Tom Hooper preemptively waving all the red flags for his future musical movie adaptations.

You’ve probably already guessed based on my Sound of Music post, but when I was a kid, I loved musicals.  I mean, really loved musicals.  My CD collection was a sea of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Rogers and Hammerstein, and I got made fun of at school a lot.  Turns out, a complete lack of knowledge of the current top-40 hits gets you labeled as a weirdo.

I also really loved to read, and my addiction was facilitated by several trips back and forth to the library.  Our local library had a few of those circular racks packed with hanging plastic bags containing cassette books on tape that I typically gravitated toward.  “Frog and Toad are Friends” was particularly excellent.  There was one fated trip, however, where my love of reading and musicals collided.  My mother drove all the way out to the Livonia Civic Library, because unlike the one we usually visited, they had these new fangled things called CDs you could check out.  I don’t know how I had discovered it, but I asked my mother if we could get Les Miserables, and to my surprise she agreed despite neither of us really knowing what the content of the show was.

When we got home, I played it on the big stereo in the living room.  My dad hated it (he strongly dislikes when people sing different parts over each other), my mom thought it was OK, and I was totally and completely in love.  My parents bought me a copy of the 3 CD symphonic recording soon afterward which included a booklet with all the lyrics in it.  Sitting on the floor of my bedroom next to the CD player, I’d read along with the songs for hours.  

When I was going through a particularly rough patch in my childhood, my parents bought me tickets to see Les Miserables at the Fisher Theater for Christmas in an effort to cheer me up.  I didn’t have anything appropriate to wear, so my mother lent me a long black skirt and a white blouse that happened to fit me, which I hated, but accepted as a necessary evil.  I still remember the strange and excited way I felt watching the show, mesmerized by the rotating stage.  Eponine was my favorite character, because as a tiny child, unrequited love was the only thing out of Les Miersables I could identify with, and I cried when she died.  This shocked my family, because I’m pretty sure they were convinced I didn’t have normal emotions.  

This experience only heightened my obsession with the show, and I desperately searched for new Les Mis content.  I stumbled upon “Cosette” by Laura Kalpakian in a bookstore, and read that 600+ page fanfiction in 6th grade.  In 7th grade, I attempted to read the novel “Les Miserables”, and after 3 separate attempts over 15 years and a 65-hour audiobook later, I conquered my literary ninja warrior and never. ever. again. jesus. tapdancing. christ.  It succeeded in making me love Javert and HATE Marius, so mission NOT accomplished.  I don’t need all that information about the Battle of Waterloo and the Paris sewer system living rent free in my head.

Anyway… as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been amused with the memeification of the self-aggrandizing earnestness the show’s reputation has.  When the Les Miserables movie was announced, I was curious, but not excited.  I had been burned by Sweeney Todd, and I wasn’t about to get swept away in all the hype only to be let down.  Still, after Christmas dinner, my friend Claire and I saw it at 10:30pm on opening day.

The movie isn’t perfect by any means, but I couldn’t believe how true to the musical and the book it was.  They showed the elephant Gavroche lived in, Fantine getting her teeth ripped out and some asshole shoving snow down her dress, Marius slumming it to piss off his conservative grandpa, the absolutely disgusting fact that Jean Valjean waded through literal miles of shit to save his daughter’s boyfriend… these are uncomfortable details of the desperate state of these character’s lives that sometimes get lost in the musical when you’re applying patina on plywood to make it look old.  This movie is also gorgeously epic.  It goes hard on the up-close shaky-cam shots with the actors looking directly into the camera like it’s a goddamn music video, and makes a lot of quick cuts because they couldn’t film the vocals and the action at the same fucking time, but watching Jackman hoof it though the French countryside and stay in that gorgeous church with the painted ceiling is worth the price of admission.

…I’m now realizing that maybe I’m more impressed with the set design and less impressed with the filming.  Point is, they pumped a lot of money into this, clearly someone thought and cared about this musical and wanted to give it its best chance.  But then they made the baffling decision for the actors to sing live in an attempt at authenticity, and putting it kindly, it had some mixed results.

I’m just going to embed this great video by Sideways that explains why having your dehydrated actors sing for 10-12 hours a day is unbelievably dangerous to their vocal chords, and is dumb dumb dumb.  And I’m not going to attempt to defend Tom Hooper’s choice here, because it could have done permanent damage to his actor’s voices, so even if it was the best stylistic choice, it wasn’t worth their health.  But what I will discuss is the emotional impact he was attempting to achieve by doing this, and where it succeeded and failed in the overall narrative.

