Hooper Adaptation (2012)

Short answer: Because it’s my favorite. 

Longer answer (including an explanation for those outraged by the short answer):

To start with, as I say at more length elsewhere, it’s practical for my current purposes: the stage show is far and away the best-known adaptation of the book, and the advantage of this film is that it crystallizes the basic source material from the stage show (the music and lyrics that make up the Les Misérables musical, performed by actors, in costumes, on sets) into a permanent, consistent, re-watchable form, while keeping a lot of the things that people love about the stage show. 

And, look, I know – it loses a lot of things that some of the most die-hard fans of the musical love. And not just the live performance aspect, although I also know that for some theater folks, a movie can never scratch the itch that theater does, full stop. I know not everyone liked the changes that were made to the show to bring it to the screen. I’m also acquainted with this movie’s faults, simply as a movie. I kinda wish they’d knock it off with the hand-held camera sometimes and use a dolly or a steadicam, so we could occasionally forget we’re looking through a lens. Having ears, I also wince at Russell Crowe’s singing and wonder about that casting choice (although I also have a way of retconning it that I very much like, see below). But in the end – brace yourselves for the hottest take you’ll find here at readlesmis-dot-com – this is my favorite adapted version of Les Misérables. 

I’ll give you a beat to recover, then I’ll explain myself.

My explanation/defense starts with the fact that it’s sung, which gives it an edge over other film adaptations. I think that Alain Boublil’s instinct way back in the 1970s was superb, and if Les Misérables isn’t in Hugo’s lyrical prose, it should be sung. Hugo was a poet, and his prose is peppered with poetic features (as well as actual poems). I don’t often discuss this in detail in the podcast, as it doesn’t translate well. But I mentioned briefly in episode 6 that Arthur Rimbaud, a French poet who was a teenager when Les Misérables first appeared (fascinating guy, child prodigy, enfant terrible) read the novel as if it were poetry, and adapting it into a sung-through format encourages us to do the same. 

But I think the poetry of the novel goes beyond just Hugo’s use of language. I say it over and over in the podcast, and I’ll repeat it here: despite its historical context and subject matter, Les Misérables is not realism. But so many adaptations, regardless of language, time period, country of origin, or adherence to the story in other respects, adapt it as if it is. This is not really their fault. A basic “move” in adapting a book to a visual medium like theater or film is to make internal and invisible elements of the story – things that the characters think and feel, that the narrator just tells us – visible, while also, usually, simplifying it all somewhat. So you can see how the moments that are the most surreal in Hugo’s text – characters’ hallucinations, for example, or spiritual presences that Hugo describes as if they’re quite real to an individual character – might be the first to go, or to be translated into something simpler, like a facial expression. If this story is simplified down to matters of plot and character, and then set in the environments that Hugo largely sets it in, the result is…. kinda like realism. Characters, in the often dirty, impoverished, run-down corners of nineteenth-century France, do and say the things that move the plot forward coherently, but do not noticeably experience the world that exists beyond the physical senses, which is so salient in the book.

To take just one example: in the “Tempest in a Skull” chapter (I, 7, iii), when Jean Valjean burns the clothes he was wearing in Digne and is about to throw the Bishop’s candlesticks into the fire, Hugo’s text gives us a spectacular light show as the clothes burn and Petit Gervais’s coin falls into the ashes, then a voice, crying to him from inside his mind. Adaptations, if they show this moment at all, might show Madeleine/Jean Valjean pacing his room in indecision, or the external actions associated with considering what to do with the candlesticks, and the actor has an opportunity to show his chops by conveying the agony of the situation. But they typically judge (probably rightly) that a voice-over of God or Jean Valjean’s conscience delivering the semi-sarcastic monologue that Hugo wrote wouldn’t work, and might even be a bit silly, and there is no reason why the fire should behave in ways that defy physics, as it seems to do in the book. So the hallucinatory, supernatural, other-worldly element is typically lost entirely. Jean Valjean becomes just another movie character on the horns of a big decision, whereas for Hugo, he was much more. 

