Wick's Review

Summary - Pretty Bad 1.5

People want to love Les Miz and many have, including the Oscars and a fellow ViewGuider. Fair enough. Beloved is beloved, especially when a blockbuster movie doesn’t stint on production values or star power. Sometimes however, an ugly truth is hiding right in plain sight, or in plain earshot.

What’s the plain truth?

Les Miz is a miserable march through muck and mire accompanied by bad singing. Lots of bad singing.

Didn’t know that The Miserable Ones of the title also refers to the audience? Consider yourself warned, albeit not by the orgiastic Miz Heads who packed movie theaters during this smash hit’s opening days.

Pace them, I waited for the first great song, and waited, till the muck and the mire dwarfed the experience of hearing a great song sung by an average singer. Subsequent great songs would be ruined by bad singers. Several bad singers.

The production sounds like a bunch of major moviestars practicing karaoke on a benchmark from the musical theater. As with many groups of karaoke singers, most are awful, Russell Crowe most of all.

Comedy is hard? Try singing.

Tom Hooper famously recorded his performers singing live, rather than in a studio for later lip-synching. Perhaps that’s why they sound worse than in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, another big budget musical. To wit, Helena Bonham Carter & Sacha Baron Cohen do well in Les Miz but were better in Sweeney Todd.

Singing aside, Les Misérables stands tall for the compelling historical story it tells, one that’s full of revolutionary fervor and hereditary inequality. Thus it’s worth noting that the radicals were Republicans. You can look it up. You can also find more political observations in the Reality commentary below.

Kinda like a teen screamfest, movies like Les Miz are critic proof. You know if you have to see it or not. Since you’ve read this far, you also now know it doesn’t hit the notes that fans have a right to expect. Perhaps we need a revolution.

Acting - Pretty Bad 1.5

Look at the poster above. The three male leads can’t sing a lick. OK, scratch that. Hugh Jackman and Eddie Redmayne are capable singers, though only Jackman’s a capable leading man. But he’s not a great singer yet plays a great singing role, too much to ask even from a megastar like Mr. Australia.

The female leads can each sing well, though much of what they’re given to sing is turgid exposition.

Anne Hathaway acquits herself best among the three big picture stars from the poster. Her Fantine can reasonably be claimed as something approaching a standard. Not so Amanda Seyfried’s Cosette, though it’s hardly the embarrassment others have declared.

Russell Crowe never gives a bad performance, a rule I still stand by, except when he’s called upon to sing.

Sacha Baron Cohen & Helena Bonham Carter are highlights, in no small measure because they get to deliver the only comic relief amid nearly three hours of misery. It helps that they’re both past masters at musical theater that’s at once Gothic and comic. Witness them in Sweeney Todd.

Eddie Redmayne is more annoying than inspiring as Marius, the rich young revolutionary. Dude doesn’t look like a future leading man and surely isn’t going to make his living in musical theater anytime soon.

Samantha Barks is the one fresh face worthy of a breakout. Her Éponine is beautifully affecting and possessing of a lovely voice. Turns out she won the role over Taylor Swift. Great casting call!

Little Daniel Huttlestone and Isabelle Allen represent the tween set well. Let’s see how they progress into adolescence.

Film - Good 3.0

The top drawer production design results in quite a few stunning vistas, albeit some that often look awkwardly stagey.

Perhaps some of the awkwardness is due to the pronounced British stamp placed on this quintessentially French story. No wonder it’s confused. We’re talking bangers and frites.

Edge - Risqué 2.3

Reality - Glib 2.0

The politics of the movie are a jumble for those of us not familiar with French history, especially the succession of French Revolutions. How many did they have? Unlike we Americans, they apparently needed several do-overs to get theirs right.

The famous barricades in Les Miz are from the Paris Uprising of 1832, an anti-monarchist insurrection of Parisian Republicans. Interesting. Then as now, Republicans opposed centralized power, notwithstanding that American Republicans have been known to mess up on that principle once in Washington.

Moviegoers in the Age of Obama can be forgiven for assuming that the radicals are Liberals, who today are Left of center. Ironically, Liberalism once focused on the support of individualism and was often conflated with Republicanism during the time of Les Miz, as explained in Wikipedia.

Today’s Liberalism has turned almost 180 degrees away from individualism and towards centralized power, whether in health care, energy policy or job creation. If it continues on such a path, another revolution may be in the offing. If so, let’s hope its participants can sing. We know where they can find some great songs.

2 Comments

• BrianSez Jan 27, 2013 1:29PM

  Regarding Wick’s Review
  My daughter nearly convinced me to see this. That was a close call!

• Wick Dec 25, 2012 3:43PM

  Regarding jasonhurwitz’s Review
  Wow. Very encouraging. Can’t wait to see it.

  As to Russell Crowe, he’s an actor about whom I often say “never gives a bad performance.” Then again, I’ve never heard him sing.

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