It goes without saying, where he failed was with Jackman and Crowe, and while I would love to shit all over both of their vocal performances, I think Sideways exhausts this concept.  When the singing is off meter and key, it does have the tendency to pull your focus from the story – I will completely agree with that.  I’ll even go a bit farther and say that Hugh Jackman is just not a good Valjean.  He’s the smarmy circus owner with a top hat that smirks all the time, not the hardened criminal with a lifetime of pain behind him.  He overacts the shit out of this in some scenes and I haaaaate it.

I will argue that Sideways is a little too hard on Crowe, because with the exception of “Stars”, I think he does a decent job.  And even with “Stars”, it’s not egregious or anything, it just sounds thin.  He gave a very measured performance, which is in great contrast from anyone who’s been in the stage show, but not necessarily out-of-character for Javert.  He does have a beautiful voice, and the quiet contempt he seethes in Valjean’s direction is delicious.

I found myself more annoyed at Amanda Seyfried keeping up the long tradition of captive women who sing like tight-vibratoed songbirds, but that’s a personal preference and not necessarily anything wrong with what she did.  Cosette annoys me in general, so it’s probably on-brand that I feel this way.

But say you’re a director and you think musicals are corny, but still insist on directing one.  You want to take away all the emotional sincerity and make a gritty, realistic, hard-hitting, live-recorded adaptation of one.  Honestly?  Les Miserables is the best show suited for this.  It deals with a lot of serious topics, and even the numbers that are upbeat are absolutely steeped in sarcasm.  If you had any skill at directing comedy at all and casted actors to play the Thénardiers that weren’t phoning in their performance, theoretically you’d be set up for success.

I would say a lot of the group scenes benefitted from the live recording (at least the ones where the characters were in the same physical location).  The dynamic of the students felt really organic and adorable… well, until it was sad and bloody.  

Sidenote: I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume every casting of Enjolras as a super pretty boy is entirely intentional, because honestly, it’s distracting.  Or like, is Enjolras attractive because he wants to overthrow the monarchy?  The world may never know.
BONUS: Hot Phantom played him, too.

The other benefit to the live recording lied in the intensely emotional scenes, like with “I Dreamed a Dream” and “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables”.

Anne Hathaway deserved every bit of that Oscar.  This is a performance of a woman at the end of her rope and I weep every time I see it.  I don’t care that it’s not technically perfect, in fact, it’s kind of weird when it’s sung on stage and sounds so crisp.  Anne Hathaway has a practically-perfect-in-every-way air about her in some of her performances, especially those that require accents, so it was nice to see her break down like this (even though by the end of the movie she’s back at it with the Mary Poppins shtick).

I had no exposure to Eddie Redmayne before this movie, and honestly, I wasn’t expecting much with whoever was cast as Marius because Michael Ball’s version of everything is just freaking great and has ruined me for any sort of different interpretations.  I’ve listened to his version of “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” hundreds upon hundreds of times, and just… you can’t compete with this.  The breath control through “my friends, my friends, don’t ask me” absolutely slays me. 

Anything Eddie Redmayne was going to do vocally was not going to touch what others have done with this song.  And if Tom Hooper was going to go with a weirdly tight shot on his face for this scene, Eddie had to go for an understated, humanized version of this performance, and he fucking nails it.

The survivors guilt is in every expression, his voice inflection, and his movements.  I love this scene.  It might be my favorite in the entire movie.  It certainly is the one that’s stuck with me the longest.  It made me like Marius, a creepy, privileged college student who stalked a young girl for weeks because he thought she was hot.  This scene almost makes me forgive Tom Hooper for torturing a poor orchestra to improvise with these performances.

But the movie proves that this lighting-in-a-bottle kind of thing is not consistently reproducible, and when it fails, it fails hard.  Eddie Redmayne is sitting on a chair while he sings this song, and not participating in a swordfight, or getting rained on, or constricting his lungs by binding their chest with cloth, or laying directly on his back…  Man, they did Samantha Barks dirty.

Anytime the performance deviates from standing and singing, you’re putting your actors at a disadvantage.  Not to mention nobody else can fucking move while someone is singing because it’ll fuck with the audio recording, which makes for some truly awkward scenes and jump cuts.