However, in the musical adaptation, when our hero steps out of time to sing “Who am I?”, the moment also becomes about more than just a guy making a tough decision, thanks to the musical theater convention of the sung soliloquy. Lyrical language and music elevate the story just as Hugo’s writing style does, only differently. The spirituality of the story overall comes from these elements, even as it is simplified, and compressed into just 3 hours (of which the whole Champmathieu affair is less than 5 minutes) and far fewer words. The musical’s characters and situations can soar in a way that a spoken adaptation never can. (And if there’s one character who can’t “sing” in this sense, isn’t it Javert? But I’ll get to that in my commentary….)

So any version of the musical is, in my book, already a better adaptation than a “prose” one.

Then, what the 2012 film does that I love so is this: it manages to get more of the book into the musical, via a few adjustments here and there, and mostly in the way it’s shot and staged, while still capitalizing on what the music brings to the story. By this, I mean basically two things. First, it’s chock-full of “Easter eggs” for book readers, not only as little visual “winks” that wouldn’t be practical on stage (the ELEPHANT, y’all), but also as deeply meaningful visual nods to the book’s network of metaphors – we’ll see, for example, a couple of well-deployed ships early on in the film. Second, it uses the visual detail that the new medium puts at its disposal to ground the story in that gritty environment I mentioned before – in visual realism – while at the same time reaching for something beyond this world with the music. The difference between “I Dreamed a Dream” on stage and in this movie will give us a good example of this. Characters are simultaneously living in the filth and death of this world and the transcendence of another.

This is, in my opinion, precisely as Hugo would have wanted it. On several occasions in the podcast, I mention the Préface de Cromwell, that theoretical essay where a young Hugo describes what he thinks literature should be, and it’s…. that. It’s both grotesque and sublime. In this text, Hugo says that humanity 

“a deux vies à vivre, l’une passagère, l’autre immortelle ; l’une de la terre, l’autre du ciel. [...] qu’il est double comme sa destinée, qu’il y a en lui un animal et une intelligence, une âme et un corps ; en un mot, qu’il est le point d’intersection, l’anneau commun des deux chaînes d’êtres qui embrassent la création, de la série des êtres matériels et de la série des êtres incorporels, la première, partant de la pierre pour arriver à l’homme, la seconde, partant de l’homme pour finir à Dieu.” 

“has two lives to live, one temporary, the other immortal; one of earth, the other of heaven. [...] that he is double like his destiny, that he has within him an animal and an intelligence, a soul and a body; in a word, that he is the point of intersection, the common link in the two chains of beings that encompass creation, of the series of material beings and the series of incorporeal beings, the first, from stone to humanity, the other, from humanity to God.” 

This was written 35 years before Les Misérables, in which time Hugo’s thinking would evolve a great deal, and the social and political themes we see in the book would come to the fore. But I think even a minimally attentive reading of Les Misérables reveals characters that are built on this same principle. They are at once trapped in the brutal physical world and reaching for something transcendent. They are covered in filth, starving, dying of consumption and violence… and singing.

So, essentially, I think that this film does the best job I’ve seen at doing what I define as good adaptation in my introduction to adaptations: “take advantage of these opportunities [that the source material offers to the particular tools of the new medium] to get more of the book into its interpretation.” In the medium of movie-musical, I think this one has done exactly that. The music elevates the story beyond its material realities in a way that suits the book – the book is about material things like money and hunger, but it’s also about giant spiritual realities, and the music, for me, makes this feel like it operates in that realm. That has always been the case on stage too, but putting the stage musical on film added more opportunity to bring the book back in, most often through visual details, special effects, and reorganizations of the script that would be impractical on stage. I know there are things about it that frustrate lovers of musical theater and of film, but as someone who prioritizes the novel, I think this is an excellent way to capture it in a visual medium, with the right mix of its spirit and its letter. Hugo, I think, would approve.

I hope the comments that follow will show you why.

This film impressed me with its incorporation of the novel’s extended metaphors. This, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, is an easy win for any adapter of this novel into a visual medium like film, because so many of Hugo’s most expressive metaphors are visual – and yet, so few adaptations do it this well. I’ll just include the most salient examples here.

