Les Miserables, Then and Now

Les Miserables, 1995

This was the first professional musical (opera?) I ever saw.  I was ten and sick and I didn’t have high expectations.  I only watched it because my old-lady neighbor brought it over on film so that I wouldn’t be both sick and bored.  I thought that was nice of her, even though I would probably end up bored all the same.  Boy, was I wrong.

Les Miserables, 2012

I watched this version yesterday as part of my post-mission film catch-up and personal learning plan.  When I asked my dad if it was going to be a musical, he said, “They do sing like 40 percent of the time.  Or is it like 70 percent?  …Wait, was that entire movie really singing?”

The scene that most stuck with me from the 1995 version of Les Miserables was the song "I Dreamed a Dream" by Fantine (Ruthie Henshall).  She stood in front of a microphone in her dignified make-up, hair, and dress and sung on an open, unfurnished stage.  Most of the tragedies that she suffered were described through highly stylized song rather than acted out.  In some ways, the formality of it all resembled ancient Greek drama, as described in the Delbanco and Cheuse textbook: "This formality may...make these ancient dramas seem overly regulated or ritualistic for modern tastes.  However, when you consider the material that the play puts forward--murder, incest, child abuse, and a madness that questions language that comes directly from the gods--you can see how the playwright achieves a certain stability with all of this potentially frenzied subject matter by grounding the intense emotions in such a formal fashion" (1100).  I felt that the affected music was great for evoking the emotional impact of traumas too horrible to be reproduced onstage.  Also, Fantine's refined physical appearance could represent an inner value and dignity that she preserved through all the misery.

The 2012 version, like most modern cinema, took a more realistic approach.  The settings, costumes, and action reproduced scenes so true to life that my dad hardly even noticed the singing.  This is an effective approach when we are dealing with a plot in which, "...every man or woman can be a kind of hero. You need not be aristocratic or from an imperial family to have a tale worth telling or a fate that matters to others" (1277).