There’s also the problem of having the realism work against the climax of the show… I hated how “One Day More” was shot.  It’s super impactful having the entire cast unite to sing it together, and instead in the movie separated them all by their physical locations and like… sometimes it’s better to fudge the plot a bit to get the emotional moment, yeah?  At least they figured it out at the end when they close with “Do You Hear the People Sing?”.

Second sidenote: When I saw Cats, I couldn’t not stop laughing at the ending because it’s almost identical to Les Miserables – all the characters gathered in a courtyard of white buildings in a heavenly afterlife-type deal.

Coming down to it, though, there’s a lot of good in this movie, and maybe with a director that inherently isn’t embarrassed by the musical format, it could have really been something.  I feel like I’m going to say some version of this statement ad nauseum as we progress further down this list.  

Also, it’s a bad idea to put your actor’s safety at risk for the sake of your “vision”.  Don’t do it.

This story is a cautionary tale against playing a murder hobo in your RPG.

Let’s uh… Let’s talk about teenage Colleen for a moment here.  I know, I don’t want to do it either, but context is needed and so it shall be provided.

Picture it: Grand Rapids, 2002.  15-year-old me, who very much loved shopping at Hot Topic, watching anime, and listening to System of a Down, went on vacation with my family for winter break.  My father, who enjoys a wide variety of artistic expressions (except The Offspring’s “chainsaw music”) procures tickets at the Civic Theater for an unknown-to-him musical, Sweeney Todd.  None of my family, in fact, had any idea what it was about, so it was to my absolute delight when a demented barber started lopping off heads with a razor at the end of the first act.  It was the most bizarre musical I had ever witnessed, and my only critiques were this:

1. The squealing noise they play every time a character is killed was too loud. 
2. Sweeney sang about his razors too much.
3. The love story was dumb.

Other than that, once I returned home, I downloaded whatever was available on Kazaa.  Sondheim has never, ever, been my jam, except for this musical, which I would defend with my life.  There is an entire song about baking people into pies.  It is the most on-brand thing that could have ever existed for the teenage version of me.

So imagine my utter delight several years later when it was announced that Tim Burton would be adapting it to screen, with Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Alan Rickman as the leads.  My favorite director and my favorite people and my favorite musical… I honestly couldn’t have cast it better in my mind.  I had a promo poster hanging up in my dorm room for months.  And then, I went and saw it and just… had some feelings I didn’t expect.

I think this story lends itself to film very well, because it gives a lot of opportunities of showing, not telling.  The stage musical has a repeating chorus of cast members explaining to the audience the show they are about to see (put a pin in this, we’ll get back to it), but we don’t need that in film because it can very explicitly show Sweeney Todd slitting throats of randos that just wanted a shave.  The uncomfortably up-close opening credits following the pie making process was brilliant and perfectly set expectations regarding the amount of gore your eyeballs are about to be accosted with.  The sheer amount of blood they could use in this slasher film gleefully elevated it to campy as fuck.  It was one of the great additions that obviously can’t be replicated on stage.  Well, not without a splash zone, that is.

The horror aspect is the best part about this movie.  I giggled incessantly during the Johanna murder montage.  Every thud of a person rocketing down the body chute cracked me up.  Also, the suspense during the first shaving scene with the Judge had me cringing, and I already knew what was going to happen.

The fantasy montages also worked fairly well.  “By the Sea” is kind of a throwaway song in the stage musical, but it’s genuinely funny in the movie, where its vignettes overtly show how different Mr. Todd and Mrs. Lovett’s idea of an ideal future are.

These changes come with a set of maybe unintended consequences.  I understand why the chorus was removed, and I support it generally, but without the character introductions, the first time we see Sweeney is on a boat with Anthony brooding that there’s no place like London.  There’s no fanfare, no shrill sopranos shrieking his name, no grand reveal.  Basically, it takes one of the most powerful entrances of a titular character, one that always causes the audience to spontaneously applause, and reduces it to a quiet moment of Johnny Depp trying out the ridiculous accent he’s developed for this role.

But the most egregious misuse of showing-not-telling is “A Little Priest”, god help me…

“A Little Priest” as a song is such a fucking masterpiece.  If you look up “dark comedy” in the dictionary, it’s just a picture of Patti LuPone offering an imaginary meat pie filled with people meat to George Hearn.  

