The new nearly three hours-long film version of Les Miserables will forever be remembered for the raw powers of Anne Hathaway as the doomed Fantine. Current critical backlash–bah, humbug– is mostly concerned with director Tom Hooper’s penchant for closeups, his failure to change the stage show’s reliance on nearly constant singing, his unique decision to render all the singing live, and his casting of Russell Crowe, despite his rather characterless voice, as the villaious Inspector Javert. Forget it! See this film, not just for the rapturous Hathaway performance of “I Dreamed A Dream” (you’ll forget all about the unnerving Susan Boyle), but for an intense, heart-wrenching experience in pure passion. Never having taken in Les Miserables as a stage production and essentially a “Les Mis musical virgin,” I was blown away.
Hathaway.
Is.
Stunning.
When her laborer turned forced prostitute protests her fate to the Gods, it’s as if we’re in another dimension. (Pools of tears will be sure to inundate theater seats on the film’s Christmas Day opening.) Hathaway’s Fantine remarkably rips straight from her soul. Just when you can’t take anymore, she ups the intensity yet another notch, and another. Filmed in a single take, the live singing heightens the total effect…
Then Fantine is off-screen for much of the film, and the rest of the cast more than makes amends. Hugh Jackman, veteran of stage and screen, portrays Jean Valjean, the film’s protagonist. Crowe, though he’s unlikely to make one forget Charles Laughton from the 1935 straight-dramatic film version of the Victor Hugo classic on which the musical was based, holds his own in providing Javert with just the right edge. After the first few minutes, his singing voice actually appears quite normal. Jackman’s superior stagecraft anchors the whole affair. He brings the flair he demonstrated in playing roles as flamboyant as Peter Allen to an endearing character who is the heart and soul of a literary classic turned Broadway musical classic, turned perhaps unsubtle film, yet one fully saturated with a transforming passion. The film has an extraordinary power and eminently entertains.
The lyric “That’s all you can say for the life of the poor/It’s a struggle, it’s a war” sums up the frustrations of the workers in Fantine’s factory line. Though unable to come to her immediate aid, Valjean’s vow to look after her daughter, Cosette, reflects the same mercy he was once shown by a bishop who saved him from the hangman’s noose. Hugo’s themes of empathy and justice are well represented here as Valjean wrestles Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) away from a demented couple, the Thenadiers, played with aplomb by Sacha Baron Cohen and Helen Bonham Carter. Hooper may have added one or two too many instances of Javert reappearing on the scene out of nowhere to again pursue Valjean, but I quibble. The musical that played for 16 years on Broadway and has reportedly been in production somewhere in the world from its 1985 opening to the present day, has finally arrived on the screen. Often containing singing in counterpoint, where two singers sing different words at the same time, Les Miserables achieves its own unique counterpoint of expressing despair and redemption in equally forceful doses of movie magic.
4.5 “Higher Plans To Become An Honest Man” (out of 5)