at least folks have the programme to explain what's going on, but I'm still not convinced the movie needed it. It felt like it often threw focus on people or events that weren't really relevant and then didn't stay there long enough for it to make sense or make you care for them.
There were also little changes that were clearly jarring, and possibly, as another friend said, there to catch out those of us singing along with the recordings. Why on earth do you reverse the order of two lines? Why?? Why do it when it means they no longer rhyme? If you didn't want it to rhyme why are you doing this musical??? You didn't CHANGE the lines, so why change the order??? (Yes, there were changes to lines too that I didn't like as well, but really!)
The one change that I actually did sort of like was the new song for Valjean. It was, sadly, Hugh's best singing in the whole movie but it was kind of nice. Unfortunately, the music for it just did not feel like it belonged with the rest and it came at a time when I was anxious to move on to Paris and it changed Valjean's reasoning in a way that didn't particularly make sense. He'd already turned a leaf, he didn't need additional changes of heart because of Cosette. If it'd been in another movie, I probably would've liked it quite a bit as a song, but as it was I was so taken by how out of place it felt that I couldn't just enjoy it at the time.
I was actually quite worried up until Castle on a Cloud and Master of the House. I remember sitting in my seat going "Oh my god, I'm going to have to sit through this whole thing" because there's no way I couldn't and I'd had to. HAD TO. Then Castle on a Cloud came on which surprised me because I all of a sudden went "Oh there's the musical I know and love." It was even more surprising because I normally HATE Castle on a Cloud and have loved the transfer to mp3 where I can auto skip instead of fast forwarding my tape to death. They shortened it, which I didn't mind as it didn't have time to get nasally annoying, and they actually let that little girl sing. Which she did, well.
That was actually quite a recurring theme throughout the movie though- if they let the actors really SING, they did well. I'm talking Empty Chairs at Empty Tables, Red & Black, On my Own. Shockingly, as I was expecting to be in tears because of how awful they were, I quite enjoyed Crowe's Stars & Suicide and had tears in my eyes for other reasons. When he was let really sing, he wasn't terrible. He's not going to do a Broadway run of it, but at least he was on key unlike some of his costars. True, the rest of the time he was pretty dire, but the big pieces, saved him imo. (and I'm a HUGE Javert fan)
I really, really enjoyed SBC and HBC as the Thenardiers. I quite loved the dynamic between them, the characterisation and the way they played it. Some of the changes to their roles I wasn't gone on but I actually would've liked to see their stuff that got cut put back in (which I can't say I ever felt about the Thenardiers onstage). They were great.
Mercifully, once the Broadway stars showed up, the calibre of the songs dramatically improved. (Hmm, and yes my list of singing well does fairly well correspond to those stars, doesn't it?) Gavroche was quite entertaining and I was happy to see they didn't cut his death scene as had been rumoured (although by cutting the earlier version of Little People you did kinda have to guess how it ended if you didn't know the song). I did bawl like a baby anytime Colm Wilkinson was on screen, although that was probably entirely for non-movie related reasons, although the symbolism of that last scene with Valjean and the Bishop had a lovely feel to it even if its meaning really came from outside movie knowledge. I like to think that Wilkinson was absolving Hugh Jackman for his crimes against the character.
I was rather put out with the changes to Eponine's story, which isn't really a surprise considering how much of a fan of her I always have been up to and including at least one year going as her as my Halloween costume in my teens. Grr and argh. It felt like they belittled her love with the changes they made and that interfered with her death scene. Ok, I still bawled, but I was irked. And I did not like that interfering with my tears. The friendship between Marius and Eponine didn't feel like a friendship, more of her just making puppy dog eyes at him which was never how I'd felt it before. I also didn't like the cutting of the lads chivalrously trying to send her away from the action. I know she was dressing like a boy, but come on, no one was fooled and in the play the nod to that gives the lads some chivalry they were kind of lacking in the film.
