Gee-whiz, it's Les Miz

I am presuming that the opening sequence of Les Misérables (the movie based on the international mega-hit stage musical) is historically accurate. I don’t mean the singing of all those poor wretches at hard labor in waist-deep, freezing salt water, but the very fact of the kind of labor they are performing. Whatever, it’s a visual killer-diller beginning to a long, sometimes thrilling, sometimes shocking, sometimes tear-jerking, sometimes ho-hum, epic film.

My caveats are few about the making of the film; I think a lot of the right choices were made to get this brute of a musical onto the screen. Most of my negatives are based on what I feel is unfortunate casting. Russell Crowe is a fine actor in the role of Inspector Javert and, although he has the balls for the role, he just can’t carry the singing necessary to make you forget that, well, he’s friggin’ singing! The pivotal role of Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) would be okay but her singing voice is distressingly reminiscent of Jiminy Cricket’s. Sacha Baron Cohen has now been typecast in Sweeney Todd, Hugo and now, again ludicrously foreign, in this Les Mis.

Hugh Jackman seems to age in reverse as our besieged hero Jean Valjean but he’s essentially believable and can sing well enough to send many a manly man into being a blubbering idiot during the scorchingly beautiful ballad “Bring Him Home.” Patti Lapone said that playing Fantine (in the original London production) was so great because she got to sing one fabulous song (“I Dreamed a Dream”) and then die; reappearing as a ghost at the end. I think Anne Hathaway might say the same thing.

Of course Les Misérables is based on the Victor Hugo novel and takes place during a student uprising (no, not the French Revolution itself) that fizzled ignominiously and disastrously for the robust young men involved. Thus proving yet once again that manning those barricades just ain’t what it used to be. And, as is usual for this kind of “foreign” movie, the classes are divided between perfect English accents of the upper class to practically incomprehensible cockney for the hoi polloi. Mr. Cohen, as usual, seems to be in that nowhere-land of some made-up Baltic state.

Still, overall, I liked the movie and I think one has to recognize the artistic value of trying to get what seems like the impossible task of getting a very popular stage musical to the screen. I don’t think it’s going to win any Oscars although it should get at least some nominations in the tech categories. I will leave it to others to judge the caliber of the computer-generated imagery but I thought that opening sequence was really impressive.