Les Miserables: A Delayed Reaction

Okay, so I have had a delayed reaction to the musical phenomenon and new movie, Les Miserables. I adored the movie when I saw it, don't get me wrong, but over a week later I was suddenly hit by the urge to download every song from every album in existence and ONLY listen to them.

Yes, there were things wrong with this film.  The plot is can get a little jumpy and personally, I'm not a fan of singing every single thing that comes out of a character's mouth - it just adds too much time to a movie and is unnecessary.  Additionally, I suffered great disappointment from the two male leads, especially Hugh Jackman who blew my mind in the Boy From Oz and could previously do no wrong for me.  But their voices couldn't carry out the range and fullness that are required from Broadway musicals.  There is often such a depth, richness, and complexity to Broadway music (especially the classics) that Hollywood stars who are not Broadway trained are doomed to fall short (See Sweeney Todd).  While their emotions were spot on for the most part, their inability to capture the rich, tormented melodies left me wanting.

Now on to the brilliance: Anne Hathaway is the ultimate exception to the Hollywood star rule.  Her trials grated on the soul and her face broke your heart as she sang of her broken existence.  While some could fairly accuse director Tom Hooper of overusing close-ups and dramatic camera movements, his choice to focus the shot only on Hathaway in her chilling rendition of I Dreamed a Dream was perfection.  Hathaway's face told the story of Fantine and extra images or movement would only have detracted from the raw emotion that shone through.  Other notable performances included Broadway veterans Samantha Barks and Aaron Tveit, who can only be faulted for not being on screen more.  They are clearly acclimated to the vocals needed for a Broadway show and they shine through.  

Lastly, we get to the only "happy" romantic couple of the show: Marius and Cosette, played by Eddie Redmayne and Amanda Seyfried respectively.  While Seyfriend was by no means bad, she suffered from playing one of the most uninteresting and disliked characters in Broadway history.  She is a plot point and nothing more and while the couple did not inspire fandom or devotion, I am glad that the movie chose not to sink to try to make a musical/book which had themes far greater than romance into a romantic piece just for ratings or audience. 

Moving on to Marius, I have a small confession - I sort of love Eddie Redmayne - never thought freckles could be sexy before but damn, he has proven me wrong.  While at times his voice fell a little short of the music - he emotion and commitment made him a compelling Marius.  He performed one of the most heartbreaking renditions of Empty Chairs at Empty Tables that I have heard which thrilled me as it has always been one of my favorites from Les Mis. 

Was this movie spectacular and the greatest representation of a Broadway phenomenon - no.  BUT, it was one of the best adaptations of a musical into film that I have seen in a long time and will be cherished for it's surprising and beautiful performances by key players like Anne Hathaway and Samantha Barks.  It paid fitting tribute to the original and is definitely going on my re-watch list.

Lincoln

Okay, I will admit it: I cried multiple times during the two and a half hours of Lincoln. I have a weird thing for curmudgeonly old white men screaming at each other in wigs and banging gavels.  It gets me every time. (See my unfailing love for 1776).  Lincoln introduced me to new wig - wearers to love including the straight faced, stoic hot head Thaddeus Stephens.  I think I'm in love.  A person who can be that deadpanned and that biting while fighting for the freedom of his lover has got my vote.  Tommy Lee Jones needs to get the Oscar - he was the most enthralling part of a film drenched in big names.

What I truly appreciated about this movie was that it had a narrow focus.  It started in the fourth year of the Civil War and only referenced the death of Lincoln's son.  So many biopics try to include all factors in the lives of their main characters - it becomes too expansive and too shallow.  This movie focused on a specific segment of the life of Abraham Lincoln - the passing of the 13th Amendment.  Sure, it also addressed his married life and his relationship with his sons and did include a dramatic reveal of his well known assassination, but the main - and best - part of the movie was the political manipulations surrounding the passing of the historic amendment that constitutionally freed the slaves.

Who Needs Actors?

Should the visual beauty of a film come at the expense of the emotional depth and character connection?  That is the question probably inadvertently posed by Joe Wright’s 2012 version of Anna Karenina.  A classic tale about a married woman who succumbs to the affections of another man, Anna Karenina has been adapted numerous times with a variety of conceptions.  Wright decided to put his on a stage on film with partial success.  Despite the big name actors, such as Keira Knightley and Jude Law, it is almost not worth mentioning them since the standout players of the film were not the characters but the intricate dance made of image, set, and sound.

