Raja Sen feels Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee Les Miserables is epic fail.Once in a while there comes a movie that automatically deserves the tag of Epic. Tom Hooper's monumental, grandstanding adaptation of Les Miserables does that and even more: it earns the second word of the phrase popularised by Twitter: it is definitively (and, in every sense, literally) what is called Epic Fail.
Look, I love musicals. Love 'em to bits. I have an obvious (if shameful) bias toward clever lyric, and when it skilfully drives narrative and replaces dialogue, the result is joyful. Hollywood might not exactly be serving us opera, but the pizza-pie version it offers up has its own distinct pleasures -- even the excessive cheese merely adds to it all.
There is much to commend about Tom Hooper's effort: the actors strain their sinews and furrow brows furiously as they sing their own bits; the director keeps amplifying up the emotion as he zooms relentlessly into their faces; and there is an undeniable sincerity to the film, an earnest desire to powerfully adapt Victor Hugo's weighty novel.
And yet an ambitious film can also be a bad film, and this is more of the latter than the former. Or does that sound mild? It shouldn't. This is a monstrosity of a film, a pompous and bloated farce that uneasily straddles the line between spoof and drama, serving only to make us aware of the gargantuan acting efforts. It is also sadistically long, a hundred and sixty minutes of mostly unbearable cinema.
One of the primary reasons is that they don't stop singing. A screen musical (as opposed to one on stage, which casts genuinely incredible singers, not A-list actors who can also sing) can be crammed with songs, sure, but they must be matched with lyrical highs. Characters should sing to express the dramatic, the romantic or the humorous.
Here, every line is sung, and thus the music never lets up. Characters doggedly wail and moan every bit of banality, and while it is an approach that may sound good on paper, it translates horridly on screen: when Russell Crowe looks at Hugh Jackman and sings his prisoner number, warbling 24601, all seriousness invariably vanishes.
The cast, as said, does a lot. Jackman, playing protagonist Jean Valjean, turns in a mammoth performance and sings with startling intensity:
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