Les Miserables (M). Director: Tom Hooper. Starring: Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter, Eddie Redmayne. 158 minutes
I once saw an amateur theatre group perform 'Do You Hear the People Sing' — a musical battle cry for lower class rebellion — while pretending to be commuters on a packed train carriage. At a time when there were a lot of stories in the mainstream media about overcrowding on Melbourne's trains and trams, the performance worked as a lovely piece of topical farce. But it also sent shivers down my spine. That song always does.
Les Misérables is like that. Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil's 1980 musical adaptation of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel is replete with rousing anthems and stirring torch songs, which have cemented it as one of the great 20th century stage musicals. It is true that even good musicals can make for bad films (look at what Chris Columbus did to Rent); Hats off to director Hooper then that his Les Misérables stops just south of magnificent.
Hooper is best known as the director of A King's Speech, a character and dialogue driven film that showcased a magnetic performance by its lead actor Colin Firth. Les Misérables is set some years after the French Revolution in a society still suffering badly from class divisions. Yet despite this epic scope, and perhaps unsurprisingly considering his King's Speech pedigree, it is the more intimate moments of Les Misérables on which Hooper excels.
And there are plenty of these. The musical is populated by characters who incessantly plough their own moral and emotional terrain, or describe or challenge that of others through charged vocal exchanges. Hooper and his cinematographer Danny Cohen focus a lot on faces; there are many close-ups, and moments where characters sing directly to camera, the audience placed in the role of confessor or as the object of supplication.
He is blessed to have a lead actor of Jackman's calibre. Jackman portrays the story's tortured hero, Jean Valjean, a good man brought low by poverty and imprisonment, now on a lifelong quest for absolution. Jackman is a good actor as well as a great singer, and emotes rather than simply performing, plumbing the depths of Valjean's soul-searching. Other cast members, notably Seyfried as Valjean's adopted daughter Cosette, and Redmayne as young revolutionary Marius, prove similarly capable. The camera devours the intimate moments with voyeuristic vigour.
On the other