I may have missed it, but I don't recall USA Today devoting a full one and three-quarters pages to a movie, never mind a movie that's been out for some time now. But there in the Life section of the Weekend edition was a lengthy discussion of "Les Misérables," or, more precisely, a discussion of the furiously negative responses the musical epic has evoked from a gaggle of critics who simultaneously trash the film and express an incredulity verging on outrage at fellow moviegoers who don't share their view.
David Denby, writing in The New Yorker, after declaring that the movie is not "just bad," but "dreadful," goes on to report himself "deeply embarrassed because all around me … people were sitting rapt, awed, absolutely silent, only to burst into applause after some of the numbers." What embarrasses Denby is the decline in "the taste of my countrymen" in the face of something that is to him so obviously "overbearing, pretentious, madly repetitive"; and he seconds the judgment of Anthony Lane, also a New Yorker reviewer, who dismisses the film as "inflationary bombast." (Something a bit inflationary about that phrase, perhaps.)
And then there is Matt Walsh, who was dragged to the movie by his wife and found it "a thousand times worse than I could have imagined … [v]apid, shallow, self-indulgent and emotionally manipulative." All that crying, you know.
After reading the full versions of these diatribes and a bunch more, I decided that I just had to go see for myself. So I saw the movie twice, last Friday and Saturday. The first time I liked it, the second time I loved it. Part of the reason for my increased enthusiasm was that I could better understand what the director, Tom Hooper, was up to when he employed two techniques every reviewer comments on: (1) the actors do not lip-sync the songs, but perform them "live" (what is and is not real and authentic is always a difficult question) as the camera rolls, and (2) that camera is literally "in your face"; the close-ups are so close up that, as a viewer, you are almost inside the singer's larynx. As Dana Stevens explains (not in admiration) in Slate, while many movies "cram ideas and themes down our throats," this one may be the first "to do so while also cramming us down the throats of its actors."
The key to what is intended by these technical choices was provided for me by Hooper himself when he remarked in an interview (also printed in USA Today) that while "we live in a postmodern age where a certain amount of irony is expected, [t]his film is made without irony." Irony is a stance of distance that pays a compliment to both its producer and consumer. The ironist knows what other, more naïve, observers do not: that surfaces are deceptive, that the real story is not what presents itself, that conventional pieties are sentimental fictions.
The artist who deploys irony tests the sophistication of his audience and divides it into two parts, those in the know and those who live in a fool's paradise. Irony creates a privileged vantage point from which you can frame and stand aloof from a world you are too savvy to take at face value. Irony is the essence of the critical attitude, of the observer's cool gaze; every reviewer who is not just a bourgeois cheerleader (and no reviewer will admit to being that) is an ironist.
"Les Misérables" defeats irony by not allowing the distance it requires. If you're looking right down the throats of the characters, there is no space between them and you; their perspective is your perspective; their emotions are your emotions; you can't frame what you are literally inside of. Moreover, the effect — and it is an effect even if its intention is to trade effect for immediacy — is enhanced by the fact that the faces you are pushed up against fill the screen; there is no dimension to the side of them or behind them; it is all very big and very flat, without depth. The camera almost never pulls back, and when it does so, it is only for an instant.
By means of these devices, Hooper manages to create on the screen something like what the Color Field painters (Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis) were always striving for: "We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth" (Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, letter to The New York Times, 1943). In Color Field painting, "figure and ground are one, and the space of the picture, conceived as a field, seems to spread out beyond the edges of the canvas." As a result you are not encouraged to engage in higher-order thoughts about what you are viewing; it's all very elemental; it hits you straight on. Rothko declared that "The fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted by my pictures shows that I communicated … basic human emotions." Newman echoed the point: "I present no dogma, no system … I work only out of high passion."
Endless high passion and basic human emotions indulged in without respite are what "Les Misérables" offers in its refusal to afford the distance that enables irony. Those who call the movie flat, shallow, sentimental and emotionally manipulative are not wrong; they just fail to see that what appear to them to be bad cinematic choices (in addition to prosaic lyrics that repel aesthetic appreciation, and multiple reprises of simple musical themes) are designed to achieve exactly the result they lament — an almost unbearable proximity to raw, un-ironized experience. They just can't go with it. And why should they? After all, the critic, and especially the critic who perches in high journalistic places, needs to have a space in which he can insert himself and do the explicatory work he offers to a world presumed to be in need of it. "Les Misérables," taken on its own terms, leaves critics with nothing to do except join the rhythms of rapt silence, crying and applause, and it is understandable that they want nothing to do with it.
Understandable but not admirable, if what you desire from criticism is some kind of affirmation. Irony — postmodern or any other — is a brief against affirmation, against the unsophisticated embrace of positive (unqualified) values. No one has seen this more clearly than David Foster Wallace, who complains that irony "serves an exclusively negative function," but is "singularly unuseful when it comes to replace the hypocrisies it debunks" ("E Unibus Pluram," Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993). Irony, he adds, is "unmeaty"; that is, it has nothing solid inside it and is committed to having nothing inside it. Few artists, Wallace says, "dare to try to talk about ways of redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naïve to all the weary ironists." But perhaps there is hope. "The next real … 'rebels' … might well emerge as some weird bunch of 'antirebels,' born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions with reverence and conviction" ("E Pluribus Unam"). Enter "Les Misérables."
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