Les Miserables (4/5 Stars)

This is that rare movie which deserves both a glowing review and a disappointing one. Greatness is in sight that is perhaps the most tragic part, but right next to some supercharged catharsis and magnificent melodies there are these superfluous plotlines and tedious tunes. I should be a big time producer giving blunt notes with a fat cigar and final cut. Okay people, this is what they should have done.

Let’s start with what is fantastic: First of all the story of Jean Val-Jean is pretty incredible. Hugh Jackman plays a man who was sentenced to nineteen years of forced labor for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving nephew. The man who is in charge of him is a steely man of the law named Javert, played by Russell Crowe. On the last day of his sentence, Javert presents Jean Val-Jean with a parole slip that Jean will be forced to carry with him his entire life forward. It is stigmatized piece of paper that announces Jean as a criminal to all who meet him and which condemns him to unemployment and shame from here on out. Then one day, a cold poor and lonely Jean finds himself on the doorstep of a church. The bishop there brings him inside and feeds and clothes him. In the middle of the night, Jean steals the churches silver. The police catch him soon after. Jean lies and says the bishop gave him the silver. The police bring Jean back to the bishop. One word from the bishop and Jean is imprisoned forever more. The bishop tells the police that he indeed gave the silver to Jean. After the police have left, the bishop indeed gives the silver to Jean but tells him that he must use it to become a better man.  And this Jean indeed does, donning a new name, breaking parole, and becoming perhaps the most truly Christian person in a pitiful and treacherous society of industrializing and urbanizing Parisian society circa 1815-1832. Javert searches for Jean the entire time, convinced that criminals do not change and obsessed with bringing him back to justice.

Then there is the story of Fantine, played by Anne Hathaway, a seamstress in Jean’s factory in 1820, cruelly fired for being a single mother (unbeknownst to Jean) and thrown out into the unforgiving streets. In order to pay two sleazy local tavern keepers, played by Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter (two sublime three named actors who flawlessly fit into an inner city industrial revolution setting whether in Paris or London, see Sweeney Todd) to take care of her child, Cozette, she heads down to the docks selling first her hair, and then her teeth, and then lastly herself as a prostitute. Finally, she is victim to the Cholera epidemic sweeping the city of Paris.

Les Miserables is a musical and a completely sung through one at that. There is as little as actual talking as possible, although since the singing is live, it does not have the stilted nature that say Evita had. For the most part, the music is better too, at least in the first half of the movie. Jean Val-Jean does not have any great songs, but because his story is so strong, and because Hugh Jackman acts the hell out of the songs, and because the songs are so fast, the lack of any particularly great music does not slow up the movie. It is always a gripping and tremendously uplifting tale of redemption. Fantine’s story is utterly depressing with no way out, but it is saved by some great music, the most famous being the solo “I Dreamed a Dream.” That has got to be one of the saddest things I’ve ever witnessed. I literally became embarrassed to be part of a theater crowd and really wanted everyone else to leave. The tavern keepers provide some much needed comic relief with the catchy tune “Master of the House.” I’m telling you the first hour and a half of this movie really couldn’t have been better.

The movie inexplicably fails when the story jumps ten years to 1832, introduces a bunch of boring characters involved in a revolution that is never really explained, and the music becomes mediocre at best and yawn-inducing at worst.  

You know it really matters to be able to understand what exactly a really slow unmelodic song is all about. Otherwise you are sort of just waiting for it to end. We have a lot of people singing about a revolution but what is the revolution about? Who are they against and for what? I understood the conflict between Javert and Jean Val-Jean, but I have no idea what the barricades we’re all about. If it was against the monarchy, where is the monarch? If it was a class war between the poor and rich (which I think I remember from my high school class is what Engles and Marx thought it was about) than why is the main character a rich person, played by Eddie Redmayne, slumming it up with the revolutionaries. I remember a rather boring song sung by one of his compatriots that questions whether he is more interested in the revolution or some girl he saw from a distance and fell in love with (this being a grown-up Cozette with a woefully underwritten personality). I think that’s a great question. Where does this guy’s allegiance lie? Why am I watching him in a movie named Les Miserables?

