"Les Miserables" - Film Review

For the longest time, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables was considered to be part of that pantheon of literary works deemed unadaptable (along with other such *ahem* “unadaptable” works as Fight Club, Life of Pi, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy). It’s easy to see people’s doubts about Hugo’s work being translated to any other medium. The novel tells a sprawling, sweeping tale with a large cast of characters and deals with a wide range of heavy themes. But Les Mis’s first stop to the big screen wasn’t in the form of film, but oddly enough into a theatrical, operatic performance. Though the now highly regarded musical version of the story cut a fair bit of the narrative, it kept much of the central themes of loss, redemption, and revolution that had made it such a powerful story in the first place.

Hugo’s novel had proven itself adaptable, but now people wondered less about the plausibility of that, and more about the question of whether its superb musical counterpart had any hopes of being made into a film. Well, now, that it’s been made, the more appropriate question seems to be: how does the play translates to film?

That answer hinges on the musical itself because much of what works and doesn’t work for the adaptation is the nature of it being a musical. The music of Les Mis has a majesty to it; an emotional, powerful grandeur. But the music by itself is not enough to carry a film. And Les Mis by its very nature has next to no dialogue. The film has us watching one person after another singing (with varying degrees of enthrallingness and ability). This isn’t necessarily problematic; a number of films have done this before. West Side Story, clocking in at over 3 hours, is almost non-stop musical for the entirety of the film’s length. But what allows West Side Story to get away with this is that every musical number is dynamic. The camera changes angles, and actors move around. It provides the film with a vibrancy and energy that Les Mis often lacks. Too many of the shots in Les Mis are a single close up for almost the duration of the musical number. It’s as if director Tom Hooper forgot that he was making a movie and had the ability to move the camera around. This leads to a stiffness to the movie that causes it to be a slog to sit through at times. In short, the execution and staging of these musical numbers often takes away from the impact of them.

Don’t get me wrong; I love Les Mis. Ever since my high school put on a production of the show, I’ve been a devout fan of the musical. But that’s just it; I’m a fan of the musical, not this film adaptation which just happens to have its music. And it doesn’t even always have its music. There are weird cuts and additions to songs, and there is a wholesale creation of music that often feels clunky. For fans of the musical it may seem like it’s enough, especially after long wishful thinking about the arrival of the day when the play would appear on the big screen. But for people uninitiated to the story and music, it may not be nearly as satisfying. The fact is that Les Mis was never something that was going to be easily turned into a film, and this is probably the best we could have hoped for considering the difficult source material they were working with.  

Les Miserables –  B-