Les Misérables *½

Director: Tom Hooper
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway
Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen
Samantha Barks, Aaron Tveit

Based on the eponymous musical by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg (itself an adaptation of the famous novel by Victor Hugo) Les Misérables is a story about revenge, injustice and doomed love...or at least that's what one gathers it's supposed to be about, considering how bloated and lacking in feeling this adaptation is. The film opens with an impressive shot as the camera rises from under the ocean and we watch a group of prisoners raise a ship in the galleys. Among them is Jean Valjean (Jackman), a man about to be released who has been in prison for two decades for stealing a loaf of bread. Keeping a close eye on Valjean is inspector Javert (Crowe) who reminds him he must respect his parole. Immediately a dynamic of abuser and abused is established and we know that Javert will make Valjean's life a living hell.

Yet the problem is that we know this only by default. Les Misérables is one of the most celebrated works of literature in history and people from all ages have come to know it even if they're not fully aware of it (The Fugitive anyone?) but director Tom Hooper depends so much on the audience's knowledge of the novel/musical that he pretty much forgets to make a "movie" to go with the story. Before we know it, we're back with a clean shaven Valjean who has changed his name and become mayor of a small town (how? Why? We never know). His peaceful existence is suddenly threatened when Javert is appointed as guard in his town. This Roadrunner/Coyote dynamic goes on during the rest of the film as life keeps putting Javert in the reformed Valjean's way even when he's trying to do nothing but good. Among his greatest deeds is the adoption of Cosette, the daughter of doomed grisette Fantine (Hathaway), perhaps the most miserable of them all, who dies after selling her hair, contracting an unnamed disease (*cough* TB *cough*) and killing it with a rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream".

The plot spans over two decades and clumsily tries to fit a ridiculous amount of uninteresting events into its overtly melodramatic structure, yet the problem isn't how over the top everything is but how inefficiently Hooper puts it on film. The film is supposed to be grand, sweeping, majestic etc. but the myriad of topics covered in Victor Hugo's historical fiction simply slip through Hooper's fingers. Les Misérables is an epic and simply put, Tom Hooper is no David Lean. He makes it seem as if the historical context exists exclusively in the service of the romantic plots and the Valjean/Javert dynamic. Things just happen and we never truly understand why. But he also fails in giving all these characters a true emotional background. They too, exist there only to serve the director's vision.

Hooper and DP Danny Cohen shoot every scene as if it was being viewed through a smartphone picture application, creating distasteful compositions that contribute nothing more than "style" to a movie that should've been ruled by substance. If the songs weren't loud and dramatic enough, Hooper's camera zooms so close to the actors' faces that it seems he's trying to make a statement about their tonsils. His stylistic choices (why try to develop an auteur vision if it's so inefficient?) often take you out of the movie and you begin to question everything that surrounds it. Why don't characters seem to age if it's been 20 years? Why are Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter still playing their Sweeney Todd characters? Why does Éponine seem to have been written to be the heroine in a telenovela? Why isn't Russell Crowe's fantastic Javert (the only character who seems to have a moral ambiguity) featured in more scenes where he's not being reduced to a sneering villain?

Les Misérables is sure to make viewers just as miserable as its characters, unless they're willing to pretend the movie's over after "I Dreamed a Dream". During the key sequence Hathaway is shot like Falconetti and she does so much with her face and your emotions, that her work should be considered nothing if not truly miraculous.

Heat Wave.

Head over to PopMatters and read my review for My Week with Marilyn.

Sheet-y Saturday.

Where we take a look at posters for upcoming features.

Did you see how simple the posters for Martha Marcy May Marlene have been so far? Even the ones that relied on the internet code to send out a message (risky move too!) were so haunting and beautiful in a way. The efficiency of the concept is that it gets across several points: Elizabeth Olsen, all the Ms and Elizabeth Olsen again.

My Week with Marilyn debuted its first official poster and the result is so lifeless. Michelle Williams might deliver a stunning performance but in all the publicity shots and now this one sheet, she looks like a morbid morgue project. We get she's playing Marilyn but she has been looking like some sort of postmortem strange postmodernist experiment (let's see if you can play Marilyn as a mannequin!). It's strange that the marketing people at the Weinstein Co. even went with this image at all when just a few weeks ago we got one where at least Williams seemed to be alive.

How do you feel about all the Ms this week?

