Tuesday 29 January 2013

The wonder of Hugh

I am delighted with my title pun! It is in reference, of course, to Les Miserables which D kindly took me to as a wee treat. He is very patient. So, I realised I haven't yet posted a review of this so here it is...

Funnily enough I actually preferred it to the stage version and it is not often I say that. There are two reasons: 1) the book (which I have nearly finished) has such tremendous scope, particularly when it comes to the French Revolution. The stage show, for obvious reasons of brevity, is forced to ignore this. The film (because a picture can say a thousand words, of whatever the cliche is) manages to capture some of that scope. As a prime example, Hugo devotes twenty pages or so to discussing the Paris sewer system, a fact that goes unrecognised in the stage show. On screen, Valjean and Marias' escape through the sewers is pretty graphic and perfectly responds to Hugo's description 2) on stage your perspective is set. Unless you run up and down the aisle (not recommended) you are always the same distance away from the stage and even if the set designers mess with the perspective a little, you are always more or less a particular distance from the action. In the film, Tom Hooper used close ups...lots of them...and then scanned back...a lot. While this 'in and out' movement had the potential to become a little grating, actually it worked wonderfully for this film especially for Fantine's solo (Anne Hathaway should win every award going for this) and Valjean contemplating his fate in the Bishop's church.

I really liked the live recorded singing. It made the whole piece feel very fresh and unusually raw for an on screen musical. This worked particularly well with its sense of realism, again chiming with Hugo's prose. As for the individual performances...well my standout was, of course, Hugh Jackman as Valjean who was born to play that part. As anyone who knows me will know, Hugh can do no wrong in my eyes. Anne Hathaway is immense and Russell Crowe has been given some bad rap but is actually a rather good screen presence especially in the 'Wolverine v Gladiator' scenes. Eponine and Marias were both excellent, although I wasn't a huge fan of Cosette's voice, but that might simply be personal preference. In a lovely nod to the history of Les Miserables (one of my pet hates is calling it Les Mis - don't even think about it!) the Bishop was played by none other than my childhood hero (and original London Valjean) Colm Wilkinson, whose voice remains as good as ever. And it was nice to see a brief cameo role from Sheffield Crucible's own Dan Evans.

So, my verdict? For me this film redeemed a musical that had become rather tired and cliched. I have fallen out of love with the musical over recent years but this has convinced me that there might be a place for a really good musical story in the modern world.

Anyways, back to the books. I am in France at the end of the week at a conference and have plenty of work to do on a book chapter and, of course, the Difficult Second Book which I approached with intrepidation today after some months away from it. The Introduction is a 6 out of 10 currently which really isn't too bad.

CSW

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