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Les Miserables / Rated PG-13 for violence, sex and lots and lots of singing. In fact when it starts it doesn’t stop for 2 and ½ hours.
For the few who don’t know this is an opera. This means it is sung from beginning to end. Only a few isolated words are spoken without singing and the speakers have a guilty look on their faces. The faces include Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter. There are lots of others but without singing their names I am against mentioning all of them.
LM was directed by Tom Hooper. His last outing in 2010 was the Oscar winning The King’s Speech. That film was impressive and this film is staged in a way that makes it visually stunning while being a little on the dark side. LM is about life in France a couple of hundred years ago. Things were not good. Regular weekend Beaujolais and Cheese parties were far in the future. Everyone except the very rich were very depressed as well they should be. At the time France had 5 classes of people. The above mentioned very rich had all of the money, all of the food and the only fun there was to be had. Next were The Miserables. Hence the movie’s title. Below them were the very Miserables and even lower down were the extremely and totally Miserables. The only group lower were The Dead. The Dead were the only ones in the bottom four groups with anything to live for.
The main character is just being paroled for having stole a scrap of bread 19 years earlier. He has been doing hard labor for his dastardly theft as well he should. Some inconvenienced rich person had to choose a different piece of bread when HJ stole the one they would have otherwise purchased. Hugh J. plays this part. Russell Crowe is the copper who busted him. When HJ violates his parole it sets off a lifelong mess where RC is obligated to put him back in the can while HJ just wants to do good deeds. Everyone else around them is swept up in their mess one way or another.
Long periods of time go by as decades are skipped as being just more singing that we don’t need to hear when nothing but misery was really taking place. Eventually the French people rise up once again and fight with other French people over who gets what and when they get it. There doesn’t appear much to fight over. Normally these fights end when both sides try to surrender and this often leads to more fighting over who surrendered first.
While the singing at times is very pretty since they never stop singing it makes the songs all sound the same except for occasionally when they try to hit a few different notes.
Based on the long running and very popular play which was based on the even longer in print and very melodramatic novel by Victor Hugo LM is on the Oscar nomination list with 8 nods. I know if it will win but can’t tell you until I can figure out how to do it in song form.
Rated 3.2 out of 4.0 white flags of surrender. NOTE Russell Crowe has already received a special award for his singing. The new Pierce Brosnan/Mama Mia award is only given when someone is so bad they actually sound like the brakes going out on a large truck going down a long steep hill. RC certainly deserved the honor. He plans to sing his thanks at the award ceremony.
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