Andrei Tarkovsky, who described filmmaking as “sculpting in time” (“pick out and join up facts taken from a ‘lump of time’ of any width or length”) once wrote that art is “a means of assimilating the world, an instrument for knowing it in the course of man’s journey towards what is called ‘absolute truth.’”Īs such, art is an editorial process: One shot is chosen over a host of others because it most clearly conveys a specific idea. But the almost confrontational emotion and physical directness of Les Miserables seems to me to be less narrative laziness as an earnest attempt to create a visceral experience that conveys universalities through resonant tableaus of image, sound and action.Īll films (all narratives, really) are, in the end, curators of moments and consolidators of emotions that help us to see more clearly things that are true about existence. In adapting the musical to the screen, then, Hooper is simply using the medium to his advantage by bringing to the story some elements the stage cannot.ĭoes the result come across as heavy-handed and emotionally “overbearing,” as Denby suggests? Perhaps. Film, paradoxically, perhaps, can bring the viewer closer to the action and allow them to be more intimately engaged with a particular actor’s embodiment, gesture, presence.
Watching something like Les Mis in a theater, one gets the experience of the music and the broad scene of a stage full of sets, props, and actors, but one misses out on the intimate expressions of the actor’s faces (unless you are sitting in the front row, perhaps). The ability of a camera to direct an audience’s attention to specific images at specific times, and to get close enough to faces to capture the slightest nuance of emotion, is one advantage film has over the theater, for example. But he also wisely recognizes the inherent differences between the medium of the stage and the screen, and the relative advantages and disadvantages of those forms. In adapting a beloved stage musical like Les Miserables, Hooper wisely opted to keep much the same (the songs, the period costumes, the overall showmanship).
I actually quite appreciated the camera’s tendency to go to extreme close-up. Writes Denby: “How strange to have actors singing right into the camera, a normally benign recording instrument, which seems, in scene after scene, bent on performing a tonsillectomy?” But the film has also had its naysayers and outspoken haters, most notably David Denby’s amusingly snooty takedown for The New Yorker, in which he employs a prodigious array of negative adjectives (“terrible,” “dreadful,” “overbearing,” “pretentious,” “maudlin,” to name a few) to underscore his scorn for the popular movie.Īmong Denby’s critiques (they are legion) is his disapproval of the prevalence of extreme closeups in the film’s depictions of the actors singing their big solos–a device which is, indeed, the film’s most noticeable and polarizing stylistic feature. It topped the list of the “most redeeming films of 2012” (a nebulous distinction, to be sure) that my film critic colleagues and I voted on over at Christianity Today.
Tom Hooper’s film version of Les Miserables has received much praise in recent weeks, including multiple Oscar nominations.