The Ocean & the Man Overboard

The opening scene of this film establishes this metaphor absolutely stunningly. The novel establishes it in I, 2, viii, and gestures back to it throughout; we discuss it for the first time in episode 5 of the main podcast. This metaphor has society represented by a ship, and society’s marginalized – the poor, the outcast, and specifically the convict Jean Valjean – represented by a man overboard. That man floats at the surface of the water, not yet dead, but utterly without hope of rescue; he cannot return to the ship, but he continues to breathe, think, and struggle for life. 

The opening scene of this film places Jean Valjean at the surface of the water as well, outside a ship, subject to driving rain and splashing surf that nearly drown him, as he is part of a convict labor force that has been assigned to haul a damaged ship – a large square-rigged vessel like the Orion, which we explored in episode 16 – into dry dock. This would really have been done on a rising tide, so there is realism to the way we see the water behaving, as well as symbolism. (Fun fact: this is the only scene in the film where the singing wasn’t done live on set, because the splashing water made capturing high-quality sound impossible.) But to understand how well the film deploys and reworks this metaphor, we need to look at the scene from the beginning.

We start the film underwater, fading in from black to a shot of a French tricolor flag floating above us on the surface, with the beginning beats of music muffled until we surface. A title card tells us that it’s 1815, after the Revolution, and a king is back on the throne. When we emerge, we find that the flag is from the damaged ship. 

In the novel’s version of this early metaphor, the ship was not damaged, although, as we discussed in episode 5, Hugo’s use of the ship-as-society metaphor did warn of shipwreck (i.e., social unrest due to failed or failing government) elsewhere. But here, just after we’re told that there’s a king back on the throne, we see a shipwreck. And we see a group of men who, unlike the novel’s man overboard, were never part of the ship’s crew, but were always outside it, brought in only to do the difficult and dangerous work of hauling the ship in for repair. The lyrics sing of the injustice of their punishment (just as they do on stage, where the men pantomime rowing or breaking rocks), as they, in a state that represents permanent exclusion and living death, work toward the repair of something from which they will never benefit. The penal system here is not a vast ocean into which those who transgress disappear irrevocably, as it was in Hugo. Hooper, in what seems perhaps to be an echo of some postmodern theorists (who postdate Hugo), makes the penal system the principal force that keeps society afloat, by sacrificing its transgressors. Society’s repair depends on its prisons – here, literally. 

In the next sequence, the convicts’ work is done, the ship has been hauled in, and the tide has gone out. Javert stops Jean Valjean as the convicts are exiting in a line and asks him, individually, to “retrieve the flag” – this is an assertion of power (and a handy way for the film to establish Jean Valjean’s extraordinary physical strength), not a particularly crucial task. But the flag – the same one we saw in the opening shot – turns out to be attached to a large, heavy mast. Jean Valjean heaves one end of the mast onto his shoulder, carries it a few steps toward Javert, and drops it at his feet. As he does, the other end – the one with the flag on it – is dragged, and we get a quite pointed shot of the flag being dragged through the mud. All that we have seen – the exclusion, the “shipwreck,” the exploitative labor, the abuse of power, the effect it has on the convicts, which we heard in the lyrics – all of this dishonors the nation that produces it, “drags the flag through the mud.” (Another fun fact: this would not actually have been the flag flying after the monarchy was restored in 1814, and we’ve been told explicitly that there is a king on the throne. But this tricolor flag, which was associated with the Revolution at the time, is what a 2012 viewer would recognize as a “French flag,” so using it here is a practical way to communicate this idea of the nation, even if it is not strictly historical.)

This opening sequence draws on the book’s metaphor, and uses the context of the musical and the resources of film to add to it. This use of the ship/man overboard metaphor figures the convicts’ exclusion, while it also shows us a broader perspective – the broken and uncertain state of French society, the role that the penal system tries (and largely fails) to play in restoring order in that society, and the dangerous consequences for all involved. It is absolutely stunningly done.

