Less Miserable Than Other Shows

Film: Les Misérables

Tom Hooper, 2012

One month to the day since my first viewing and a week since my second, it doesn't seem as though there's much left to say about Les Mis that I and others haven't elsewhere. Still, I am finding it difficult to stop talking about Tom Hooper's gift to fans of film and theatre, so I will say a little more.

Already counting Hugo's Les Mis on my shortlist of greatest novels and Natel/Schönberg/Boublil/Kretzmer's adaptation among my favorite musicals, my expectations on entering the Christmas premiere were unrealistically high, /GrossUnderstatement. As impressed as I was by the cinematography (18th Paris on film has rarely looked simultaneously so grungy and so gorgeously rendered), the definitively re-orchestrated score, some stellar performances (particularly from the Broadway and West End grafts, and particularly particularly Samantha Barks and Aaron Tveit), and spot-on editing, I was distracted endlessly by the strained (Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway) and often just plain terrible (Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried) singing, shaky-cam, and (as I then conceived) disastrously misguided close-up tracking shots. To belabor the point, Russell Crowe's voice is an abortion of the eardrums which, for the sake of public safety, should never again be permitted near recording equipment. Worse, his "acting" is nonexistent, save a consistently constipated expression of the strain of singing, and therefore incapable of improving the performance even to the level of sub-par. At least I could understand what Hooper was going for with the apoplectic handycam and  unforgiving close-ups, even as I disagreed vehemently with the decision, but I could not forgive his casting nor account for it except as commercial calculation. 

I left the theater satisfied but lukewarm in my affection, counting the project a mostly successful but heavily flawed adaptation. It took a second viewing to remind me why I so deeply love Les Mis, and to recognize Hooper's adaptation as the faithful and independently successful film it is. 

It is not that I recanted my criticisms upon that second viewing so much as that I came to realize I had missed the forest for its most blighted trees. Les Mis more than merely "succeeds" in spite of its flaws: it flourishes, and stunningly so. Melodrama it is and has always been, but contra the myriad critics who have seen fit to consider that a mark against it, Les Mis's sentiment is its heart and life, a violent reawakening of raw feeling at the end of a decade characterized by smug self-awareness and postmodern ironization. 
Hooper captures Hugo's love and understanding of humanity in its full spectrum of color and contrast. An opening shot of a titanic galleon hauled by hundreds of prisoner-slaves through sea and storm to the swells of Schönberg's revitalized overture is the very definition of breathtaking. A near-unrecognizably emaciated Jackman as Valjean is cast in constant darkness against a lit cross or icon of the Christ in opposing corners. Hathaway's Fantine sings of her living death in prostitution as she is ravished in a literal coffin, and if that imagery is heavy handed it packs a punch just the same. The starving poor huddle together at the shadowed edges of the frame, their diseased and filth-ridden complexions only occasionally lit by scraps of lights through grates and crumbling walls separating them from the few and beautiful elite.

This flood of imagery reaches its crest in the second act, which pummels us with the raptures, follies, and tragedies of humanity in Marius (Eddie Redmayne) and Cosette's (Amanda Seyfried) infatuation, Eponine's (Barks) loss and longing, Enjolras's (Tveit) passion and principle, Valjean's awakening to compassion and forgiveness, Javert's (Crowe) inability to cope with a loss of identity in a changing world, and virtually every other facet of what it is to live and suffer and love and lose on this earth, all in the span of 158 minutes, making Hooper's one of the most compact and yet complete retellings of Hugo's material in its adaptive history. The word "epic" is thrown around a great deal too often (including by yours truly) in describing scope and significance, but if it ever held applicable meaning it is for Les Misérables. Whatever the cynical may label "manipulative" or "cloying" in the narrative is from my perspective a defensive reduction of what Les Mis really accomplishes here, which is to say the genuine impartment of genuine feeling. And Les Mis can cause feeling of a magnitude rarely matched, whatever its faults or whatever its methods. 

Or so, at least, the theater restrooms full of sobbing men of every age seemed to testify.

Grade: A

It's Actually Ambidextrous

Ursula K. Le Guin  – which I always thought an unnecessarily long moniker on her part, considering that she's easily the most famous Le Guin on the planet – is the uncontested queen of science fiction, though given her gender politics she might prefer a more neutral honorific. Shall we go with "democratically elected literary dictator for life"? I doubt she'd be any happier with that title, but I'm sure she'd concede once I convinced her of its necessity for the greater good, for if there are any more empathic, more humanely insightful authors writing in the genre I remain blissfully unaware of their existence.

