Les Misérables (Tom Hooper, 2012)

When set against the experience of seeing a production of Les Misérables,Tom Hooper’s adaptation single-handedly disproves Chaplin’s notion that life is tragedy in close-up and comedy in long shot. Hooper is so fixated on the musical’s reputation as a tear-jerker that he has no sense for its epic sweep, and his camera is rarely more than inches from an actor’s face as he or she sings. At times, performers even lurch suddenly toward the lens in a disorientingly pop effect, a gesture of spontaneity that sometimes comes across as their way of saying, “Would you back the hell off?”

Based, of course, on Victor Hugo’s epic, social romance novel, Les Misérables is one of the few musicals ripe for the current fetish for “realism” (emphasis on the quotation marks). Hooper always makes sure each face is covered in grime just so, that the stars’ teeth are not sparkling but also not blackened like the extras or significant characters of disrepute. These details make the film seem more fake than a stage show, not less, though the camera does such a fine job of its own on that front that the relatively minor sin of aesthetically arranged grit. One might not even notice this if, again, Hooper could bear to mix up his agonizingly long close-ups with a medium or long shot that lasted more than a second.

The King's Speech

Though it features the sort of rousing, uplifting score one expects for a movie about an underdog overcoming an obstacle, the dominant sonic motif in Tom Hooper's The King's Speech is a light, choked gargle, the sound of the base of the tongue splashing around the back of the throat in tremulous preparation for a performance it would like nothing more than to not give. The tongue in question belongs to Albert Frederick Arthur George, the Duke of York and second in line of succession to the king of England, a man whose stammer might never had been an issue were he blessed with the good fortune to have been born before the popularization of radio.

The film opens in 1925, at the closing of the Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Albert's father, King George V (Michael Gambon), charges him with delivering the closing speech on radio, himself and the primary heir to the throne, Prince Edward, having already made their wireless debuts. As he arrives, his wife and their confidants reassure Albert that he will do wonderfully, but the look of fear in his eyes creates a tense mood before he even says a word. At last, aides send him in front of the microphone at the head of the stands, and all in the audience turn reverently to hear him. The pause is deafening, and when Albert finally speaks, the crackled stutters that escape his lips echo through the sound system, mocking him as the crowd maintains their respectful silence but look around uncomfortably in that way people need to make eye contact to share pain but must also avoid it at all costs to prevent an errant titter.

It's an excruciating moment, and as someone who does not stammer but has often felt the hot sting of apprehension -- no, pure, unrelenting terror -- at the simple notion of public speaking, the seemingly contradictory combination of agoraphobia and claustrophobia that creeps into the mise-en-scène rang painfully true. Of course, the damned thing about a stammer or any other display of anxiety is that, once aware that others have picked up on the trait, the sufferer can never right, spiraling further into a pit of self-revulsion and embarrassment that magnifies the first slip into a cascade of tics and halting pronunciation. The first scared pause, the dreaded "ums" and "likes," never come in one aberration. They only ever lead to more mistakes.

Humiliated by the experience, Albert tries a series of speech therapists, all of whom display a knowledge of medicine so arcane one expects them to break out leeches and suggest a blood-letting. As ashamed by the experiences of failing with countless doctors as the public performances themselves, Albert swears off speech therapy and banks on a public life held largely out of view as his father and elder brother can handle the speeches. But the king knows better. He realizes that an occasional appearance in procession with a regal wave will no longer do; with every household turning to radio for news, entertainment, and general social guidance, it is imperative that the royal family take advantage of the airwaves lest they become an inanimate relic alongside the other trinkets in their castles for fat American tourists to come marvel at year after year. "We've been reduced to the most vile and loathsome profession of all: actors," sighs the king with grim irony.

Behind Albert's back, his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), finds a middle-class therapist, one Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). Whatever danger this movie was in of being a stuffy period drama is obliterated by Rush's entrance, heralded by a toilet flush before that magnificent mass of a head enters the frame and, unaware of who Elizabeth really is, makes plain, frank chat with her. His puckish grin, mischievous bow tie (and since when has a bow tie been mischievous?) and quick wit disarm the somber proceedings instantly, though it's just as amusing to see his boyish looks blanch when his upfront candor is returned in kind and Elizabeth reveals her identity and that of her husband.