            Besides being stunning to watch, the concept of the characters lives taking place on a stage did help illuminate and emphasize several symbolic points.  The conceit worked best when it was used to expose a character, when a dark secret truth was being set before society for judgment.  The pounding of the binoculars and snapping fans and the clumping feet of the horses blurring together highlight Anna’s extreme reaction to her lover’s fall during a race.  Likewise, after being exposed as an adulteress, Anna attends the ballet to the scorn and horror of society. As her once friend says “I’d call on her if she’d only broken the law, but she broke the rules”.  That was another aspect that the staging was able to emphasize: society.  There was a beautiful party scene in which the camera swept through the dancing glamorous couples to behind the wooden sets, exposing the working men and women acting as stagehands to the theatrics of the elite.

            However, these elegant machinations came at the price of engaging and enjoyable characters.  Even the characters you could like have a falseness to them – Levin’s vision of Kitty floating amongst the clouds, his love illuminating her, is proven wooden and false, the unpainted back of the clouds gives a sense of unreality and woodenness.  It’s a façade and nothing more. As much as this is a critique of the director’s choice, I cannot deny that the main characters, Anna, Karenin, and Vroknsky are not the most likeable characters in and of themselves.  Whether that’s the actors’ faults or just the nature of the story is unclear.  With the being said, I have drawn a conclusion which I had not originally been intending to draw. While normally I would disdain at a movie that chose artful conceit over character, in this case it just might have worked.  I did not enjoy the film when I first watched it, yet as it sat with me over the next week, I began to love it more retrospectively, appreciating it.  It was not bad performances or unlikeable characters that flash in my mind as I think of Anna Karenina, but instead the beautiful dance choreographed with cameras, sets, sound, and costume that Joe Wright created. 

What's Behind the Facade

The Architect shows that the façade doesn’t matter: whether a luxury home or a decrepit mass housing project, the families inside can all feel misery.  This movie was as off putting as it was engaging.  There were many lines of plot that ran along side each other, dipping into each other’s paths without ever truly weaving together.  I would say that in order to enjoy this movie you must focus on performance over plot or resolution.  Anthony LaPaglia’s Leo Waters is a man whose job it is to control, design, and create but whose personal life cannot seem to fall into place with such efficiency and ease.  His wife is bored and distant, afraid that their marriage and life has left her “eroded”. His daughter is miserable, upset at her family’s dysfunction and uncomfortable and confused about her changing body and her father’s awareness of it.  His son, played by Sebastian Stan, is rebellious and in the midst of a sexual awakening that is desperate, difficult, and ultimately heartbreaking.  Alongside this story is that of Tony Neely, portrayed movingly by Viola Davis.  She feels the oppression and dangers of the world she lives in.  Gang members at every corner, smart kids dropping out of school for a life on the street.  Her eldest daughter revels in trash television so she can know that she at least has not fallen as far as some have; her youngest daughter barely even lives with her having earned a scholarship to a better school in a better part of town.  Her son’s death was the final push to begin her campaign to tear down the inefficient and inhumane housing project that was more conducive to gangs than to families.  These two worlds cross paths when Tony seeks the support of the architect of the housing facilities in her quest to tear them down and build them anew.  Only Leo’s pride will not let him concede the buildings’ failures. 

            Unfortunately, this film never quite reaches its peak.  There are brilliant moments: Sebastian Stan’s desperate surrender to his homosexual feelings, Viola Davis’ confrontation with her youngest daughter over her denial of the reason her son died, and Stan’s quiet intensity as he gazes over his one time lover’s body.  While poignant and thought provoking, these moments of intense emotion and exploration of one’s identity and one’s own hidden motivations are not connected in a way that flows or advances their meaning.  This is a movie of snapshots.  They are merely the blueprints of a great movie: terrific acting and the exploration of very real questions.  But with nothing filling in those blueprints, no structure or consistency, the film remains just that: great in concept, adequate in execution. 

Shhhh....Never Know Who's Listening

One of my biggest fears growing up was a planted camera in my room. Irrational and unlikely as it might be, the idea that someone could see what I was doing when I thought no one was watching was horrifying.  Not all camera angles are flattering!  Whether for vanity or for privacy, Harry Caul lives a life of intense privacy, fearful of people knowing more about him than he saw fit.  Perhaps this is exacerbated by his career choice, a surveillance specialist.  Francis Ford Coppala, in The Conversation, smashes Caul’s life apart. Caul takes a case that he can’t stay aloof from, too afraid that it will lead to murder.  The tension mounts and the vagueness clears through Coppala’s expert use of sound and image. The same scene repeats over and over again, a man and a woman walking in circles around a park, their voices intermittently obscured by static.  They are Caul’s latest targets and as  the scene repeats and the recording sharpens, a picture starts to emerge.  “He’d kill us if he had the chance”.