The Left Hand of Darkness is as exemplary a piece of Le Guin's style and philosophy as she's ever written, and probably the best introduction anyone could find to her work this side of the Earthsea saga (which is admittedly a bit more of an investment and more appropriate for the most hardcore fantasy enthusiasts). Harold Bloom famously wrote of the book that "Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature, for our time," which is exactly the kind of hyperbolic yet essentially right-spirited praise I would have heaped upon the work myself had I read it at the time of its publication (1969, twenty years prior to the formation of my zygote) without the benefit of hindsight to reveal how dated some aspects of the novel would one day appear in comparison with Tolkien's timeless masterpiece. Still, Left Hand is certainly more worthy of the "high lit" label than 99.999...% of the crap masquerading as science fiction (most of it published under the Tor and Bantam labels, of course), and you know a woman's doing damn fine work as an author when even as blatant a misogynist as Bloom recognizes her craft.

I wish I could give it the analysis it deserves at present, but due to my massive backlog of pending critiques (specifically of works not forty-three years old) I'm going to have to summarize it with nothing but Twitter hashtags until a full review at a later date: #GenderBender #FirstContact #AlienSurvivalSaga #LikeNothingYou'veEverRead.

Arbitrary Numerical Score: 9/10

Because Childhood Innocence Is Overrated

I was introduced to Richard Adams's classic leporine novel Watership Down and its lauded film adaptation through slightly roundabout means. Around the age of eight or so I developed an affection for Brian Jacques's Redwall series bordering on obsession; already a fantasy fanboy in the making, I found something irresistible in a world of ancient swords and epic quests populated by talking woodland creatures with a questionably influential affinity for strawberry cordial. Needless to say I was hooked for the next half decade or so, suffering through the eventual decay of the series with virtually undying patience and going so far as to develop the then largest Redwall fansite on the web.

All the while, I had continued to glaze over the back jacket cover texts that, book after book in the series, lauded Jacques's storytelling by comparison of its achievements to those of Watership Down, an otherwise unfamiliar title to me which stuck in the back of my mind but somehow never sufficiently motivated me to track it down. Mind you, such tracking of a non-Rowlingian English-language novel was always a Herculean task in the Thailand of the 1990s, particularly when one lived as far from its civilized (read: westernized) hub in Bangkok as my family did at that time, at least given the quality (read: lack thereof) of Siamese roadways in those days. Consequently it was not until the flame of my passion for Redwall had been reduced to a dying ember in my mid teens that I chanced upon a tattered mass-market edition of the elusive work in an equally tattered missionary guest home, and my world was changed forever.

Well, perhaps I exaggerate. Let us rather say my world was improved markedly. The novel, which I have not had the opportunity to read again in the last seven years or so since that happy discovery, could be considered a masterwork of the 20th century English literary canon (I refuse to employ the vile terminology of "children's" literature), assuming one were to put such stock in my over-glossed nostalgia-fueled memory of the thing. And were this review expressly about that written work, it should likely be nothing more than the slathering adulation of a worshipper and scarcely worth the name of Literary Criticism (though just try telling such a thing to an Austenian scholar, I dare you on your life). As it stands, this review is about the 1978 Martin Rosen animated film adaptation, which has both the advantage of my only just having seen it for the first time and the disadvantage of my having no fond childhood memories attached to its being - though I wonder if any child could possibly view this film without experiencing unmitigated terror, "fondness" be damned.

Vapid dust-jacket review blurbs aside, the similarities between the world of Redwall and that of Watership Down are superficial at best. Jacques's characters, particularly after the first book, are less so animals than they are people in animal costumes - the word "anthropomorphic" hardly begins to encapsulate the fact that they are bipedal, possess opposable thumbs, and not only practice in some hybrid Benedictine/Neo-Pagan religious order but fashion matching abbeys and habits to boot, to say nothing of their inordinate preoccupation with the culinary arts. Adams's rabbits, conversely, are rabbits: they hop about on all fours, their primary concerns in life are survival and reproduction, and the discovery of a boat's buoyancy in the course of a predatorial escape is their equivalent of a Copernican revolution.

It has been observed before by wiser critics than I that Watership Down fits comfortably nowhere in the canonical scheme of western literary genres; nowhere, that is, posterior to the Homeric epics. For WD is nothing short of an epic, albeit one told by rabbits, about rabbits, and for rabbits, the work itself operating under the genius conceit of being conveniently translated for its human readership, with "Lapine" names such as Hrairoo rendered as "Fiver" for our humble benefit. The scale of the story is certainly epic from that Lapine perspective, a journey of two miles consisting of near immeasurably life-threatening adventures and close escapes even when truncated from the novel for the purposes of standard "childrens'" film (that vile terminology again!) running time. The world's mythology, two, is as artistically fitting and psychologically appropriate as any of that in Homer's renditions, and therein perhaps lies the greatest strength of both the book and the film.

Watership Down, I believe, is so universally understood and adored by those familiar with it precisely because it fails to fall into any classical Aristotelian category. Neither inherently comic nor tragic, WD is a resonantly true (and ironically human) story due to its treatment of the pathos of sapient existence, which, one might thereafter watching coherently argue, holds as strongly in the case of of rabbits as it does for that of homo sapiens. For no one is the fragility of life - and, conversely, the necessity of its perpetuation - more apparent than for rabbits, the race "with a thousand enemies" ever seeking to catch and to kill. The narrative of Hazel, Fiver, and the entire Watership Warren is positively overflowing with the abundance of life in all its most extreme experiences, from the sheer terror of present and painful death to the pure elation of fulfilled dreams to the ethos of meaningful sacrifice.

