I feel obliged to preface this little post with a warning.
I will use the term liminal space in the next few hundred words. I open myself
to your ridicule, and fully expect it. It is, however, the only way for me to
explain why I found Les Miserables such a failure. It will allow me (and I hope
you will to) to compare the stage space and the film screen.
I think that in offering a criticism of Les Miserables I
need to separate my disdain for the musical and my opinions of the film
adaptation itself. I’m naturally bent to dislike the film and am not going to
hide this or attempt a balanced review. But that isn’t what this essay is
about. It’s about what you can get away with on the stage and on the screen.
Tom Hooper, in choosing how we should experience this
sprawling tale, goes against what we see on stage: while at the theatre one can
watch all of the action at a ‘mid-range’ shot (film buffs, please feel free to
correct me on my terminology…) Hooper takes the directorial decision to film
most of the set pieces close up (so close up, in fact, that I spent most of one
of Hugh Jackman’s big numbers counting his nostril hairs…) and, conversely he
chooses aerial wide-shots for the sprawling city scenes.
The problem with this is that, for most of the first half
(before all of the barricadey stuff) it feels like one music video following on
from another. Indeed, here is where I think the problem lies with the whole
film: it doesn’t manage to keep up with the time and location jumps that the
theatre production offers. But how can this be? Surely the stage is more
limiting than the screen? It’s certainly easier
to jump between one location and another on camera, it’s easier to show a
dramatic change in a character’s health or age (Jackman starts emaciated, bald
and bearded and ends up a happy Dickensian gent) and a simple bit of text on
screen can signify the change of year. So what went wrong. Well, back to that
term…
Somewhere between Hathaway singing her bald little head off
and croaking and all that barricade fun there’s a bemusing hour or so where
human photoshop accident Eddie Redmayne chases after that one from Mama Mia. We
go to a nice house in the country, and then he pops back to the barricades for
a chat, then goes back to neverland to chase after Julie Walters Amanda
Seigfried. Nothing in the film feels connected – it’s one set piece after the
next.
On stage, however, we accept this. The shifting of time and
place is granted – we need only a little change in set or lighting for us to
imagine a completely different city, and two things happening at different
points in different parts of the stage allow us to imagine things occurring
simultaneously. In short we acknowledge that all these different events take
place at the same space in the same time. That’s what the stage does: we view it as a
transformative, we are open to whatever change may come without shifting our
central reference point. We accept that the stage is Paris, and that the
constituent parts all take part inside that Paris. It is a liminal space, never
quite one thing, never quite another: the stage offers a border between places.
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