            The repetition of the mysterious conversation adds tension to the film, the truth obscured from both the viewer and Caul, being chipped away at until new conclusions arise and past ones fall.  It is both an innovative choice and a lesson: what we think we see and hear are not always the truth, our impressions are never completely accurate.  And there is always the chance that someone is listening to you.  

Sinister: A New Way to Do Old Horror

      Don’t have a creepy attic.  If you buy a house with a creepy attic – DESTROY IT IMMEDIATELY!  That is the primary lesson I learned from Scott Derrickson’s Sinister this weekend.  That and don’t be an asshole who lets your family live in a house where a bunch of people just got horrifically strung up on the tree in the backyard.  Because lets be honest, even without the supernatural that’s just asking for trouble.

      Sinister centers around a true crime writer, Ellison Oswalt, masterfully played by Ethan Hawke, desperate to get his name back in the spotlight.  One element that raises this movie above the typical horror film clichés, is Ethan Hawke.  My friend turned to me during the movie and muttered, “oh hey, that guy’s actually acting.  Huh”.  But yes, having someone who recognizes the benefit of subtly and emotional depth adds a real layer to what could be another one note ‘been there done that’ addition to the genre.

     What really intrigued me is that the plot, while layered and surprisingly continuous, held no real surprises.  The entire mystery was spelled out almost from the beginning.  And nothing legitimately terrifying happened for a long time.  Yet it was the tension of what could be that frayed my nerves and kept me on the edge of my seat.  The all too real home videos and the red herring camera movements meant that I was always expecting a more chilling image or something to pop up in the unused left side of the frame. 

    Yes, there were cliches: the "creepy child", scary attic, and against all common sense, yelling at the screen idiocy of nighttime wanderings after noises in the dark.  Yet Derrickson took these cliches and layered it with real depth and emotion; there was a legitimate plot of a man who puts everything, including his family, below his need to regain a lost fame. Finally, a modern horror movie that doesn't rely on gratuitous violence and gore, but on suspense, emotions, and chilling and lasting fear. 

Putting our world on a screen: how our private lives become public

It’s amazing how we have found ways to translate something as uniquely sensory as food so that we can appreciate it when we are unable to use taste: the ink in cookbooks, the images flashing on our television and against the glow of a computer screen all conjuring memories of food past and hopes of food to come.  Julie and Julia explores this journey through technology using the parallel lives of famed food personality Julia Child and devoted blogger, Julie Powell.  Amy Adams and Meryl Streep bring charm, humor, and determination to their respective Julies and it’s easy to see where a bit of hero worship is warranted.  The movie alternates between eight years of the life of Julia Child in tantalizing Paris and a little over a year of the life of modern day Julie Powell.  Both women begin the movie lost and out of place:  Child, despite her exuberant love for Paris, her husband, and food, finds herself bored and itching for more.  Powell, dissatisfied with both job and new apartment, follows adoring husband Eric’s off hand suggestion that she begin a blog.  And that is the start of these two women’s adventure together; while they never meet, their lives continue on similar trajectories:  they find something they love, culinary school and Julia Child’s comforting recipes, face success, failure, rejection, and acceptance, and live their lives finally pursing something to the end.  Their parallel is best displayed in a montage of changing technology:  steel versus aluminum, a churn versus a food processor, type writer versus a computer.  Regardless of the differences, technology dramatically affected these two women’s lives: literally, as their means to success and symbolically, as a catalyst for change in relationships and dynamics between the great big world and their little dreams.

The movie explores the muddling of private and public life brought about by this technology.  Julia Child, after making a mistake during her cooking show, reassures “you’re alone in the kitchen, who’s to see”.  The irony of that statement and her mistake being aired on television for generations to come to watch is thick.  Likewise, Julie’s world is lived online.  She both gets lost in it, miserably breaking down and worrying about her readers and their comments, while finding her self in it too.  Everyone knows her business, it is how her mother found out she was having problems with her husband.  Yet at the same time, it was her apologetic, self-deprecating blog entry that brought her husband running back home.  Jane Lynch, as Julia’s sister Dorothy, gave a sad yet uplifting summation of the girls’ lives: “from the beginning we just didn’t fit in.  So we don’t!”.  Julie felt that too, her uncomfortable glances and awkward interjections at the Cobb Salad lunch with her friends revealing to her feelings of inadequacies and insecurity.  Yet through the blogging she was able to create her own persona, find herself, and have her own successes and failures.  She was able to create a niche for herself just as Julia Child did in her day.