Les Miserables

If nothing else, it’s the most audacious movie to hit theaters in years. Whether it works for you or not will depend on your love (or not) of the source material and your willingness to over look some really big hurdles that director Tom Hooper runs into (actually, crashes into) along the course of his nearly three hour epic. When it works, it’s brilliant. Watching and listening to Ann Hathaway perform the role of Fantine is one of the best movie musical moments ever captured on film. She takes one of the ‘hits’ of the show – I Dreamed a Dream – and turns it from a pretty song into a thrilling and beautiful emotional experience. When it doesn’t work, however, it’s dreadful. In the role of Javert, Russell Crowe has a good enough voice for the role, but he can’t make the connection between trying to sing a part and making the part come alive through his vocal performance. In opera, they call it the ‘park and bark’ syndrome where the singer stops everything – even moving – to stand there and sing. Crowe does the same and it virtually stops the film. Jackman, a veteran of the Broadway stage, does a better job of making the connection between his acting and singing, although it’s not always a pretty thing to watch him do it in the extreme close-ups that Hooper uses throughout the film.