Then, a bit later, we gesture back once more to this image, when Fantine also finds herself in a ship in dry dock. After she has lost her job, in need of money, she heads to the docks, initially to look for a buyer for a locket she has. (Third fun fact: Montreuil-sur-mer, despite the fact that the name translates to “Montreuil-on-sea,” is not in fact on the coast, and does not have docks.) She is then – in a montage that seems to include some time compression – tempted by the prospect of cash into selling her hair and two teeth. By the time she has endured all of this, she’s next to a ship in drydock – damaged like the one Jean Valjean hauled in, and this time, the site not of forced convict labor, but illicit activity borne of poverty. As she is encouraged toward prostitution – again largely reluctantly, by the force of those around her and the confusion they create, by the prospect of money, and by a kind of apparent predestination – the ship, and specifically its sculpted figurehead, blends in with the human environment to add to the confusion and horror, which is presented from Fantine’s slightly intoxicated point of view. The tone of this section is entirely different from what we see at the same moment on stage: rather than the bawdy humor based on the lyrics while the actress playing Fantine is off stage for a wig and/or costume change, in the film, we intercut closeups of Fantine’s face with the disorienting nightmare imagery, and the presence of a ship on land contributes to that disorientation. The sexual jokes in the lyrics take a back seat, and what was mostly comic relief becomes grotesque and terrifying.

She is presented with her first customer outside the ship and leads him into its hold to conduct their transaction in private. As she sings “Don’t they know they’re making love to one already dead?” she leads him to what appears to be a coffin that serves as a bed. The ensuing scene is designed to provoke disgust and discomfort (especially in a film rated PG-13), after which Fantine sings her iconic “I Dreamed a Dream” – which, pointedly, has been delayed relative to its timing on stage. What she goes through here is far worse than what she goes through on the stage: the sale of her teeth is added back in, including a new verse of “Lovely Ladies,” and we see the extent of her vulnerability in a way that we could not in the theater. The closeup in which most of “I Dreamed a Dream” is shot makes her appear naked, and with her shorn hair, and the fact that an already-Hollywood-thin Anne Hathaway lost quite a lot of weight for the role, she seems utterly without protection – which she is. 

Placing all of this in a dock area – and, ultimately, in the hold of a ship – connects it to the earlier uses of this metaphor, and expands it. To all the meanings that the film has already established for the ship, we can now add another one, from the novel: Fantine’s prostitution as a kind of slavery. Hugo establishes this metaphor in I, 5, xi, and we discuss it in episode 9 of the podcast. The transatlantic slave trade was abolished by the time Hugo wrote Les Misérables, but it was still within living memory, and of course, for a 2012 English-speaking audience, the idea of it is conjured by any image of human beings in the hold of a ship of this period. This sequence, by placing Fantine’s lowest moment in the hold of a ship, and by harkening back to the shipwreck metaphor established at the start of the film, powerfully connects Fantine’s fate, along with Jean Valjean’s there, to the broken state of their society.

So now, with the novel’s meanings for ships and water translated onto the screen and developed for this context, we can continue to read other appearances of ships or water in this light. And water, in particular, appears frequently, be it when Jean Valjean escapes Javert after Fantine’s death, echoing his fall from the Orion in the book, or when Javert’s endless teetering on the edges of precipices finally proves unsustainable….

But that’s a whole other metaphor:

Javert, society’s guardian

Perhaps we can get this part over with first: I know Russell Crowe doesn’t have the voice chops for this and didn’t do the character’s vocal part justice. 

Let’s move on.

