Directed by Billie August
Written by Rafeal Yglesias
Based on the novel by Victor Hugo
Starring Liam Neeson, Geoffrey Rush, Uma Thurman, and Claire Danes
As Reviewed by James Brundage
No matter how many times I watch non musical versions of Les Miserables… no matter how long it has been since I saw the musical (once, at the Intrepid in NYC)… no matter that I have the unabridged book and am worming my way through it, I still see the people in Les Mis and expect them to start singing. It's engrained into my head, cut with a jackknife like "Bob Loves Judy" is scoured into a tree. Similar reactions come whenever seeing anything that has made the musical-to-film transition. I just expect them to leap into song. Perhaps it was this reaction that made this latest film version of Les Mis so annoying to watch.
Unlike the musical, which makes four hours fly by with its song and dance, Les Miserables spends its 159 minutes being utterly boring. Of course, I didn't even see the full 159 minutes. I watched the Spanish subtitled (It's in English with Spanish subtitles), 143 minute version (don't ask me why, it’s a long story that involves the awkwardness of buying a momento from a foreign land). It was still boring.
Perhaps it was the fact that I watched it at 4:00 AM or perhaps it was the constant expectation that Liam Neeson would sing his name at the top of his lungs for a good thirty seconds at least a dozen times during the film but rather than be furnished with those potentially comic moments I am furnished with the same reason that the book "Les Miserables" was abridged… its just too long. The movie plods along at the pace of a fat cow at pasture and has all of the same panache.
Les Miserables concerns Jean Valjean (Neeson), a good man who has broken parole and is pursued by obsessive detective Javert (Rush). He cares for Cosette (Danes) on a promise to her mother, Fantine (Thurman).
Like the stereotypical period piece we are furnished with a context we know next-to-nothing about (about twenty or so years after the French Revolution). We get costumes that make otherwise very attractive actresses look like completely repulsive (which is a good mark for accuracy but a bad mark for the viewer). We get streets that are supposed to look like something out of a previous century but instead look like 1920's New York (devoid of cars). We've seen it before.
In fact, the odd thing about Les Mis is that complete feeling of having seen it before. The way about 40 million of us are used to it is with a stage, not a set. This forces us to use our imaginations and thus not be completely distracted by an unattractive background. But having seen it before does not relate at all to the stage versus set predicament. It relates to the fact that, as costume dramas are concerned, Les Miserables is completely formulaic.
Director Billie August, who has been operating stateside since The House of the Spirits (1993) and hasn't been making good movies ever since, operates completely by the book as far as the costume drama goes. It is as if he picked the notes off the set of Elizabeth (not a good move considering the quality of Elizabeth) and decided to use the same basic setup. It did not occur to him that this movie takes place a good 300 years later and that it might be a good idea to work with characters.
Even with a skilled cast such as this, Billie August manages to through a monkey wrench into the machine that should have been their combined skill. The relationships that could have gone into depth frizzle, the characters are defined but not filled in, as if their outlines had been sketched on a piece of paper. Danes ends up looking like a mindless little girl. Neeson ends up looking like the archetypal do-gooder (you imagine that he would tell you he was an Eagle Scout were this taking place in modern day). Rush never develops that balance between love and hate that was necessary to make the character of Javert work. Thurman gets what is whittled down to a bit part in the case of Fantine.
In the case of remakes it is especially hard to review the movie. An automatic comparison jumps to mind. Thus, with Les Mis I know for a fact that it could have been handled better. It just wasn't.