Holiday preview: 'Les Misérables'

The world has a rich history of protest music that speaks for the poor and downtrodden. But as we learned last year from the drum circles of Occupy Wall Street, it’s a lot more effective if you can actually carry a tune. In the new film version of the hit stage musical Les Misérables, the rabble is roused less in song than in an operatic wail against the comfortable who turn their backs on the afflicted. Think of it as Class Warfare: Show-Tune Edition. Les Misérables (not yet rated) comes to the screen 25 years after the Tony-winning Broadway debut, 150 years after the publication of the Victor Hugo novel on which it’s based, and 180 years after the actual Paris uprising depicted in the story, in which a mob of students and the impoverished lashed out at the French ruling class. Despite being rooted in the distant past, the film may be the most politically provocative mainstream movie of 2012, brimming with themes of social and economic inequality that could be ripped from the U.S. presidential race or any number of recent populist revolts around the world. ”We’re not making some Masterpiece Theatre show,” says Hugh Jackman, who stars as Jean Valjean, a poor man once imprisoned for stealing bread who becomes a respected member of society after turning fugitive and assuming a fake identity. ”This is something that’s relevant. Classic literature — classic stories like Les Misérables — sticks around for a reason.”

The story’s revolutionary spirit was a big draw for Tom Hooper, the mild-mannered, Oxford-educated director who won an Oscar for 2010’s period drama The King’s Speech. ”One of the reasons I thought it was timely to make it now, despite the musical having been around for years, is we’re living in a time of incredible rising anger against the extraordinary explosion of inequality and injustice in our society,” he says. ”With Occupy Wall Street, Occupy St. Paul’s in London, with revolution in the Middle East, that theme is very connected with the modern experience. What’s lovely about the story is it offers us the feeling that we the people can meaningfully stand up and change the circumstances for the better.”

Even Hooper’s use of the phrase ”we the people” recalls one of his most elaborate previous projects: John Adams, the Emmy-winning 2008 HBO miniseries starring Paul Giamatti as the fearsome Founding Father. ”[Les Misérables] is very connected to the DNA of America. A lot of the story could play as the 1770s in Boston,” the director says. ”There was a very strong feeling of dissatisfaction toward an unjust king and an unjust system.”

During the three-month, $61 million production of Les Miz that wrapped this past June in the U.K., the American public was already feeling the tension of a society dividing itself into percentages. The significance only became stronger as the shoot went on. ”Some of those [conversations] were not apparent at the beginning,” says producer Eric Fellner. ”But the way history unfolds, you suddenly find you’re in a zeitgeist place.”

Ever since Les Miz opened in London in 1985, composer Claude-Michel Schönberg’s musical has somehow always stayed relevant. The show, which is still running in London, played for 16 years on Broadway and has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from various productions in more than 40 countries. But when veteran British theater producer Cameron Mackintosh first brought the English-language version to the stage (with Herbert Kretzmer adapting Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel’s original French lyrics), he wasn’t sure it would survive. ”I never thought this could run more than two or three years,” says Mackintosh, who’s also a producer on the film. ”It didn’t have all the ingredients people assumed the musical should have.”

That is, it wasn’t a feel-good show.

But the epic storytelling, the compelling characters, the innovative turntable set design, and Schönberg’s gorgeous melodies struck a chord with audiences everywhere. One major narrative thread concerns the fugitive Valjean, who establishes himself as a wealthy factory owner (what some might call a ”job creator”) but fails to intervene when one of his workers, Fantine (Anne Hathaway), is fired after her colleagues discover she had a daughter out of wedlock. He does, however, become the guardian of the child, Cosette (played in adulthood by Amanda Seyfried). It’s then that both Cosette and Éponine (newcomer Samantha Barks), who’s the surprisingly sweet daughter of thieving innkeepers named the Thénardiers (Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen), set their romantic sights on student protest leader Marius (My Week With Marilyn‘s Eddie Redmayne) as tensions with authorities mount.

For much of the show, Valjean fears doing anything out of line since a relentless police officer, Inspector Javert (performed with rock-opera intensity by Russell Crowe), remains on his trail. Javert has no mercy for anyone, not even himself when he believes he has failed in his duties. ”Both men think they’re inspired by God,” Hooper says. ”Javert is very Old Testament and vengeful, full of wrath, and hard-hitting. Valjean is more of a New Testament man.” In other words, he’s more about forgiveness than punishment.

One of the biggest challenges for Hooper & Co. was conveying the gritty message of Les Miz amid the luscious melodies. To lend some authenticity to the performances, Hooper chose to have his actors sing live during the shoot rather than follow the standard Hollywood practice of lip-synching to prerecorded tracks. This stripped away a layer of polish and allowed the stars to add improvisation and heat-of-the-moment emotion to their roles. For Hathaway, that meant she could approach a ballad such as ”I Dreamed a Dream” in a completely different way than she would if she were performing in a theater. ”I didn’t have to convey the message to the back of the house,” she says. ”I had to put the message in my eyes and let the emotion live in my voice, as opposed to trying to sing the song in a way that was aurally pleasing.” As a result, she says her rendition of the familiar tune ”is so unspeakably angry” — without an ounce of the self-pity found in some renditions. ”[”Fantine”] didn’t have time for pity. Pity would have killed her,” says the actress, whose own mother, Kate McCauley Hathaway, played Fantine in a U.S. tour of Les Miz when Anne was 7. ”Fantine had to get angry. The only thing that kept her going was rage.”

The big question Les Misérables asks is a biblical one: What is our responsibility to the least among us? Although it may seem hypocritical that a big-budget studio film featuring wealthy stars is literally singing the praises of the poor, the central idea of the story is that the strong need to stand up for the weak. Says Jackman, ”My father used to teach that to me: ‘You have to give to receive,’ which is pretty much what Victor Hugo was talking about.”

At the time it was published, according to a preface of Easton Press’ 2003 edition, Hugo’s novel was criticized for seeking to capitalize on the pain of the less fortunate — but it became a rallying point among lower-class people, who sometimes pooled money to buy a single copy that they could share. ”[”Valjean”] feels he’s never doing enough. And so do we all,” Jackman says. ”I’m a parent. I’m an actor. I’m many things. And there’s not one aspect of my life where I feel like I can’t do better.”

Hathaway, who played the leather-clad anarchist Catwoman in this past summer’s The Dark Knight Rises, another studio film about an angry uprising, says she’s grateful for her good fortune but recalls an upbringing that was less secure. ”I was comfortable growing up, but we did not have much. And I saw my parents struggle to make ends meet and raise three children,” she says. ”Compared to a lot of people, we were incredibly well off. And obviously now I’m in a very different position. But underneath [Les Miz] is just the sheer anxiety of ‘How am I going to make it to the end of the month? Where is the money going to come from? How is this going to work?’ It’s the idea that the haves, those in power, those who have excess, are tone-deaf and tuned-out.” Fortunately for audiences, the cast of this musical are neither.

Broadway Musicals on the Big Screen: Both High Notes and Low

A decade ago, Chicago broke Hollywood’s long musical drought, cashing in at the box office and earning six Oscars (including best picture). Its success has led to a flood of movies based on hits from the Great White Way. But how well have they fared with U.S. filmgoers?

Chicago 2002

Domestic: $170.7 million

The Phantom of the Opera 2004

$51.3 million

Rent 2005

$29.1 million

The Producers 2005

$19.4 million

Dreamgirls 2006

$103.4 million

Hairspray 2007

$118.9 million