This movie should have done one of three things: Cut at least half of Eddie Redmayne’s songs, make the songs he sings decent un-boring songs, or make the revolution actually about poor people fighting against oppression. You know I saw this same pussyfooting around the obvious in this summer’s “The Dark Knight Rises.” If you are going to walk up to the bell of socioeconomic conflict (i.e. class warfare) then be a man and ring it. Now I doubt you will find many Americans in the audience (me included) for that sort of thing but when it is left out, the conflict has no antagonist and becomes dreadfully boring. Let’s put up some barricades! Who are we fighting? I don’t know!

If I were in charge, I would have also used the melody for “I Dreamed a Dream” more than once. Really, there is no reason not to when the movie does not come up with anything better and yet insists on having very slow solo songs. It helps when the characters are forgettable and their problems are not interesting to have them sing a melody that is by itself worth hearing. There was this inexplicable love triangle between three undeveloped characters. The least known of them spends about five minutes of our time singing about being left out. Change that tune to the Dream one and it might have been a little more bearable to sit through as we wait for the story to cycle back to the interesting characters once again.

One more thing and try to take this as something other than homework. This story, Les Miserables, has gotten flak before for a benign reason. It is about the struggles of the very poor but its audience has been traditionally very rich. Long running lavish Broadway musicals that win lots of awards have much higher ticket prices than the average movie and going to the theater to see an unapologetically cry-inducing musical about poor people is, let’s be honest, a bit of an upper-crust thing to do. This movie is worth seeing, it is true, but go ahead and also see this year’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” another great movie about poor people that was actually made by poor people. Both have abject poverty. Both have disease and death. Both have traumatic events. Hell, both have bad teeth and prostitutes. But see them both. And then think about what you saw and ask yourself: why are they so very different?

The King's Speech (4/5 Stars)

A model of courage

As it is pointed out by King George VI, played by Colin Firth, a modern monarch has no real power. They can’t declare war or raise taxes or write laws. But they are kept on as figureheads because when the king speaks, the people believe that he speaks for them. “But I can’t sp…speak,” he stammers. The King of England has a speech impediment that routinely humiliates him whenever he must make a public speech, which is often. Meanwhile on the other side Europe is Adolf Hitler, the very most of which can be said about him is that he was a very good public speaker.

The Director of this splendid historical drama is none other than Tom Hooper, the man behind the incredible HBO John Adams mini-series (something every American student should be shown in school). Some directors you are thankful exist. Tom Hooper is one of them. He not only tells good stories. He is also keeping alive our heritage and history. And he does it in a way that is engaging and easily accessible. The people in his movies, though royalty, don’t seem to be acting as if they are aware of their place in history. They act like real people in their own time period. They are even given throwaway lines that assert personal fears that we know in our time period they shouldn’t be worried about. For example King George asserts that the English royalty should be worried about being done away with. He names the Czar in Russia and Cousin Wilhelm in Germany as examples. It is a reasonable fear but only at that time and in that place. It takes a writer/director who is unafraid of historical accuracy and has faith in the audience’s sense of empathy to allow his main character to say something obviously wrong. Someone who is aware of the faults of history (not those who say look upon the Founding Fathers or the writers of the Bible as omniscient gods) will smile when certain events and characters are brought up in this movie, their human foibles in full view. (Case in point: We get to meet Neville Chamberlain who talks a little about his misperceptions about Hitler.) We are also presented with another old friend from history books, a Sir Winston Churchill, played by Timothy Spall, always with cigar and drink in hand. This is a great character that surely deserves his own great movie. But that doesn’t mean Tom Hooper is afraid to use him in a supporting role, milling around the background of certain scenes and giving choice quotes from time to time. Hooper gets away with this because he knows enough about the historical period to know when or where he can make Churchill show up and still be accurate. Who knows what anybody actually said? In the end it really doesn’t matter because the audience should know that it is literally impossible to tell a personal story of a historical person and be totally factual. The most any historical biopic can do is get all the details of the period right and make what the characters say and do as plausible as possible through tons of research. This is what Hooper routinely does.