In fact, the whole revolution was rather lacking. I really didn't feel the tragedy of the whole thing, probably because they cut so much out. I missed the whole revolution stuff, Enjolras standing up and rousing the troops. It all seemed over in a flash and was barely a speedbump in the plot. My favorite stories always have grand surroundings in them and by removing so much of the revolution stuff, I don't feel like it gave due to the circumstances, reasons, or action. The focus really was on Valjean and Javert, but the narrowness of it made me feel like so many of the other good characters and plots got short shrift.
The cinematography also bothered me. Closeups are quite effective at times, but when that's all you do it loses the impact. The Parisian sets and many others were great, but underused. I quite liked when they panned out and let you see the set- like in Stars and Javert's Suicide, but the rest of the time the closeups were pretty much all there was which was disappointing especially for a costume junkie like me. The other problem with pretty much only doing closeups is when there are ensemble pieces you can't see everyone at once. The stage allows this to be dealt with pretty easily- everyone's on stage. Easy peasy. However, I found that the shifting between various closeups on a lot of the ensemble pieces to be very annoying and sometimes almost too fast to follow. One Day More was a perfect example of this where you almost don't get what the hell is going on with the various plot lines as you're skipping between everyone so fast. Also, when there's a duet, its nice to see the two together- which you didn't. A Heart full of Love felt a bit disjointed as the two lovers were never on the screen at the same time. Even one shot of them staring lovingly at each other would have been nice.
The live singing thing doesn't work for me if it equates to bad music. If your voice, your tone, your tuning is bad it detracts enough that I don't enjoy the performance. I cringe, I wince, I frown. And if I'm doing that, I'm not enjoying myself or getting into the performance enough to care about what's going on or happening to your character.
Hooper seems to believe that singing should be the same level as speaking, and its really difficult (at least for me) to sing well and keep your voice down. I'd rather he'd let the singers sing out and then readjusted the level to quieter later if that's what he wanted. And as stage performances for years have proven, you can act really well and sing live. When the music is as important for the emotional content as it is in this, you need to make sure the music is good, even if that means its not sung live if your actors can't hack that.
And that's what I missed the most- the music. Its a shame that the beautiful music of Les Miserables was so often dampened down and not let swell and the melodies carry the emotion. In fact, most of the times that I spontaneously burst into tears was when it would pan out and they would ramp up the music as the sets changed because THAT MUSIC MOVES ME and it was missing through most of the film. Instead I got unsteady voices and missed notes which means this morning thinking back on it, I remember the film as mostly a grating sensation instead of the beautiful ebb and soul-touching music it should be. In fact, my favorite moment may be when Valjean tears up his parole papers and the camera follows a bit into the air because the music is blaring and gorgeous and evocative. And it didn't help that as the last note of a song was being held that they'd cut straight into the next song instead of finishing that one WHILE THE NOTE WAS BEING HELD, which made it feel rather disjointed and could be quite jarring.
This is a lot of negativity, but I should say that today I'm incurably humming/singing to myself ever since walking out of the cinema so it must have done something right. Its a little disappointing that I'm not inspired to immediately go out and buy this-version-of-the-musical-that-I've-just-watched which is my normal modus operandi. Instead, I went back to listening to the original recordings I've loved all my life.
I can't say that I hated it, but I'm not planning to go rewatch it anytime soon. I wonder if they'll release a director's cut that actually has the entirety of the plot in it, but right now I'm not in a hurry to watch that either as I'd have to sit through that first bit again, which was quite painful.
There were definitely some beautiful spots. I liked the ending. I liked the way the movie allowed France and Paris to come to life. I liked Stars & Javert's Suicide (and I was really shocked by this, but basically all my complaints about the general film were solved in that Hooper let Crowe sing out, showed off the beautiful sets, wasn't all closeup, and let the music & melody shine. Funny how that works...). Many of the parts I usually skip through in the recordings and could take or leave in the play, I really enjoyed in the movie. Unfortunately, that leaves a lot of what I do love lacking.
Overall, I think its best summed up by the fact that I now feel I'll have to drag my other half to see it live. I can't quite let the movie stand as the definitive version. And I wouldn't be giving it any awards either were I asked.