To summarize the plot of Les Miserables can be a daunting task. This version is a film of the musical based on the Victor Hugo book, but the plot is effectively the same. Without going too far in depth, if you’re not familiar with the basic premise, the next paragraph is for you.
Hugh Jackman is Valjean, released from prison after 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread. France of the early 19th century isn’t a nice place to be, with Russell Crowe’s Javert on the heels of the criminal. There is revolution, secret pasts, love, and a number of different plot thread and characters. Anne Hathaway won an Oscar for her portrayal as Fantine, a woman with an illegitimate child, Cosette, who becomes an important plot piece.
While the stage production is a spectacle, on film it is easy to bring some of the illusion to firm reality – even if it is with the use of computer imagery. the film opens with a very large set piece of Valjean and other prisoners hauling in a ship to dry dock. It is meant to be impressive. It also points to the problem I have with the film, which is just because you can go big doesn’t mean you necessarily should.
Les Miserables works best when the focus is on the personal interaction, as all great stories do. Sure, Star Wars is remembered for its epic space battles, but the reason people remember the film to this day is because of the characters and how they relate to each other. The same goes for Les Miserables. Massive sweeping crowd scenes are good, but overly enhancing scenes with computer graphics to face something to be “epic” diminishes the effect.
And Russell Crowe is fine as Javert, a man on the hunt for a criminal, but he doesn’t seem to be the right man for the role in a musical. He doesn’t do a bad job, but I certainly don’t think we’ll be seeing him on Broadway any time soon.
Interestingly, we get a lot of closeups of the singers. This is meant to (I assume) compensate for the lack of ability to really see the actor’s face close up on stage. Film affords this, and director Tom Hooper does this. It’s not a bad decision, but does take some getting used to. There are some camera shots that don’t seem to fit with a movie musical, but they don’t detract too much. Still, I think the film would have been better off without (obviously) hand held cameras and the panoramic shots.
At two and a half hours, you might think this film too long. It isn’t. There’s been a lot snipped from the book for the stage production, and then again, snipped or altered from the stage production for the film. In many ways I’d have liked to have seen this film run 3 hours – yes, there’s that much story. Sure it could be told in an hour, but that’s very much not the point. This is an EPIC.
As a film adaptation of a stage musical based on a massively thick book, Les Miserables is much better than I had expected. It doesn’t replace any of my top favorite movie musicals, but to does hold its own and certainly honors the source material.
Special features are plentiful, starting off with an audio commentary by director Tom Hooper. I sampled about 20 minutes of it at various points, and he seems pretty amiable, and there didn’t seem to be any dead spots. Most of what I heard was about the challenges of filming, which is pretty appropriate. A piece on the original novel clocks in at just over 10 minutes, and could easily have been much longer, and mentions nothing of the stage production. An hour of featurettes (6 in all) look at various aspects of the film. I think these should have been expanded into a much larger piece looking at Les Miserables as a book, it’s impact, the stage production, this film, and more. Oh well.
Still, it’s not a bad musical.