Nobody nowadays can remember this, but King George (or “Bertie” as he was called by his family) wasn’t the big royal story during the 1930s. People were much more interested in his older brother Prince Edward, played by Guy Pearce, and his romance with Wallis Simpson, the woman he would abdicate the throne for in order to marry. Now that was a huge thing. Sometimes though it takes 80 years to realize who was indeed the more interesting person. Edward is the perfect foil for Bertie. He is selfish, uninterested in his duty, and oblivious to the great need of his people for a strong leader in dire times. On first blush it may not seem obvious why King George is a courageous person for giving wartime speeches to the nation while fighting a stammer. But this movie makes clear that he really didn’t have to do it. He could have been like his brother. He could have abdicated the throne. He could have refused to make the speeches. He could have simply not cared. I can only imagine what the people of England felt when they heard those wartime speeches knowing full well that all the pauses were mainly due to the king’s herculean effort to get the words out straight and true. It must be hard for a king, with all his wealth and prestige, to show solidarity with a suffering people. Standing in front of a national audience doing the thing you hate and fear the most is perhaps as close as a monarch can get.

A cynical person would look upon Colin Firth’s performance as “Oscar Bait.” And they would be right. There is nothing the Academy likes better than physical impediments, except of course royalty. This role has both. But that doesn’t mean Firth is undeserving. He really gets the whole thing down perfectly, (and I learned quite a lot about speech impediments in the meantime.) Most of the movie takes place in the office of the speech therapist, Lionel Logue, played cheerfully by Geoffrey Rush. He is an unconventional therapist who insists that he and the king be on a first name basis and that the therapy shouldn’t simply be mechanical. This is awkward because one of them is royalty. But really there is no choice. Bertie has already been to every other speech therapist. Joining them several times or waiting out in the lobby drinking tea is the Queen, played by that woman of unique beauty Helena Bonham Carter. She does a good job too. They all do a good job.

p.s. This movie is Rated R. It should be rated G. The reason it is R is because Bertie doesn’t stammer when he curses and under doctor’s orders he is told that when he feels his mouth clogging, he should curse as loud as he can. (Only in the privacy of the office of course.) So there is one scene where he shouts, “Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, shit, bugger, Fuck!” And that is why the movie is R. If there is any movie that makes certain the idiocy of an objective rating system it is, “The King’s Speech,” a noble story about perseverance and duty, which I would argue is fit even for kindergartners.  As a student of law I understand the point of an objective system. It is only fair to put movie-makers on notice as to what exactly constitutes an “R” rating. Two “Fucks” is an R. Everybody knows that. But this standard ignores the most important thing that parents should be considering and that is the context of the story and more importantly whether the movie is any good. These are matters of taste and though any freedom of speech loving person would be aghast at the idea of somebody rating something via such a judgmental prism as “good taste,” I would argue that if the rating system doesn’t consider taste than it is completely pointless and we shouldn’t have it at all. The way it is now, we make no distinction over how the objectionable content is shown or told. Thus, the blood and gore of responsible redemptive movies like “Saving Private Ryan,” or “The Passion of the Christ,” is equal to the most disgusting sadistic torture porn like “Saw I-VII." Nor does an objective standard actually prohibit objectionable content from creeping in anyways. Many comedies make it a mission to find a way to say the naughty things they want to say without actually saying it. Just take a look at the movie “Little Fockers.” The title is a joke and the punch line is “Fuck.” But the movie is PG-13 even though it couldn’t be more obvious. Besides the movie is terrible. Why are we telling parents that this is better than, “The King’s Speech”?