Clear away the barricades and we're still there

My ability to fall asleep before it's light out is pretty badly damaged at this point. It leads to a lot of not very interesting staring into the dark. Around four in the morning on Monday night, I remembered that I had forgotten to pack handful_ofdust's care package along with the rest of the DVDs and decided to stare at a recommended scene from Les Misérables (2012) instead.

As I wrote to derspatchel—

I am incredibly charmed by the presentation of the Thénardiers as a loving criminal couple—Helena Bonham Carter fleecing the handsome soldier while crooning her sob story of an unhappy marriage into his ear, not just flicking the take into her husband's hand as he passes but mouthing him a quick silent grin of I love you as the number riots to a close. (It does go some way toward explaining why Eponine actually turns out a functional human being, not to mention staging the price-gouging verse as an arithmetic lesson from father to daughter as Thénardier tots up the young couple's cash with an attentive Eponine on his knee.) Special mention should go also to Sacha Baron Cohen's outrageously sub-Chevalier French accent, which he reserves for welcoming in the marks and otherwise doesn't bother with, as he should. Bonham Carter is kind of doing her tousled sexy slattern thing, but it works a lot better for Mme. Thénardier than it did for Mrs. Lovett. For starters, her husband looks equally as though he dressed himself out of a wardrobe tip. I loved Eponine handing him his bicorne, as if he were setting out for work in the morning. And he has such a mild expression for so much of the song, as if genuinely bemused by all the chaos going on around him while he makes spectacles and glass eyes and everybody's money disappear. The staging and the camerawork overall is still too busy—I don't know if the problem afflicts the rest of the movie, but it feels like Tom Hooper doesn't trust his actors to be sufficiently magnetic without bits of business everywhere, which I think is totally selling Baron Cohen and in this case Bonham Carter short—and the song is both speeded up slightly and missing a verse somewhere, but I still consider it an entirely functional version, which I kind of didn't previously except on trust of you.

—Last night he insisted I follow it up with "Beggars at the Feast," so as to get the full experience. It's a clever little zinger of a send-off reprise, but it looks at first as though the song is being completely undercut by its staging, with the Thénardiers boasting of their profiteers' tenacity ("Keep your wits about you and you stand on top!") while being given the bum's rush from Cosette and Marius' wedding. It's not until the last line that we can see that far from being slung out unceremoniously on their asses, the Thénardiers have just once again, with perfect literalism, landed on their feet. The footmen heave-ho and they pop down neat as cats—Thénardier even composure-grooms a moment, for all the world as if he'd just been set down a little too abruptly from a sedan. And turning to go, snatches himself a better wig from the nearest doorman, the same way his wife almost absentmindedly palmed herself a new hair ornament from some better-dressed guest on their way in. No, they didn't get their payoff from Marius, but they're just as horribly indestructible as they always said. It's a weird little moment of dignity for a pair of utterly reprehensible characters and, like the reframing of their relationship from a squabbling partnership to actual affection, I like it. Now I just need to figure out how much of the rest of the musical I want to watch.

(Also, I'm rather fond of the look Helena Bonham Carter gives over her smoked glasses as Marius recognizes his own ring on Thénardier's finger and Madame divines just a fraction of a second before her husband that their attempted act of blackmail has just turned into a heartwarming confirmation of heroism and no one is going to cough up five hundred francs for that.)

Oh, and Rob and I signed the lease for our new place this afternoon.

That has very little to do with Les Misérables, but we are very, very happy about it all the same.