Les Miserables / Lincoln

Gotta try and move these reviews along, so time for another double helping. At first glance, though these films may not look like bedtime companions, they’re both cut from similar cloth. They both cleave their main storylines from historic incidents, are, in effect, both tragedies, and, oh yeah, they’re both bloody long. Starting with Tom Hooper’s film (his first since the excellent The Kings Speech), I’m not going to go over the Les Mis back story and I’m not really too sure how you can review a film like this as basically isn’t the main question just going to be if the actors can sing or not? (and as an aside to that, you should be aware that virtually all the lines in the film are sung, though I didn’t find it that much of a problem like some people have). I’ll come back to the warbling in a moment as a film obviously has a much wider field of play than a stage when it comes to capturing the audience’s attention. However, great though Danny Cohen’s cinematography is, Hooper’s film has far too much obvious CGI to make it really feel like a spectacle. In addition Hooper’s over editing and wild camera sweeps distract the audience from immersing themselves in the audio entertainment. That isn’t a sarcastic remark either as the majority of the main cast (Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway) can hold a note and although Crowe gets some flak for his one-tone singing voice, at least he can produce that single tone pretty well. Though it’s the relatively unknown Samantha Barks who gives a performance of real emotion and, though hers is a small role, she pretty much sneaks the film in regards to its best player. All in all, if you like the play you’ll like this, but I don’t think non-theatre goers will be convinced. It terms of the source material Hooper had a fictional play to use, whereas Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln has apparently used actual dialogue from the time, copied from historical documents. There’s a problem here though. It’s all a little bit dull. Sacrilege you say! But is this the film for which people aren’t actually allowed to say anything negative? Of course it’s mainly about one of the worthiest subjects and men in history, but that doesn’t mean it should automatically be lauded as a great film. Firstly, the film assumes you come prepared as it covers the final four months of Lincoln’s life and little else. This quickly becomes the film’s main sticking point as it’s not clear if this is a portrait of the man himself or what he achieved in those final few months. Either way, it doesn’t really work. In terms of the latter all we really get is row after row of actors hamming it up in awful fashion in the House of Representatives, with the message behind why they’re actually there lost amongst the terrible wigs and lapel grabbing. As for Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role, it’s a great performance but was the man himself really as he is portrayed here? All his lackeys appear to do all the hard work and he himself comes across as plain dull, with his telling of anecdotes the equivalent of being stuck in the pub with a boring barfly. At times he is even (whisper it) a bit creepy. In terms of look there isn’t much here to flag this up as a Spielberg production aside from a scene where Joseph Gordon Levitt (lost in a role as Lincoln’s son) follows a trail of blood which leads to a visceral gut punch not seen from The Beard for quite some time. What this film needed was more of such scenes and more historic evaluation. Spielberg himself has stated that his film only just avoided being a TV movie. Though at the time he was talking about film funding and audience preferences in general, the small screen is actually probably the best place for this. If you want to really learn about Lincoln and the history of US slavery, I suggest burying yourself in many a book rather than watching this.

The OC Film Sting Final Verdict

Les Mis gets more right than it does wrong and the target audience won’t be disappointed (Rating: 7/10), but Lincoln is a confused effort which glosses over the history of the time and doesn’t appeal as either a portrait of Lincoln or a decent analysis of the abolishment of slavery (Rating: 5/10)