The scenes between Lionel and Albert -- or Bertie, as his family (and Lionel, to his extreme annoyance) call him -- play as a tug-of-war between stale, Academy-pleasing montage of uplift and determination and something fresher, more spontaneous. Lionel insists on a first-name basis to make his therapy work, and his direct manner so stuns the royal member used to even his closest advisers speaking to him with reverence and cowed expression that he starts answering back in spite of himself. Rush's humor is infectious; Bertie tells him about the other doctors who prescribed cigarettes to relax the lungs, to which Lionel replies, "They're idiots." "They're all knighted," replies Bertie smugly. "That makes it official, then," says Lionel with a wide grin.

Rush and Firth attain an instant chemistry that shows off each individually but also creates a certain hollowness when they're apart. Rush, with his giant, triangular face, is at once boyish and refined, his elocution and perfect diction clashing with his more laid-back attitude. He plays off Firth, who once again gives a fantastic performance. Like Tilda Swinton, Firth is seemingly incapable of giving anything less than a mesmerizing performance, and he's the sort of person who can oscillate between homely and strikingly beautiful depending on they compose themselves. Firth spends most of the film contorted in mental agony, squashing his throat into a makeshift double chin as if compressing a bellow, hoping to stoke the words out of his lungs. He looks uncomfortable with the very thought of existence, his eyes darting nervously even when secluded from the public eye.

Had Hooper the confidence to stay entirely with their interplay, The King's Speech might have deserved the fevered hype that has greeted its release. But he gets mired in the cliché of the genre. His edits border on the sporadic at times, eliding over the more intimate and affecting moments to get to necessary stopgaps in plot. Bound to tell the historical narrative, Hooper must devote time to Prince Edward, a feckless, irresolute cad governed by his emotions, all of which are petulant and self-centered. Casting Guy Pearce in the role makes all the Australian jokes lobbed at Lionel throughout the film that much more amusing, but not even Pearce can work with the weakling. Nothing exposes the ludicrous nature of the monarchy like Edward's ascension and ultimate abdication of the throne: he falls in love with an American woman working on her second divorce, and his passions lead him to propose marriage. As the head of the Church of England, the king could not marry a divorcée, and what's more, neither the characters nor the people behind the camera suggest his rashness comes from true love. And so, Edward drains the film's middle section, simply occupying time until he can at last drop out and let his younger brother assume the throne.

Furthermore, Hooper and writer David Seidler get stuck with the proposition of successfully building dramatic tension to the titular speech, delivered when Britain declared war on Germany. Though Lionel features prominently and the camera spends some time in his modest domicile, this is a film that essentially roots itself in the hermetically sealed world of the monarchy, a faded, anachronistic relic that effectually ended long before the Russian tsars and German emperors mentioned nervously as Albert and others ponder the fate of the dynasty. But this creates the issues of building social tension through the group of people most oblivious to popular malaise and the nuances of international relations. After all, this monarchy sent its subjects to die en masse in the previous Great War even though they, being of inbred "pure" stock, were related to the German nobility they were meant to be opposing. The film wouldn't work if it suddenly sprang WWII on the audience without tying Albert's story to the mounting international turbulence, but it also seems clumsy for the characters to mention him only in the most terse and suggestive way possible, as they do throughout the 30s before Albert becomes George VI. Only when war is at England's doorsteps do the references to "Herr Hitler" becomes anything less than thudding moments of forced relevance in an otherwise sharp script.

The film has its other flaws. For the note-perfect work from the main cast, some of the supporting parts, though played by heavyweights border on the laughable. Timothy Spall, my dear Timothy, puts in such a bad Churchill impersonation I kept waiting for, Monty Python-style, someone to walk in from behind the camera and say, "No, stop, this has gotten far too silly." Derek Jacobi plays the Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the more morally superior to hold the position, as an unctuous but snippy sycophant, wanting to be villainous without being able to twist the real man that far without snapping him from his base in reality. Long after Hooper's direction settles into its refined grace and settles the aesthetic issues near the start, these two drag down all of their scenes. Taken with some of the more obvious lines, these nagging issues too often distract from the keen, hilarious and moving double act shared by Rush and Firth and expertly moderated by Carter.

