Doin' The French Mistake

There’s a certain irony - and one might say boldness – to producing a movie named “Les Miserables”, given the distinct possibility that this description would apply to your audience, particularly since the umpteen prior cinematic versions all went down ingloriously, and completely, in flames.  This is ever more so likely when the movie in question requires Hollywood stars of no known musical ability to sing their way through most of the movie.  Oh but to be a fly on the wall at the pre-production meetings when this was pitched: “no, I swear Manny, we can pull this off.  Hugh Jackman is going to be great; Russell Crowe will kill it; Anne Hathaway will bring us to tears”.

Hugh was not great; Russell didn't just kill it, but mutilated the corpse; and Anne did in fact bring us to tears – of raucous unintentional laughter.

And so another infamous “Movie Review Without Seeing The Movie” is born.  When they announced last year that this version would be a musical, I initially struck it from my list of prospects.  There was no way the movie would be anything other than a crushing bore, I thought, and lamented that the Money Men had not had the benefit of my wise counsel.  They didn’t, and I was wrong.  After seeing the Trailer, I changed my mind – for all the wrong reasons.  This was going to be a train wreck of epic proportions, and I wanted in on the action.  Now, Schadenfreude is not a sign of good character, but the hell with it.  Earnest Hollywood megastars took a shot and spectacularly screwed the pooch.  There’s no way I was not going to leave this one alone.  

Besides its musical pretentions, the problem is mostly a story that has just not aged well: Les Miserables is the Charlie Brown of movie concepts.  For the sake of this metaphor, the culturally attuned movie fans who love the story of Les Miserables - nearly as much as they love avante garde floral arrangements and invitations to the one time only performance art of Sean Penn as he channels Rigoberto Menchu - are Charlie Brown, eager for the opportunity to finally kick the football.  The Lucy Van Pelt character ready to jerk the ball away - causing Charlie Brown to predictably and ignominiously flop onto his back - is the movie itself.  See, the movie version of Les Miserable will always fail for the same reason the printed version always fails: the story sucks.  What’s different this time is that everybody knows it.

But, onto the plot: In a nutshell, Jean Valjean – a poor soul who occasionally means good - steals a loaf of bread, goes to prison, gets out, and thus attracts the undying attention of Javert, the policeman who devotes his life to making Valjean’s a living hell on Earth.   Valjean atones for the stolen bread even though there was no sensible reason to do so.  He was hungry after all, and he did share.  Into the picture comes Hathaway’s character Fantine, to whose daughter Cosette Valjean becomes a protector and father figure.  This is significant because he is a middle aged man and she a young girl, giving Valjean a creepy pedophilic quality, but then you remember that this story originated in France, the country that not only offers safe haven to many of the world’s most notorious pedophiles - including Woody Allen and Roman Polanski – but showers them with awards and acclaim particularly because they are Pedophiles.  And you are even more highly esteemed if you engage in Sodomy (Polanski) or Incest (Allen).

And how much of a kick would it have been if either Allen or Polanski had directed this movie?  “I need a rewrite”, Woody would say.  “Add a half dozen more scenes of Valjean and Cosette in slightly more, um, romantic surroundings, after the filming of which Allen would be required to retire to his trailer for 15 minutes, coming out afterwards looking refreshed, and much more at peace with the world.  Later, Allen would cause it all to make sense by pointing out that this was post-revolutionary France, see, and Frenchmen were still working some kinks out of the new social contract, all done in his trademark conversational voice-over.

But, I digress.

Another reason this movie fails is that there are too many modern-day variations that immediately come to mind that would cause you – as you sit there squirming in your seat – to question the credibility of the plot, the characters and eventually the flesh and blood actors themselves.  With that in mind, was I producing this movie, I would keep most everything but the setting: same plot, same script, same actors, and same costumes.  The actors would all sing; oh my, how they would sing.  Anne Hathaway would cry: there would be a veritable flood of tears, particularly at completely inappropriate times.  Crowe and Jack man would cry too, along with several lesser characters, regardless of how little sense their crying made.  And not only would Hathaway keep her Big Scene where she gets shorn of her lovely mane, but all of the abuse at the hands of the sadistic Thenardieres as well.  In fact, I would stretch the hair cutting scene out to at least 15 minutes, during which time she would deliver several side-monologues stylistically indistinguishable from Brad Pitt’s incoherent ramblings in the Chanel perfume commercials. 

And, one of the male characters would have a man-purse.

What I would change in its entirety would be the setting.  Pre-Revolutionary France would become modern day America; Valjean would be a simple tourist boarding a plane to fly from New Jersey to Miami, Florida; Javert would be a TSB drudge at the beautiful Camden International Airport; the loaf of bread would be a pocket knife; Fantine would be the Chick who inadvertently brought oranges into Florida; Valjean’s persecution of Javert would cease to be the relentless attentions of a petty authority figure convinced of the righteousness of his cause, and become instead an endless series of TSB pat-downs at security checkpoints, each one more invasive and embarrassing than the last, and with the ever-increasing prospect of injuries that would require Valjean to use laxatives for the rest of his life in order to poop.  Don’t worry sir, I’m a professional.

I think you see where I’m going with this.  We would play the entire movie for laughs.  We would take the most pretentious story of all time, put it on steroids, feature cameos of Richard Simmons and Lindsay Lohan, and then segue into a real musical, Blazing Saddles, specifically where the movie spills out of the Old West and onto the set with Dom DeLuise and his All-Gay revue doing their Big Number: “Throw out your hands, stick out your Tush, hands on your hips, given them a push; you’ll be surprised you’re doing The French Mistake….Voila!”.  And of course, Slim Pickens would still fall in love with one of the Dancers, and Hedley Lamarr would still catch a cab exclaiming with no small amount of justification “get me out of this movie”.  Hell, tweak Helena Bonham Carter’s hair a bit, and she could jump right into the Madelyn Kahn role as Lilly Von Schtup.

Let’s face it: there’s no way anybody associated with Les Miserables comes out of this one unscathed.  I fully expect whole websites will be devoted to defame the movie, Hathaway, Jackman & Crowe, and these sites will be successful for the same reasons that the Flying Spaghetti Monster lives on, a thorn in the side of Organized Religion: regular folks just love deflating the Establishment, especially when they are taking themselves the most seriously.

And that, my friends, is a notion worthy of a revolution.