Les Misérables – thoughts on the movie

OMGOMGOMG. (Emotional breakdown in progress, please hold.) Okay… hopefully I’ll be able to calm down enough to write this… Deep breaths…

I’ve been anticipating this movie ever since I saw the musical at the Orpheum about a year or so ago, and found out what I had been missing all my life. I’m a Broadway fanatic: Wicked, Phantom, Lion King, Joseph, Beauty and the Beast… love ‘em all. And Les Mis turned out to be just as good as any of the others, if not better.

The movie was released Christmas day, and for the past month I had been looking forward to it much more than the holiday. And it did not disappoint. I went to the second-earliest show on Christmas day and the theater was packed in a way that almost rivals Avatar (my benchmark for crowded movie theaters). There was a burst of spontaneous applause at the end, and the women on either side of me were crying throughout—one being my own mom, the other just some lady with a lot of Kleenex.

Everyone was cast perfectly with the unfortunate exception of Russell Crowe as Javert. He looked the part perfectly; you couldn’t have found anyone who looked more like Javert, but I think they forgot how big of a role it was when they cast him. He has two solo songs, and his voice simply wasn’t strong enough to pull that off. They should have at least let him record those two songs (Stars, and Javert’s Suicide (uh, spoiler alert…?)) in the studio instead of live on set so he could focus on making his voice stronger or deeper. Or they should’ve cast someone else. Just pull somebody off of Broadway, make him star! Or if they wanted another big name to put on posters, Gerard Butler probably would’ve done well in that role. I liked him as the Phantom, anyway. His voice is certainly deep and powerful enough.

See what I mean? He is Javert. Too bad he can't sing.

 Everyone else was wonderful, and the idea of having the actors sing live on set is still genius. If anything, it’s a small trade of perfect vocal quality for raw emotion, which is well worth it.

The complex plot makes loads more sense in movie format than it ever could on stage, although the sewer scene is decidedly more difficult to stomach. Ick.

So, I’m looking forward to going again tomorrow for my birthday. I think I’ll cry more this time, since the first time I was more interested in seeing how they’d do everything and constantly thinking about how cute Eddie Redmayne is:

Gaaah he's adorable. And he was amazing as Marius.
"Empty Chairs at Empty Tables" will make you cry.

Tomorrow I’ll probably just be bawling nonstop. Happy birthday to me…

Give this movie a chance, even if you’re not a Broadway person. I mean, where else are you going to see Hugh Jackman coated in sewage, and Anne Hathaway getting her hair hacked off and her teeth yanked out? Oh, yes. There’s a reason why it’s called ‘The Miserable Ones.’