Les Mis: Yes, I Hear the People Sing

… although, for some of them, “sing” might be optimistic.

However, most of the cast of Tom Hooper’s cinematic adaptation of Claude-Michel Schönberg and Michel Boublil’s successful musical, Les Misérables, are quite pleasant to hear. (My lacklustre praise isn’t a symptom of poor quality — I don’t know much about singing and can’t give a better comment than “It was nice!” Also, people opened their mouths wide, and their lower lips trembled a lot, which is the only thing I know enough to associate with good professional singing.) Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) and Fantine (Anne Hathaway) in particular were tremendous.

Did I enjoy Les Mis: Now With Popcorn? About as much as I enjoyed the theatrical version, I suppose. (Also, for once I ate all my aforementioned popcorn and didn’t get ill. Victory!) The story is fun, even if the musical paints in emotional brushstrokes that became to broad for my tastes somewhere at the end of high school. I like the music (disclaimer: as implied above, I have no understanding of music), and although the lyrics are kind of a punch in the face when I unfairly compare them to the clever wordplay of, say, James Lapine in Into the Woods, whatever.

So, here’s what I thought of the movie.

1. Doing what movies do best

My favourite theatre presents ideas onstage by prompting them in its audience’s minds through presentationalism and metaphor, the universality of the scene evoking personal experience in each audience member, moving from big to small; my favourite cinema moves from small to big, using details and focus that cannot be presented onstage to evoke a larger, more universal feeling.

In film, the director can steer the audience’s attention to tiny details. Showing a glimpse of a letter or having the Bishop’s candlesticks in the background is possible. Film can dictate how its audience moves through the scene: Valjean may be physically limited to the edge of the cliff over which he throws the remnants of his past life, but we and the camera can soar above them, free. And film can move through isomorphically representational physical environments the stage can’t (safely) reproduce: we can watch Lamarque’s funeral procession from both sides, see Marius’s rooming house, spend just seconds darting inside houses to find out what’s going on for the local residents first as the barricade forms outside and then as the fight drags on. All these capabilities are used to great effect in Les Mis.

The film also works hard to avoid tackling tasks that live theatre could handle but that look silly onscreen. For example, many of the live show’s transitions are driven by the magical elision of time and space made possible by music, exeunts, and set changes. There are a few abrupt transitions in the movie, but the creators juggle scenes well to avoid jarring juxtapositions.

2. Beware of doubling times.

To do this, the filmmakers take liberties with the tempo, order, and inclusion of much of the music. For instance,  “Castle On a Cloud” goes by in a breath; Gavroche delivers a second verse of his introduction straight to the camera to keep the audience following along; “Do You Hear the People Sing?” comes long after “ABC Cafe/Red and Black”; and many of the “narrating what I am doing right now” songs are cut. This is neither good nor bad, but if you’re familiar with the soundtrack from the musical, it will trip you up.

3. I am from the gutter, too!

Russell Crowe has acted excellently in many movies I’ve enjoyed, but I regret to say that I can’t count this as one of them. It’s not that he didn’t provide a personal interpretation of Javert, our protagonist Valjean’s nemesis policier. But his version wasn’t compelling or exciting enough to justify casting him in spite of a weak vocal performance. Mr. Crowe, I’m not judging you here — Lord knows I’ve been given parts much farther beyond my singing capability, and you did way better than I could. And it’s not fair that I have Philip Quast’s powerful performance in the back of my head as I watch yours. But if your Javert wasn’t going to focus on the character’s strength and presence, I needed something more to grab me than his stoic demeanour.

4. Theology to the forefront

I wasn’t expecting was the movie to bring out a facet of the musical that the other productions I saw seemed to gloss over. The religious aspect of the story was much more prominent: what these characters, all of them, are concerned about is how to live a good life in G-d’s path. In the end, our heroes conclude that “to love another person is to see the face of G-d,” and (spoilers!) the show in all its forms is capped with a joyous afterlife scene.

Maybe it’s just that I have perspective now that I lacked when I first encountered Les Mis, but it seemed to me that visually, the movie embraced how each character searches for the divine in his or her own way and underlined whether he or she found it. It did this despite the omission of some of the more explicit references to religion such as Thénardier’s solo “Dog Eats Dog.” It’s no small thing to make an audience member suddenly see a very familiar show in a new light — especially a cynical, petty one like me — so chalk one up for Hooper and co.

5. Do you hear the people sing?

Musical conventions include the implicit rules that let one understand when a character is supposed to be singing in the world of the story — i.e., whether other characters perceive him or her as singing — and when singing happens to be the way the storytellers are making the character’s inner life available to the audience. (Of course, it can sometimes be both, but that’s beyond the scope of this blog entry.) For example, in The Sound of Music, when the children sing The Lonely Goatherd or So Long, Farewell, they are clearly singing in the world of the story, so that other characters can hear them sing. Contrariwise, when Captain Von Trapp and Maria sing Something Good, it seems silly to imagine that if you or the Baroness accidentally walked in on them, you’d overhear them singing the duet they just made up.

My point is, Les Mis: At Your Multiplex is one of the first musicals I’ve seen where I sometimes felt thrown from one mode to another mid-song. Maybe the best example is during the musical’s Act 1 finale, “One Day More.” Famously*, this song starts off with just Valjean singing and then builds as each character joins in with his or her own concerns and expectations for the next day. Usually, it just feels like each character is expressing his or her thoughts and feelings but not necessarily singing aloud for the others; in this version, I had a weird moment when Cosette, Valjean’s adopted daughter, starts up while riding in a carriage with her father. The camera cut to Valjean, and he had this look on his face that read most strongly as, “… Does she know I can hear her singing? …. Awkward.”

Anyway, overall, this film was an enjoyable experience, apart from the ladies in the row in front of my sister and me who couldn’t stop looking at their cell phones the whole time. Really? Thanks, Debra, for deciding we should go see the movie, and thanks, parents, for buying us tickets so we would leave your house and get out of your hair for three hours.

* As in, there are parodies. (Warning: linked video has stronger language than this blog.)