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

If Caleb Picked the Oscars and Made Up His Own Categories, 2013 Edition

Best Picture If It Weren't for the Blasted HandyCam: Beasts of the Southern Wilds (Special Mention: Les Miserables)
Best Film No One Saw: The Queen of Versailles
Most Surprisingly Awesome Film: ParaNorman
Most Surprisingly Awful Film / Biggest Disappointment: Prometheus (Special Mentions: The Dark Knight Rises, Brave)
Best Body Horror Moment Since Cronenberg Quit Horror: Looper
Best Superhero Film: The Avengers (Well, no shit)
Most Useless, Underbaked, Unwanted Film: The Amazing Spider-Man
Best Wes Anderson Film: Moonrise Kingdom
Best Propaganda Piece: Zero Dark Thirty
Best What the Fuck Did I Just Watch: The Cabin in the Woods (Special Mention: Safety Not Guaranteed)
Most Overrated Sequel That Is Actually Good But Not Nearly As Good As Everyone Says: Skyfall
Best Piece of Overrated Oscar-Bait: Lincoln
Best Forgettable Mediocrity No One Would Be Talking About If Pixar Hadn't Dropped the Ball This Year: Wreck-It Ralph
Weirdest Off-Beat Comedy That I Have No Idea What to Do With: Bernie (Special Mention: Safety Not Guaranteed)
Most Surprisingly Hilarious Comedy: 21 Jump Street
Most Chronologically Unfortunate Subject Matter for a Superhero Film: Chronicle
Best Picture I Expected to Hate But Actually Kinda Liked In Total Spite of myself: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Dark Knight Diatribes

"On a more superficial level, I have to ask the question: how many good third movies in a franchise can people name?" 

~Christopher Nolan

The Dark Knight Rises is not a great film. It is not a great Batman film, nor is it a great summer blockbuster. It is not a bad film, by any stretch, nor even a mediocre film; we may generously even call it "good" if we allow the whole to amount to more than the sum quality of its parts. But shrouded in the shadow of what I might with only minor hesitation call the two greatest superhero films of all time, the latter of which is probably the masterwork of Nolan's career to date, TDKR cannot help but be a disappointment. 

Where to begin? Perhaps it is best to take the worst of the pain from the outset: TDKR is in many ways a sloppy, haphazard, and bloated film from a director (Nolan the Elder, Christopher) and screenwriter (Nolan the Younger, Jonathan) I have often praised for attention to the finer details of the craft and a general coherence of vision, both of which are sorely lacking on display here. The first half of the film in particular is the worst kind of drudgery, reminiscent of nothing more than the Wachowski brothers in its endless, self-important exposition full of sound and fury but signifying nothing; it aches to watch J. Nolan striving for such profundity with every line, hoping desperately to achieve aphorism of grand philosophical portent and instead landing upon grandiosity. TDKR desperately, crudely longs to be Wagnerian but achieves only the Shatnerian; I can think of no closer analog to the failure than that of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, and the two films share more in common both structurally and thematically than I am comfortable examining, but I will momentarily force myself to do so anyhow.