Yet if The King's Speech is ultimately unable to transcend the restrictive boundaries of its awards-baiting genre, it overcomes any disappointment by being so full of verve and energy that it at least stretches those confines to the breaking point. This is the kind of film made to show off its actors, but the main players are all so excellent that they would all deserve awards, were they given based on merit instead of marketing ability. Fortunately for the cast and crew, The King's Speech has enjoyed plenty of that as well. I do not think the term "Oscar-bait" necessarily connotes a bad film, but it does speak to the increasingly stale formula guaranteed to please the artistically conservative members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. What typically makes an Oscar-bait film unbearable is when it was clearly made to reap platitudes.

The King's Speech works because it cares for its characters and understands the symbolic but vital importance of George VI. A whole other movie could be made about the courage he and his wife displayed during the war, never leaving London even when a bomb went off at Buckingham Palace. The pauses he put into his speeches as he ensured each word came out clearly gave his voice a solemn gravity, and though his inspiration gets overlooked in favor of Churchill, George too played a key role in the war effort. Rush's Lionel looks compassionately but sternly upon his subject, aware that Albert could be a great man if he could only get over his fears. It is a testament to how well Rush goads Albert and how well Firth responds that, when the speech came at last, though I knew the ending, a tiny knot had formed in my stomach. Whatever else holds back the film, that effect was earned, and this break from the usual, priggish nature of period drama made The King's Speech an unexpected pleasure to watch.

John Adams

Near the end of Kirk Ellis' gloriously researched miniseries concerning our second president, John Adams, now retired and visiting the White House to see his son John Quincy assume the presidency, is shown John Trumbull's painting Declaration of Independence and immediately launches into a rant. The entire Continental Congress was never present at any one time, he rages. A taken-aback Trumbull stammers, "Y-you would not deny the artist a certain... license?" Adams retorts that the Europeans say that nothing is as false as modern history, then bitterly adds, "I consider the true history of the American Revolution as lost forever."

That is what Ellis' script, based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, seeks to rectify. Though it naturally takes artistic license of its own, even within the scene just described -- the only comment he was recorded making was an offhand, nostalgic remembrance of nominating Washington to lead the Continental Army -- it offers a side of the Revolution rarely seen and, in the process, sheds light on a tragically forgotten Founding Father.


And how anyone could overlook such a fascinating life for so long is baffling. Ellis wisely begins this biopic not with Adams' childhood but on the brink of the Revolution. Adams (Paul Giamatti), a respected but otherwise inconspicuous lawyer, suddenly finds himself thrust into the spotlight when he reluctantly agrees to represent the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre when no one else will plea their case. When his wife, Abigail (Laura Linney), protests, he stands by his principles that everyone deserves a fair trail. As the courtroom rages with incensed colonials, Adams attacks their passion with reason and forces them (chiefly the jury) to recognize that the colonials were as much to blame for the confusion and terror as the soldiers. He manages to get the men off and returns home, where he and his wife celebrate what they assume will be his final case before the public shuns him forever.

His surprise matched my own when Thomas Jefferson then comes to town and offers him a position in the First Continental Congress. Jefferson, a life-long friend of the family, understands that Adams' principles and conviction are needed to inspire the bickering, selfish representatives. Jefferson had no idea what he was getting himself into. The miniseries kicks into high gear over the next three episodes, with Adams displaying all of his passion as well as his stubbornness and a frankness totally unsuited for the political world. He irritates the Congress so much that they ship him abroad to negotiate with France, which only makes matters as now he not only seems insolent and uncultivated but cannot even properly communicate with in their native tongues.

