Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables is 158 minutes of a stage musical filmed at a distance of about eight inches. It adapts the Schönberg and Boublil show, itself drawn from Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, and it does so with a cast that could sing, one that mostly could not, and a directorial choice that has been argued over since the day it opened.
Trailer, via LesMiserablesFilm.
Valjean and Javert
Hugh Jackman plays Jean Valjean, a man imprisoned for stealing bread who breaks parole and is hunted for decades by Javert, the ruthless policeman played by Russell Crowe. The pursuit consumes both lives, and Valjean ends up in the middle of the student uprising in Paris. Jackman is very good. He has a stage voice and a film face, and he uses both. Crowe is the film’s problem. He acts Javert well and sings him badly, and in a film where every song is delivered in close-up there is nowhere to hide that.
Hathaway
Anne Hathaway plays Fantine, and her performance of the musical’s most famous number, shot in a single unbroken take, is the film’s justification. It is raw in a way that a stage performance cannot be, and it is the one place where Hooper’s method of filming the singing live and up close pays off completely.
The Rest
Eddie Redmayne is Marius, Amanda Seyfried is Cosette, Samantha Barks is Éponine, and Aaron Tveit’s Enjolras leads the students at the barricade. Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter play the Thénardiers as broad comic relief, which is what the material asks for, and Daniel Huttlestone’s Gavroche is the kind of child performance that makes an audience forgive a great deal.
The Method
Hooper had the cast sing live on set rather than lip-sync to a studio recording, and the film pushes the camera into their faces to prove it. The result is intimate and exhausting in equal measure. The great voices benefit. The rest do not, and the film gives the viewer no distance to enjoy the spectacle a musical of this scale should provide.
Where It Falls Short
The screenplay by William Nicholson, Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Herbert Kretzmer keeps almost everything, and 158 minutes of nearly continuous song is a lot to ask of anyone who did not already love the show. The staging of the barricade, which should be the film’s biggest moment, is cramped. And Crowe’s casting is a wound the film never stops bleeding from.
The Verdict
Les Misérables is a bold, uneven film with two or three sequences that are as good as musical cinema gets and long stretches that are merely loud. Its tagline says fight, dream, hope, love. It manages about two of those.
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