Friday, June 14, 2013

Les Miserables & Zero Dark Thirty (Movie Comments by Bob Racine)



                   2 hrs & 37 min each, color, 2012
                  

“Les Miserables,” the 1862 novel by Victor Hugo, is not only a very old and venerated work, but it has been adapted into live action motion picture form no less than fifty-five times, beginning with the earliest flickering, crude silent versions and ending over a century later with this current behemoth  derived from the blockbuster Broadway production.   It has seen animated representation no less than nine times.  This is the fourth adaptation that I have viewed, the first three being the 1935 version with Fredric March and Charles Laughton, a 1978 treatment featuring Richard Jordan and Anthony Perkins, and a 1998 depiction that co-starred Liam Neeson and Geoffrey Rush.  I would recommend any one of those three over this inflated, sometimes tiresome, interminable opera on film. 

In all fairness I must commend the major performances.   No better casting is conceivable than that of Hugh Jackman in the lead role of Jean Valjean, a Frenchman during the late 18th and early 19th centuries sentenced to serve two decades of his life at hard labor for the “crime” of stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family and pursued over many years after his release by a French police officer named Javert, who is obsessed with capturing him, after he jumps parole and tries to create a new life with a new identity.  Especially powerful is the work of Ann Hathaway as an abused, socially disgraced and terminally ill young woman rescued from the gutter by Valjean, whose daughter he vows to raise as his own.  Russell Crowe does a yeomanly piece of work as Javert .  And some of the libretto is deeply moving, thanks to the work of a team of writers, headed by William Nicholson and Alain Boubil, and Tom Hooper’s direction.  But the total affair brings ultimately to my mind the old saw about “too much of a good thing” that turns to glut.  There is much too much elaboration in the lyrics.  How many words does it take to express a brokenness of heart or a consuming despair or a blazing romantic passion?  I do not think that even Verdi or Wagner would have been this indulgent.  The story could have been told, as it has before, in half the time and lost nothing of import or consequence, even with the use of an operatic format.  And most disappointing of all to me is the way it revolves between the sublime and the ridiculous.  The ending is the most conspicuous case in point for the ridiculous. 

If they were not going to settle for less than two and a half hours, they could have at least graced us with an intermission.     


For the first time in my blogging, I must state unequivocally that I have seen a much anticipated motion picture that I wish I had not viewed at all.  “Zero Dark Thirty” is for me a completely decadent and wasteful treatment of a recent international event – the killing of Yosama ben Laden by Allied forces just a few years back.  Other than Jessica Chastain’s dynamic acting, I have nothing good to say about it.  I found not a shred of redeeming value in its content.  History, past or current, has never been more distorted on the screen.  An earnest documentary about the event and what led up to it would have been much more worthy of our time.  But we have a narrative in which none of the actual individuals who took part in it are ever mentioned or portrayed.  Everybody is a fictional creation.  It is virtually an original screenplay.  The whole impetus of the story as told is the unconscionable bloodlust of a woman who supposedly guided the operation.  In fact the film is a monument to hateful, cruel and vicious retribution.  Not only is torture portrayed in explicit detail beyond the limits of taste but it is given a place in the scheme of things that defies common sense. 

It breaks my heart to have to be reminded that this ugly spectacle of savagery was made under the directorial hand of Kathryn Bigelow, who just a few years ago gave us “The Hurt Locker,” a sensitive and emotionally penetrating movie about modern warfare in the Middle East.  That one is quite disturbing but it opens the hearts of the combatants it portrays.  It appeals to the humanity in all of us, creating sympathy for men trapped in the dynamics of defensive warfare.  There was no driving motif of retribution, no easy target for obliteration.  In “Zero Dark Thirty” all is reduced to the simple question of how to commit the murder on which all the combatants are intent.  And when, by the way, did we as a nation come to believe that assassinating one person is going to have a crippling impact upon a movement.  Leaders can always be replaced, while those assassinated become martyrs to be cherished.  It is an idea we are doing battle with, not a person.  How do you fight and defeat an idea?   That is a question over which strategists should burn the midnight oil.   


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