Reel History by Alex Von Tunzelmann

Author:Alex Von Tunzelmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

1832

Les Misérables (2012)

Director: Tom Hooper • Entertainment grade: C • History grade: C

People: The film begins with Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) completing nineteen years of hard labour: the penalty for stealing bread and repeatedly trying to escape. His overseer is the unrelenting Javert (Russell Crowe). Victor Hugo’s novel was inspired in part by the true story of Eugène-François Vidocq, who turned a criminal career into an anti-crime industry. He created the Bureau des Renseignements, said to be the world’s first detective agency, in 1833, though he himself continued to be pursued by police. Vidocq was friends with several authors, including Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and Alexandre Dumas père. In Les Misérables, Hugo split him into two characters, Valjean and Javert, at odds with each other. So this is an eighteenth-century Fight Club. With singing.

Grime: The reformed Valjean becomes mayor of Montreuil-sur-Mer. Young Fantine (Anne Hathaway) is fired from one of his factories. On the streets, she sells her hair, then her molars, then her body. Cue the standout solo, ‘I Dreamed A Dream’. Like many of the big numbers in this film, it’s shot in blistering, uncut close-up. With each actor you get a chance to see the smears of stage blood, the sweat, the tears caught in the eyelashes, the veins throbbing in the forehead on the high notes, the dirt, the spots, the drool, the snot and the poverty stains on whatever remains of their teeth. In a movie already determined to cover all its characters in filth, vomit and human excrement, this is a bit relentless. A historian can’t complain about the past being shown to be dirty – it was – but it seems contrary to insist on gritty realism if you’re going to have your cast express themselves exclusively in show tunes.

Justice: Hathaway’s performance veers between fragile sobbing and Susan Boyle-style operatics. It’s so nakedly an Oscar clip that they might as well have flashed up the words ‘OSCAR CLIP’ on the screen, as they do in Wayne’s World when Wayne splashes water over his eyes and bawls, ‘I never learned to read!’ Fantine hits back at a would-be customer. Javert arrests her; Valjean performs a rescue. But why is the saintly Valjean hanging around in the red-light district? This is a lot easier to get away with on stage. Melodramatic though it may be, Fantine’s story is apparently based on a real event. In 1841, Hugo himself saved a woman falsely accused. The story is described in his Things Seen (1887).

Politics: There is no historical context provided for the June Rebellion of 1832 beyond a general sense that students are annoyed and ordinary working folk are hard done by, which they have been throughout history. ‘Lamarque is dead!’ trills Enjolras (Aaron Tveit). ‘The people’s man!’ That would be General Jean-Maximilien Lamarque, a political opponent of Louis-Philippe, whose death during a cholera epidemic provided the trigger for the rebellion. The film does little to correct the popular misconception that Les Misérables is set in the

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