Glorious 39 *

Director: Stephen Poliakoff
Cast: Romola Garai, Bill Nighy, Julie Christie
Eddie Redmayne, Juno Temple, David Tennant, Charlie Cox
Jeremy Northam, Hugh Bonneville, Jenny Agutter
Christopher Lee, Corin Redgrave

If you liked Atonement but wished it had been a bit more like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, then Glorious 39 might just be the movie for you.
Set in England during the summer of 1939, it recounts the dramatic story of Anne Keyes (Garai) a wealthy film actress who discovers her family might be involved in a political plot to stop WWII.
That might not sound like a bad thing, but it is! Setting the bizarre mood for a movie that rarely knows where it's going and much less how to get there.
You see, the pro-appeasement movement in pre-Churchill England was not merely used to avoid combat but also would help maintain the status quo among the upper classes who promoted it.
Of course writer/director Poliakoff doesn't seem to care about this and instead of using these ambiguities to make a comment on the way money shapes history, simply chose to throw it all away in favor of a plot that has everyone, except Garai's character, act like Stepford wives.
This is especially sad for the older actors, especially Christie and Lee, who has to endure a scene so terrible in the end that you wonder how much they paid him to go through with it.
Surprisingly Garai survives the movie with the least harm. The camera is obviously in love with her and despite Poliakoff's intentions to turn her into someone else (look it's Keira Knightley! No wait it's Cate Blanchett!) Garai's uncommon beauty helps her deliver a performance that's magnetic and well intentioned. She tries to be Ingrid Bergman in Notorious and obviously fails, but her spirit overcomes the tragedy that is the rest of the movie.
Therefore, an amazing ensemble is utterly wasted, used to bring to life a plot that confuses with its erratic tonal shifts.
The thing with Glorious 39 is that it doesn't know if it wants to be an homage to classic films (sometimes it feels like a "count the Hitchcock references" game), a Gothic horror movie, a surrealistic psychological portrait or a parody.
It moves so aimlessly among genres and styles that you never know for sure which one to pay attention to.
But beyond genres it fails to make any sense of who the characters are, which seems impossible to understand given the actors playing them.
Even the fact that the heroine is an actress (point which is brought up by mockers and skeptics throughout) teases us with an actual intention on the director's part.
Can he be trying to mention something about history's need for drama or about the roles we play unexpectedly? Can he be drawing parallels between the work of a spy and the work of an actress?
To formulate those kinds of questions would be too kind an offering for a movie that shows us a burning pile of cats and dogs, confuses randomness with intrigue and would make G.K. Chesterton roll in his grave.

Savage Grace **

Director: Tom Kalin

Cast: Julianne Moore, Eddie Redmayne

Stephen Dillane, Hugh Dancy, Elena Anaya, Belén Rueda, Unax Ugalde

On November 11, 1972, wealthy socialite Barbara Daly Baekeland was stabbed to death by her son Antony with whom she was having an incestuous affair.

In "Savage Grace" director Tom Kalin recreates the events that led to the tragic consequences, beginning with Antony's childhood during which Barbara (Moore) and his father Brooks (the always subtly brilliant Dillane) moved from New York City to Paris where he became part of a erudite circle his mother had a love/hate relationship with.

Years later while living in Spain, Antony (played by Redmayne throughout most of the film) begins to explore his sexuality and while his mother encourages him to practice love with anyone he wants (Antony was gay), his father runs away with his mistress (Anaya) leaving the young man to look after his mother.

Aimlessly travelling from exotic locale to locale, the film has trouble finding an emotional center that makes the characters' story worth a listen.

It doesn't help that Kalin chooses a disenchanted, detached aesthetic either, capturing his characters in the very same way in which they tackle their lives; moving only by inertia amongst pastel colored settings and randomly chosen vignettes.

Narrated by Antony, the story has a hard time deciding if it wants to be about the mother, the son, the subsequent incest or if it merely wants to blame the missing paternal figure for everything.

Most of the letters read by Antony are addressed to his father and the words contain pent up anger and bitterness that Redmayne's soft spoken, ironic tone never taps into.

Kalin makes a mess out of settling over Antonioni like techniques of character/structure connection or postmodernist melodrama, but of course the one thing he can't really control is Moore who gives an extraordinary performance.

Her Barbara is a pocketful of surprises, she plays her like the woman who inspired the original Madonna/Whore complex for whom the acts in which she seems like a lunatic require no extra effort from sitting with high society friends for tea.

Moore, who has never been one for star turns, avoids chewing the scenery here as well and turns in delicious work that touches camp (listening to her screaming "little puta" to her husband's lover at an airport is chilling and satisfying) and the mysteries of human behavior (what she does after the airport incident...).

While it may seem that for the movie Barbara is nothing more than tabloid fodder, Moore dignifies her with the benefit of the doubt.

When the story begins to explore the mysteries of the sexual relationship between Antony and Barbara, Moore handles all of her scenes with a perfectly imperfect balance of motherly love and plain bizarre mental behavior.

As Barbara puts her hand over her son's crotch you will feel the discomfort and awkwardness of the moment, Moore on the other side has completely vanished.