It is 8-minutes of cannibalism puns that was written specifically for Angela Lansbury.  Patti setting up George with “How can you tell?” is my entire life.  The joy I feel every time I listen to this song is just… Heavenly!  It doesn’t need a fancy set or props because it’s based on their imagination.  Bringing reality to this seems completely misguided.

But what does the movie do with this song?  BUTCHER IT :ba dum tss:

It shows every person they’re willing to murder to boost Mrs. Lovett’s meat pie business, but does that really add anything?  Mr. Todd and Mrs. Lovett spend the majority of the song casing the neighborhood out the window, which I think is meant to convey their predatory nature.  The side-effect of this, however, is they are barely interacting, removing the majority of the magic of these characters finally understanding each other for the first time.  Sure, they dance a little, but then Sweeney starts leading Mrs. Lovett around by her neck, exerting his dominance over her, when the whole fucking point of the song is Sweeney realizing Mrs. Lovett is his equal.  He literally places his cleaver at her neck when talking about murdering the judge, even though she’s just established as his partner in crime.  This is the campiest song in the entire show, and while the rest of this movie has wholeheartedly embraced the ridiculousness of the entire plot, “A Little Priest” somehow comes off as tedious and slightly abusive.  And neither of them look like they’re having that much fun with it.

This song just highlights the miscasting of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.  Their portrayal of these characters is understated in comparison to their stage counterparts, and part of this I understand because of the medium they’re working within.  What plays great to the back of the room in a stage production is going to look like overkill when the camera is a few feet from the actor’s face.  But Johnny Depp’s Sweeney looks bored and uninterested instead of brooding, and Helena’s Mrs. Lovett is so fragile that a strong wind would bring her down.  I really, really love Helena Bonham Carter in other roles, but she cannot sing.  Something as vocally demanding as the role of Mrs. Lovett is hard for a professional, as she has to persistently exert power so the audience believes she can hold her own against a literal serial killer.  Every time Helena sings, it feels so thin – she doesn’t hold out a single note, and nothing is at a volume louder than a whisper.  Her timid nature reads as victimization of her circumstances instead of a willing participant in this scheme.  

During the promo of this movie, it was mentioned several times that Johnny Depp was in a band, so having him finally get the opportunity to use his voice in a role was going to pay off.  It, um… didn’t.  I feel like the dumb accent he affected got in the way of him properly singing.   Tim Burton’s inability to not cast Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter in every single film he makes really did a disservice to this movie.  Like, there are more than a few actors and actresses that can sing this role.

The rest of the cast are excellent, which makes this so disappointing.  Typically Anthony and Johanna are played by people in their 30s, but they cast age appropriate actors in these roles who can sing, and who both captivated my attention.  The amount I care about the romance between Anthony and Johanna in the stage show is 0%.  In general, the whole situation is fairly unsettling, considering their “love song” is Johanna talking about killing herself to prevent daddy-fiancé from marrying her while Anthony pleads with her to kiss him.  The film does away with this, making Anthony’s obsession with Johanna appropriately creepy, and her willingness to go along with him as only a means to an end to get away from her captor.  I appreciated this interpretation, and felt it added depth to both their characters.

Jayne Wisener makes this very difficult song sound effortless and beautiful.  The later scenes where she alludes to her ongoing trauma from the entire experience was perfect to include.  It illustrates the consequences of being used as a human prize by people who give no consideration to her thoughts and feelings.

Jamie Campbell Bower gives me goosebumps when he sings “Johanna”.  His face has disturbing determination written all over it, and it makes me feel like maybe Johanna may not be in better hands with him instead of the judge or her murdering, but devoted father.  She really has no good options – it’s heartbreaking.

Sasha Baron Cohen and Ed Sanders also do a great job portraying Pirelli and Toby respectively.  Sweeney Todd came out shortly after Borat, and to tell you I didn’t expect this from him is an understatement.  

And Alan Rickman was perfect, as fucking always.  God, I love and miss Colonel Brandon.

I wanted to love this movie when it came out, and also upon rewatch, but I just don’t.  Maybe if it were my only exposure to the source material it would have held the same place in my heart as the stage show, but because I’ve seen Patti LuPone knock this out of the park, I’m always going to wonder what could have been.

Cast more broadway actors in movies, is all I’m saying.  It worked for Julie Andrews films, it can work again.