Les Misérables

Personally, I prefer Peanut Butter Crunch

Grade: C +
Director: Tom Hooper
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 2 hr. 37 min.

Around the 28-minute mark of director Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables, Anne Hathaway performs Fantine’s plaintive rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream.” Hathaway’s melodic voice is plenty able, but its untrained imperfections actually enhance the broken soul of a mother driven to the depths of poverty and prostitution to pay her debts and care for her child. Over four single-take minutes filmed in static closeup, Hathaway channels with piercing precision the sorrow of an unforgiving God, the surrender to wasted dreams, the horror of facing her own shame and the disgust over “this Hell I’m living.” By the time tears stream on cue when anguishing over “the dreams that cannot be,” you’re well into one of the most transcendent moments in recent cinematic history.

Unfortunately, that transcendence applies most potently to the film from which it emanates. Hooper’s choice to have the actors perform the music and lyrics by Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, and Herbert Kretzmer live on-camera instead of lip-synching to prerecorded tracks works well for the most part, particularly for Hathaway and a Tony-winning actor like Hugh Jackman as the bread-thieving protagonist Jean Valjean. On the other hand, Russell Crowe’s singing is as tinny and uptight as his Inspector Javert’s constipated application of the law. So, too, the upper register of Amanda Seyfried and Eddie Redmayne as young lovers Cosette (Fantine’s daughter, raised by Valjean) and Marius, poster boy for The United Colours of Revolutionary France. And while I concede that British accents are the universal brogue for theatrical heft no matter the setting, I’m still struggling to understand why little Gavroche (Daniel Huttlestone) scampers around the streets of Paris warbling in a cockney accent.

But the fact that the characters sing, and sing, and sing...and sing every word with bombastic gusto is but one side-effect of a bloated production that fails to shed any of its inherited traits on its way to the silver screen. Les Misérables is a 19th century novel conflated into a 1980s sung-through stage musical crammed into a distended motion picture with little reconfiguration for its new medium outside of big sets, computer graphics and unending extreme closeups that grow tiresome not long after they serve Hathaway so gloriously.

The narrative standing of the sniveling Thénardiers (Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, shrouded by pancake makeup and grungy prosthetic teeth) remains as dubious as the film’s historical import. As it stands, Les Misérables is as instructive about the 1832 Paris Uprising as Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor was about the United States’ entry into World War II...or Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is about the scourge of American slavery.

The Damned United

This must be what winning an Oscar would feel like

Grade: A

Director: Tom Hooper

Starring: Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Colm Meaney, and Jim Broadbent

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 38 minutes

The Damned United may be a sports-related movie, but it’s not the typical “sports movie.”

Screenwriter Peter Morgan adapts David Peace’s novelized account of legendary, enigmatic English soccer manager Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) and his 44-day, ill-fated stint as head of reigning champion Leeds United in 1974. However, perhaps less than five minutes of game-play is depicted throughout the film, much of it snitched-in snippets of archival footage. The audience learns the outcome of matches only by their scores being printed across the bottom of the screen. Indeed, for a pivotal match between Clough’s previous team, Derby County, and rival Leeds, then led by iconic manager Don Revie (Colm Meaney), the camera remains strictly with Clough inside Derby’s locker room, with only crowd’s reaction available to divine the result of a match Clough is too nervous to actually watch.

Likewise, unlike the usual sports film that follows a story arc of adversity, perseverance, and triumph, success turns into failure in Damned United. Scenes of Clough’s heralded arrival as Leeds’ manager – after Revie departs to lead England’s national team – are interspersed with his earlier achievements with Derby County from 1967-1973, during which he took the Rams from the bottom of England’s Second Division to champions of Division One. However, Clough’s abrasive personality and outsized ego ultimately bring about his downfall in both Derby and Leeds, as well as the deterioration of his relationship with longtime assistant Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall).

From a purely sporting viewpoint, the enmity between Clough and Revie is emblematic of English football’s modernization during the late 20^th century. The soccer depicted in Damned United hardly resembles “the beautiful game,” but instead a muddy, bloody, sometimes brutish sport viewed by unruly spectators in dilapidated stadia. These conditions would eventually lead to English football’s decline and the rise of hooliganism during the late 1970s and 1980s, banishment from international play on the Continent. The reform movement that that followed included the Football Spectators Act of 1989 and, in 1992, the top 22 clubs formed the Premier League.

Accordingly, Clough lambasts Revie and Leeds for their violent play and gamesmanship – “cheating” he pointedly labels it – while advocating a game grounded more on finesse and sportsmanship. Prior to Leeds’ first visit to play Derby in 1967, Clough – then an ardent admirer of Revie – scampers about trying to dress up his shabby facilities; he futilely implores his groundskeeper to make the pitch “look like carpet” and the cleaning staff to put a spit-shine on dingy latrines.

Still, this historical backdrop is mere window-dressing for The Damned United’s two primary tableaux. First, it is a character study of the corrosive effects of pride and obsession, embodied in Sheen’s magnificent performance. The seed for Clough’s Ahab-like fixation on besting Revie and, by extension, Leeds is planted during that 1967 visit to Derby, when Revie neglects to even introduce himself to Clough. This slight, intentional or not, sparks a competitive fire that would both motivate and consume Clough, culminating with a Shakespearean fall from glory.

Moreover, at its core, The Damned United is a (platonic) love story. The friendship between Clough and Taylor, who served as Clough’s brilliant talent scout, has the emotional ebb and flow of a marriage, and neither party functions professionally as well apart as well as they do together. It is telling that the only measure of onscreen redemption Clough enjoys is a reunification with Taylor (Clough’s later, even more legendary exploits at Nottingham Forest are only referenced during the film’s epilogue). “I’m nothing without you; please, please, baby, take me back,” incants Clough– on his knees, no less – before Hunter will consider any reconciliation.

Director Tom Hooper (HBO’s John Adams) totally engrosses the viewer within the film’s opening 10 minutes with two monologues by Clough that exhibit his genius, hubris, and susceptibility to self-sabotage. Sheen’s delivery and the way Hooper frames the actor’s maniacal, Cheshire Cat grin bear a fitting resemblance to close-ups of Malcolm McDowell’s Alex early in A Clockwork Orange. Sheen has now superbly and revealingly portrayed three modern British icons: Prime Minister Tony Blair, David Frost, and now Brian Clough. He should have received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Blair in The Queen; he deserves to win one for his spectacular, mesmerizing performance here.

Several of Morgan’s recurrent narrative devices are again on display, including pivotal phone calls between lead characters (a la The Last King of Scotland, The Queen, and Frost/Nixon) and climactic television broadcasts (Elizabeth II mourning Diana; David Frost interrogating Richard Nixon). Here, a televised joint appearance by Clough and Revie on the occasion of Clough’s sacking by Leeds not only brings the two adversaries face-to-face but brightly illuminates Clough’s destructive mania. When Clough caps his list of grievances by recounting the precise date, seven years prior, when Revie refused to shake his hand, the reaction of Revie and others on-set is not unlike looks of shocked pity Captain Queeg and his steel balls receive during the Caine Mutiny court-martial.

The Damned United is an underdog story, but not strictly in the traditional sense of the also-ran that achieves unlikely greatness. It is also about someone whose success blossoms only on fields barren of expectations. Michael Clough is the underdog who didn’t know what to do with the car once he caught it.

Neil Morris