The musical Les Miserables has captured the hearts of its viewers for many years now with its depressive songs and story. After having seen the movie adaptation, someone should know why. Aesthetically, the film was beautiful. The silly vibrant colors of the despicably comical Thenardiers scenes was an amusing and relieving contrast to the dull, miserable colors of almost every other scene in the movie. Compositionally, there are a few scenes that would stick out in a viewer’s memory. The beginning when all the prisoned French criminals are towing in a ship to shore has a grand, massive feel to it.
Audiences see a monstrously huge ship, and then hundreds of people that seem no bigger than ants in comparison, but because there are so many of them it just adds another level of largeness to the composition. Another that stands out and is also used in the trailer, is the scene where Cosette sings “In My Life. ” She stands in front of a series of panels that are painted with elegant, fragile looking roses. She is not centered, but to the far left of the frame, and overall it just looks beautiful. The colors are warm and set out a loving, hopeful vibe. There isn’t much to the image; it is simple and sweet.
A third shot that really makes a visual impact is the one at the very end, when everybody sings “Do You Hear The People Sing? ” Like the first scene, it is massive. All the dead characters, and there are a lot of them, stand behind a barricade as big as the Great Wall of China, all made from the same sort of material they had used in the barricade from when they were alive. The barricade they had made for themselves when they were alive, however, was so small and pitiful in comparison, made from furniture that the citizens of France either willingly or unwillingly gave up.
So to see this enormous barricade and the hundreds of people all singing behind it was breathtaking. It was cloudy, and bright blue, with a heavenly feel to it that made onlookers feel better about life after death. There is a certain sadness to it, because all the characters are dead, but yet it didn’t seem like such a sad ending. Even though they died and lost their fight, they are all in a better place now. Personally, I love all the songs, and I didn’t have any issues with any of the actors’ performance or singing, except for that of the guy who plays Marius.
However, I had huge issues with the storytelling itself. The story was perfect up until Fantine’s death. Her story is heartbreaking, we see her go from a working woman with an already pitiful life to a whore in the streets with chopped hair and missing teeth. Hers was the most miserable story of the entire movie. After that, audiences are suddenly introduced to brand new characters they are supposed to feel bad for, when first of all they don’t even know them, and their lives are no where near as bad as Fantine’s. In comparison, they’re just whining infants.
With nothing but sad stories and not enough comic relief, viewers are desensitized to the horrors of what happens throughout the rest of the movie. Of course, this is not entirely the fault of the script because this is all based off of an incredibly long book. Changes to the script would upset the fans of the book, and would overall seem like an insult to the author. However, to fix my issues with the script, I’d either shorten Fantine’s involvement and make her story be more of a prologue than the first act, or give her situation to a character that appears later on in the story to save the best – or, in this case, the worst – for last.
Because this is based off of a book, I don’t think the script was written with a premise statement in mind. A premise statement is what every script needs to be successful; it is the overall moral proven or lesson taught in a story. With the musical Les Miserables, it doesn’t seem like anything more than a history lesson with characters that represent all the classes and functions of the French citizens during their revolution. If I absolutely had to come up with a premise statement for it, it would be that life sucks.
