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Les MiserablesRating:
Release Date: 01 April, 2003 Retail Price: $19.94 OUR Price: $14.99 You SAVE: $4.95! Cast: Complete Cast (9 total) |
Les Miserables Reviews
Striving but not really succeeding
It's obviously not easy to compress for the screen something as complex, vast, and subtle as Hugo's novel, particularly when the focus of the book is internal and a movie is necessarily something that is focused on the external. Coupled to these difficulties comes the inevitable Hollywood fixation on test market inputs, happy endings, and schlock-horror-thrills violence. The result is a movie like this, which starts moderately well and then ambles off the rails around the mid-way point.
Liam Neeson is an accomplished actor, but you wouldn't necessarily know that from this movie. His Jean Valjean lacks nuance, perhaps because he's forced into portraying situations that are at times in conflict with the essence of who Valjean is supposed (pace Hugo) to be. His redemption scene is brief and superficial, and his supposed inner torment during the crucial trial scene (in which he ultimately elects to confess his true identity in order to save the idiot in the dock) resembles nothing so much as a man trying to determine which flavor of ice cream to select from the freezer. The only bright spot is Uma Thurman's performance, which is both unexpectedly accomplished and deeply moving. If only Neeson could have produced a performance to match this would have made the movie worth watching.
As for the fabricated love-story conclusion which owes nothing to Hugo and everything to Hollywood, the less said about that the better except for the masterful camera work, in which Valjean's spiritual euphoria is brilliantly conveyed by a long tracking shot that gradually opens up from the gray of the quayside to include finally the features of Paris and the open sky.
If you enjoyed Hugo's book you'd be much better off seeing the French version with Gerard Depardieu, or better still find the wonderful 1990 interpretation starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, which avoids all the normal pitfalls of bringing a huge book to the screen while capturing the essence and subtlety of Hugo's masterpiece.
I never saw the play
But i really liked this movie.......I have also shared it with some friends and they liked it. It may not be totally like the play but it is still a worth while film.
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