Throughout all of it, each set is so meticulously constructed and its characters so real that you forget you're watching a costume piece. The boisterous Congressional meetings reflect the representatives' constant fear that the British will blast down their door and kill them all at any minute, while Adams' ride across the Atlantic is fraught with peril from the British blockade. The French scenes in particular are superb, as the puritanical, faithful Adams steps off the boat into the death throes of European decadence. These diseased, flighty aristocrats blanket their faces in powder and every line they utter has a lascivious edge to it. They regard Adams and fellow ambassador Ben Franklin (Tom Wilkinson) as wondrous curiosities, so lost in their syphilitic spiral that they utterly fail to recognize just what ideals Adams and Franklin bring with them.


Wilkinson is the first of many casting coups that make John Adams such a rich experience. He revels in the depravity, and he's remarkably spry from a septuagenarian; when he gets Congress to axe Adams as French ambassador, you get the distinct impression that it's less to do with Adams' lack of diplomatic polish and more simply because this uptight firebrand is harshing his cool. Danny Huston appears in the first few chapters as Sam Adams, who makes his passionate cousin look meek in comparison. Stephen Dillane's Jefferson is wracked with grief but always showing resolve; the series never dips into his seedier side save for a shot of the slave Sally weeping on his deathbed, but we can understand what drove him to an affair when you see how his wife's death affected him.

But it's David Morse who steals the entire series as George Washington. Appearing only fleetingly throughout the first five episodes, he conveys Washington's quiet authority immediately with a rigid military posture and a deep voice that never rises above a stern whisper, forcing others to calm down and pay attention to hear him. If Hollywood ever does yet another project concerning Washington, I hope Morse is the first person they call.

For their part, Giamatti and Linney offer up powerhouse performances. Abigail Adams is every bit as interesting as her husband -- never formally educated, she could nevertheless hold reasonable discourse with the finest minds of the day, and Adams valued her counsel above all else -- and by all accounts the two were not simply man and wife but best friends. McCullough culled much of his research from the treasure trove of correspondence between the two, and John almost always addresses her as his friend rather than wife. Giamatti balances John's mocked and maligned public persona with this gentle personal side beautifully, and you will believe that Linney can do anything a man can do in a world that was still completely opposed to gender equality.


After Adams attains the presidency, the series winds down to a softer close; his term is fraught with slander as he remains neutral while the Congress splinters into two parties, who both turn on him, eventually moving him to pass the controversial Alien and Sedition Laws. He retires with quiet dignity and suffers the sorrows of the age when he loses children to alcoholism and cancer and even must bear the pain of losing his dearest friend. After reconciling with Jefferson, the two jovially correspond until they both famously die on the same day, the 50th anniversary of the nation's independence, no less. It may seem anticlimactic to end on such a quiet note, but that's the beauty of John Adams: where all other accounts of the Revolution and the establishment of our country take place on the battlefield, this depicts the real front lines: the town hall meetings and diplomatic missions, in which philosophy shaped a nation and people like Adams had to kowtow to European leaders for the capital to make it a reality.

This series does have one major flaw, however, and that is in the frantic direction of Tom Hooper. For a miniseries about a relatively plain man who accomplishes extraordinary things with words, not action, the camera moves at a breakneck pace, with handheld tracking shots even when people aren't moving. In the courtroom scene of the first episode, the camera darts around Adams and the jury, abruptly cutting at time to begin again, presumably because the first cameraman tripped and fell down. Mercifully, Hooper takes some downers when we get into the later episodes and puts the camera on a dolly and, saints preserve us, just sets it down and doesn't move it. His direction distracts from an otherwise perfect project.

Nevertheless, John Adams remains one of the greatest miniseries ever made, perhaps the best since Band of Brothers. While HBO's other big 2008 project, Generation Kill, is a better crafted work, it lacks the expansive yet intimate feel of this series. It turns an overlooked, maligned figure into perhaps the most interesting and vital of the Founding Fathers, fascinating in both his professional and private lives. It has a political relevance that is perhaps to transparent, but Adams' belief that war must always be the last resort when diplomacy fails obviously calls to mind the Iraq war, but Adams genuinely believed it. Its dodgy, incongruous direction aside, this seamless period recreation and slew of award-worthy performances is one of the few costume dramas compelling enough to make history truly come alive in ways beyond simply dressing people up for a few hours.