But I digress. It is only fitting that I speak at least briefly of the film qua film. And indeed, what a unique film it is, damned though it be by fate and the general stupidity of Western prejudices to the annals of esoterica. The animation, directed and fully conceptualized by Rosen with the exception of the introductory mythology (which retained the style of the original and late director, John Hubley), borders on ultra-realist in such a way that resonates perfectly both with the pervading seriousness of the WD world and with an identifiably English sensibility in substance. It is, quite frankly, drab and depressing on account of that utter commitment to realism, though hauntingly and captivatingly so. Starkly beautiful in the manner of a Bruegel landscape in its depiction of reality, and vibrantly twisted like the most horrifying of Bosch's triptychs wherever it portrays hallucination or any other decay of that reality.

It's downright chilling in both instances. And it's damn good. Sure, the voice syncing is distractingly off (likely a side effect of the animation team's dedication to realism), the sprawling plot of the four-hundred-plus-page novel is truncated and compressed to such a dizzying degree that the viewer often has scant time to learn a character's name before said character is killed off haphazardly (see the novel for proper treatment on this point), and the graphic violence likely to leave young children waking up at 3am in tears should their parents be foolish enough to mistake it for "family fun," but it's meaningful in a way that few western films of the latter 20th century can claim to be, animated or otherwise. What's more, though the film's gratuitous violence and darker thematic elements were ultimately its commercial downfall, it's precisely what makes it so memorable; we just don't see this animation on this mythic scale produced outside of Japan these days, no more in 2011 than we did in 1978, with all due apologies to Brad Bird. The score, on the other hand, is nothing special, though appropriately moody, and the infamous music-video-within-the-video of Garfunkel's "Bright Eyes" is actually one of the most poignant scenes in the film, if a bit jarring given the otherwise Romantically inspired orchestration. The mise-en-scene is beyond comment: the gentle English countryside is rendered with loving exactitude, almost too palpable to seem "merely" cartoon even in the moments wherein our protagonists' unique perspective transforms it from idyllic pastoral paradise to hell upon earth. Suffice it to say that high octane nightmare fuel abounds.

In conclusion, Watership Down, the film: flawed, yes. Masterpiece, no. Classic for all the same reasons as the novel, yes, and worth every moment of your emotional investment tenfold over. You might be surprised just how much rabbits have to share with us about what it is to be mortal – what it is, after all, to be human.

Arbitrary Numerical Rating (For the film, mind you; the novel must wait for a future revisit): 7/10

Still the First Man

Film noir in the truest sense of the term, The Third Man crafts a breathtaking story out of chiaroscuro shadows both literally and figuratively. Never to my knowledge has the pulp detective thriller form been executed so elegantly, whether in the utterly sincere performances of some of the greatest actors ever to grace the screen, the brilliant manipulation of darkness both to obscure and reveal men and motives, and a script that takes seriously the thought lives both of its own characters and of its audience. The closing shot alone probably deserves some kind of honorary acclaim, and I would recommend the movie for that single moment even were the rest of it unmitigated trash.

The only marks on this otherwise flawless masterpiece are a distracting preponderance of Dutch angles (we get it, Reed - the perspectives are skewed) and a rather interminable chase sequence in the final act. As for the much-celebrated zither-only score, I cannot say I was overly impressed, nor was I in any way disappointed; apathetic would be a better word. These few preferential cavils, however, are hardly enough to mar this gem of cinema. The Third Man is a film for people who love films and who love to take them seriously. Hell, it's a film for everyone else, too.


Arbitrary Numerical Rating: 10/10

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust Stanley Kubrick

Satire doesn't get much sharper than this. Not only is Dr. Strangelove deeply, darkly, and disturbingly funny in its Cold War arms race parody, but it is every bit as starkly beautiful in its cinematography. Every scene is a testament to Kubrick's mastery of formalism, from the breathtaking opening aerial shot to the dizzying Dutch angles artfully employed in Sterling Hayden's ominous closeups.

It is impossible to avoid crediting (although Kubrick, true to egoistic form, did just that) Peter Sellers for his tremendous - some might say single-handed - contributions to the film's humor both through his script work and his performance as no fewer than *three* of the principal characters. While Dr. Strangelove is ironically the weakest of these and perhaps the most overtly farcical aspect of the film, Lionel Mandrake's riotous RAF unflappability in the face of nuclear war and President Muffley's deadpan insecurities account for two of the highest points of comic genius in Seller's career.

Thanks to Kubrick's detailed direction and Sellers' uncanny characterization, Dr. Strangelove is that rare comedy whose artistic merits easily match - and perhaps even outweigh - its simple laugh appeal.


Arbitrary Numerical Rating: 10/10