Theater Talkback: \'Les Misérables,\' Stage to Screen

Universal Pictures Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman in in “Les Misérables.”

When excitement stirs about the latest movie adaptation of a stage musical, I usually find myself surfing a tide of mixed emotions. My inner cheerleader, whose pompoms are sometimes coated in a thick layer of dust, rallies in the excited belief that a once-dominant American art form - the Broadway musical - will gain a little luster in the eyes of a public now mostly glued to screens of various sizes.

But there is always the concomitant dread, confirmed by many a disappointment, that the movie version of the latest (or not so latest) blockbuster musical will be an embarrassing deba cle, confirming the belief of many that the stage musical is a silly, dated or just plain stupid genre, to be appreciated only by those already receiving the AARP magazine. Hence the dust on those pompoms.

Both emotions hit full surge in the weeks before the Christmas Day opening of “Les Misérables,” the movie version of the musical that ran for more than 17 years on Broadway after first storming London. An invitation to an early New York screening had my theater-loving friends texting me with envy and demanding an early assessment.

By this time the Oscar buzz had begun. After all, the movie is front-loaded with A-list talent: a director, Tom Hooper, fresh off an Oscar win for “The King's Speech,” and a cast with bona fide movie stars like Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway and Russell Crowe. Here, perhaps, would be the first movie musical since “Chicago” to break through to a big movie public and bring home some serious Oscar gold too.

But my dread quotient was possibly higher than ever: In contrast to “Chicago,” a musical I ardently love, “Les Misérables” has never been a particular favorite. Watching it from a dizzyingly high balcony seat in the West End in 1986, I found myself immune to its pop-operatic charms and have remained so ever since. And I feared that the musical's throbbing emotionalism, exemplified in the memorably soaring melodies of Claude-Michel Schönberg, would come across on screen as treacle-clotted and overwrought.

After seeing the movie tw ice - that's a full five hours of immersion in a strife-torn 19th-century France - I still feel torn. I find myself rooting for a movie I don't particularly like.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times A scene from the 2006 Broadway revival of “Les Misérables.”

Hooray for the $67 million the movie grossed in its first six days of release! Let's use up some leftover bubbly to toast that it held its own at the weekend box office, taking in just a few million less than the highly anticipated “Hobbit.” Anne Hathaway, you go, girl! You can make room on the mantle for that Oscar right now: to play a saint and a whore at th e same time is to up the ante on awards bait. Besides, they did their damnedest to make you look unpretty. Still, even as poor Fantine sang herself to death in that Parisian infirmary, I couldn't banish the thought that you looked so ghoulishly ravishing that you could have leapt to your feet and walked an Alexander McQueen runway with minimal adjustment to the death-throes maquillage.

Maybe now is the time to explain that I saw the movie twice out of a sense of professionalism rather than enthusiasm. The fact is I fell asleep at some point during the first viewing. (It probably didn't help that I was seated in the third row and thus practically supine.) When I went back to give it my full attention, the funny thing was I couldn't pinpoint the moment when I had dozed off before.

Should you too find yourself drifting off to dreamland at some point, rest assured that upon waking you will find that someone is singing, and someone is suffering. Usually it's the same person, with a tear- or sweat-stained face stretched across the screen so that no nuance of misery will go unrecorded.

That's my chief beef with the movie, as it has been with some other critics: Mr. Hooper seems to have filmed it with a magnifying glass ever at the ready. Seeing it onstage you can lean in to the material and let it seduce you; on screen I felt I was being force-fed misery, cruelty, heroism, panting young love and blustery, flag-waving emotionalism. (I think I could now handily draw a map of Eddie Redmayne's fetching freckles.)

Small wonder I succumbed to a postprandial doze halfway through, or somewhere thereabouts. It occurred to me - heretical thought! - that “Les Misérables” may be a movie better appreciated in snippets on YouTube than at the movie theater. Scaled down so that the images aren't bludgeoning you, the individual numbers might be far more appealing.

Of course it is always hard to negotiate the aesthetic distance betwee n the stylized art form of musical theater, in which song is made to seem a natural form of human communication, and the essential realism of the movies. A director must choose between trying to collapse the distance - to make the unreal seem real - or, more challengingly, to heighten it (as Baz Luhrmann did in his “Moulin Rouge,” although that was a movie original.)

Most opt for the easier course, as Mr. Hooper has in “Les Misérables.” But the result, to me, doesn't so much mask as underscore the material's melodramatic excesses. I found myself smirking at the preposterous cascade of coincidences that had the central characters tumbling into one another continually, as if the population of early-19th-century France numbered around 27.

The most gabbed-about aspect of the movie has undoubtedly been the decision by Mr. Hooper to record the vocals live, an unusual and, to hear the actors and director tell it, highly daunting strategy that has rarely been used before in major filmmaking. To which I can only say: big deal. (Michael Cerveris, now on Broadway in “Evita,” wittily tweeted as much: “Inspired by Hollywood,” he wrote, “actors all over town ARE SINGING LIVE today. And tonight. 8 times a week. Every week. No second take.” The implication: They don't expect to be congratulated for it by a fawning press.)

And in the end all the ballyhoo over the live singing draws more attention to the movie's deficiencies in this regard. To be sure, much of the cast is impressive. Ms. Hathaway renders “I Dreamed a Dream,” the musical's big ballad, with lustrous intensity. Mr. Redmayne sings capably, as does, less surprisingly, Aaron Tveit, the star of Broadway's “Next to Normal” and “Catch Me if You Can.” I was particularly impressed by the one comparative unknown among the principals: Samantha Barks as a movingly restrained, vocally assured Éponine.

Laurie Sparham/Universal Pictures Russel Crowe in “Les Misérables.”

Yet when it comes to the lead male roles, the stalwart hero Valjean and the dogged villain Javert, I found myself often yearning for earplugs. Although he fronts a rock band in his spare time, Mr. Crowe huskily declaims his way through his songs, never making anything resembling an appealing sound. (Nor, to my mind, does his rather stolid Javert come across as the obsessed monomaniac he should be.)

That wasn't particularly surprising; the unhappy revelation of the movie was the inadequacy of Mr. Jackman's singing. He, after all, has established himself as a most unusual combo platter: an action-movie hero who is also an established musical theater star. But hearing him sing Valjean made me wonder if his radiant stage charisma had not helped Broadway audiences (and we critics too) overlook the modest nature of his vocal resources.

His singing in “Les Misérables” was sorely lacking in suppleness, sonority and range. For all the talk of live singing, Mr. Jackman's sounded to me as if he'd actually been Auto-tuned by someone who fell asleep at the machine, resulting in a thin, nasal and unpleasantly metallic sound that quickly grew grating.

Maybe Mr. Jackman's vocal performance, and the other irritations of the movie, would have seemed less onerous if they had been supplied with an accouterment of the theater that I have come to appreciate more as movies have been taffy-stretched to interminable lengths in recent years. These days, while many plays have shrunk to less than 90 minutes, even formulaic rom-coms and mindless action movies gobble up a full two hours or more of screen time. Perhaps it's time for the movies to bring back intermission.

The movie of “Les Miserables” has stirred very strong responses both from theater lovers and movie fans alike. Where do you stand on the barricade of public opinion?