At their worst moments here the Nolans achieve near-Schumacher levels of absurdity. The clumsiness is often staggering to the point of camp: when Bane's (Tom Hardy) pet physicist began tinkering with Wayne's Unobtainium Reactor and a single jump-cut later declared "This is now a four megaton NUCLEAR BOMB!" I along with half the theater burst into unrestrained, un-welcomed laughter that would time and again re-emerge at each bout of similarly contrived nonsense. TDKR is no more intellectually insulting than your average Big Summer Movie, but these sorts of hokey hijinks have less place in the moral or physical universe of Nolan's Batman than they do in a Roger Moore Bond film. If Tom Hardy's mustache had been accessible through his oxygen mask as Bane he would certainly have twirled it with impunity, but alas that he is forced to limit himself to faux-Victorian posturing complete with the two-handed "Moriarty Grip" on his upper jacket lining at all times, from which I half expected him to pull a snuff box and monocle at any moment. At Hardy's most restrained he is reasonably intimidating as a faithfully intellectual Frankenstein's monster, but it is impossible to take him seriously when he is tossing quips like "Ask for the devil and he shall appear," "BEHOLD your liberation," and "I AM GOTHAM'S RECKONING!" along with literally dozens of other such Miltonian bon mots on a practically per-line basis, none of which serve to make him even fractionally as frightening as Ledger's Joker at his most banal. Alfred Pennyworth is the next worst offender, and even the incomparable Michael Caine is incapable of convincing us of the sincerity behind his ludicrously over-scripted lectures and lamentations this time around. Beyond that, the less said about Selina Kyle's (Anne Hathaway's) purring pontifications, the better, though the script does at least afford her Catwoman a few crowning moments of confidence in her cracks. 

TDKR's script is overloaded near to the breaking with enough textbook examples of Telling over Showing to give a high school creative writing teacher an aneurism. I've already heard it argued that the interminable exposition is justified by the expansive number of characters dealt with in the narrative, but that argument fails to hold much water when one considers how much more effectively that same challenge was overcome in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight through establishing imagery and just generally more effective filmmaking, which seems to have been a secondary concern for Nolan this time around the block. The film also fails against its predecessors on a more thematic level in its thoroughly confused philosophy and general disregard for consequences and characters. The more that is revealed of Bane's scheme and motivations, the less they make any coherent sense, especially where a particularly jarring "revelation" is concerned in the final act.

In making TDKR as blatant an Important Message film as it was clearly intended to be, the Nolans manage to subvert the very essence of The Dark Knight's core motifs, taking the basic hope in humanity offered in the Joker's ideological defeat by the conscience of everyday citizens and turning it on its head in a Randian anti-populist diatribe that shows those same Gothamites reduced to mindless mobs in service of Bane's amusement, absent any legitimate behavioral justification beyond the demands of the plot and Nolan's overwhelming desire to evoke Robespierre and the Reign of Terror. It's as bad an example of world-building as it is incongruous with the film's own established moral universe, and that message commitment to a set piece over the concerns of the film's soul muddles Bruce Wayne/Batman's (Christian Bale) own character arc to the point of incomprehension, however hard the screenplay tries to substitute unearned epiphanies for genuine development (going so far in breaking the rules of the world as to introduce crucial plot information otherwise unknown to Wayne through what is immediately established as a hallucination). This kind of writing is as lackadaisical as it is lazy, and the knowledge that J. Nolan is capable of so much better only makes it all the more devastating in its actualization.

I have been harder on the film than it deserves in focusing so intently on its flaws; granted, they are legion, far more abundant than I have outlined here, but for all of them TDKR still retains enough craft to commend it. Its sequences of action, though much sparser and of smaller consequence than their operatic accompaniment tricks us into believing, are as visceral and entertaining as any in the trilogy, and Nolan must still be commended for his commitment to practical – and powerful – effects over typical Hollywood CGI saturation. Most of the actors do quality work given the shortcomings of the script – need I even speak of Gary Oldman's unwavering dedication? –  and if the editing is shoddy it at least serves to showcase their commitment even in the film's excesses. Zimmer does nothing new or interesting with his musical reprisals, but his spartan score is as functionally effective as ever, even if I do wish Nolan had relied less on its shrill, throbbing strings to establish the stakes of the climax.

Though TDKR – loud and proud in its portents as it is – closes with a literal bang, it resonates as scarcely more than a cinematic whimper. Those of us with adoration for its progenitors owe it some measure of respect as a not-disastrous end to the trilogy, I suppose, but I suspect non-fans with less stake in its success will ultimately get more enjoyment from the serviceable final product than those of us with an emotional investment in its endeavors.

Grade: B- (and it feels generous; I am overriding my gut reaction in bumping it above a C letter level)