In the novel, Javert is characterized by rigidity, by literalism in his relationship to the law that he upholds (and represents), and by his position at the boundary between society and all that it rejects. He is a statue, a piece of granite, a guard dog. He is Law itself, and this (not some vaguely homoerotic obsession – looking at you, Davies adaptation) is why his pursuit of Jean Valjean is so relentless. Jean Valjean will never be free of Javert because he will never be free of the law. What Russell Crowe does bring to the role very well is its physicality: Javert is described as resembling a mastiff, and I think we can see that in Crowe, even as he exudes a haughtiness, a seriousness, and the strict, stiff discipline that will be his downfall. But we also see him put in situations that hearken back to this way of embodying the law. When we first meet him at the dry dock in the opening scene, as well as during his main solo number, “Stars,” and his final moments, he teeters on the edge of a precipice – at a high place, but precariously, only a step away from plummeting into what’s below him – a step that is only prevented by his own discipline, his ability to avoid the slightest misstep. And, in each case, Javert’s vantage point and what’s below him are both significant. 

In the opening scene, he stands at the top of the step-like structure that makes up the dry dock into which the convicts are hauling the ship. When Jean Valjean looks up – a gesture that echoes a moment early in the novel when he figuratively looks up and sees all of society above him – we see Javert on this precipice from Jean Valjean’s point of view in the water below, guarding the convicts, who are to stay in this low point. But it’s worth noting that Javert can also see Jean Valjean from here. If he were, somehow, not to remain on this precipice where he stands so close to the edge, he would fall into the same environment as Jean Valjean’s – that of the Man Overboard, the convict, the outcast.

During “Stars,” Javert seems to be atop the Préfecture de Police that is in this position facing Notre-Dame today – the architecture matches, although the sculpture at the roof level appears to be different, and of course, the surrounding city that we see in the film is made to look more like 1823 than the twenty-first century. But this location is logical for Javert, and Hooper’s reinterpretation seems to be intentional. The appearance of Notre-Dame not only allows those who know the city to identify the building and gestures to Hugo’s second-most-famous novel, it also situates Javert relative to the religion of the Bishop and of the convent that Jean Valjean has just escaped into – he is outside it, firmly in the structure of secular law, but mindful of the structures of the Church and their place in society. The eagle sculpture – again, reinterpreted by Hooper, as the sculptures atop this building, at least today, do not match this – almost give Javert the appearance of wings, like an angel, in a couple of shots, but the match is never perfect. His irreproachability is not the same thing as holiness, and he is not an angel. The eagle, symbol of Napoleon, is always visible behind him. A gesture to Napoleon of course reminds us of his significant presence in the book (or have you repressed the Waterloo section?), and of Hugo’s assessment that the Emperor, too, put more emphasis on secular power than divine will. Napoleon was no longer in charge in 1823, but he would have been the supreme authority, with all the importance that has for Javert, at the start of his career. And what’s beneath Javert here is once again what he’s charged with keeping in order: now, not the convicts, but the city of Paris. He once again teeters on the edge, and we have shots of his feet, testing his balance (in a way that certainly tweaked my fear of heights!) as he seems to compulsively patrol this edge, ever the guardian. His attention, though, is not below, but above, on the stars. 

And finally, in his final scene, he is on yet another precipice, the rail of the bridge over the Seine. Notre-Dame is once again in the shot, now from the opposite angle, and behind him; the Préfecture de Police is not visible. For most viewers, who know the story, the simple fact of finding him on the bridge over the Seine (quite suddenly, after a cut from a shot where he is climbing stairs away from where Jean Valjean left him at the exit front he sewer) is sufficiently weighty. But we also remember water imagery from the rest of the film – including that opening scene, with the dry-dock shaped similarly to the structure that we see in the river, churning the water here – and from the novel, where it represented the abyss of social exclusion. The shot of his feet on the edge, echoing the one during “Stars,” is repeated here, and we’re reminded once again that his place at the edge of society was not only as its guardian. His origins were in that abyss, born in a jail. His only way to participate in society was to guard it, remaining “on the edge” to do his job, and to keep his balance there he had to be irreproachable. Just one misstep, and he’d be back there. Now, he has succumbed to Jean Valjean’s mercy and faltered, and he can only, inevitably, finally fall from that precipice, back into the abyss that he has watched over since the opening moments of the film. 

Of course, much of this system of metaphors comes from Hugo himself – Hooper can’t take credit for creating it, but he can, in my view, be given credit for a masterful translation of it onto the screen.