![]() ![]() ![]() She dies of tuberculosis, leaving her little girl Cosette (Isabelle Allen) an orphan. The conscience-stricken Valjean admits his ruse to avoid sending an innocent man to the gallows.īecause of his confession, Valjean is tragically powerless to save former employee Fantine, who’s been forced into a life of prostitution and worse. Just as Javert is about to collar him, another man the authorities mistakenly believe is Valjean is arrested. Years later, former prison guard Javert shows up and recognizes Valjean, who’s become mayor of a small town. This works, sometimes astoundingly well, for much of the movie’s first hour, as prisoner Valjean (an emaciated Jackman) escapes, in 1815, after 14 years of hard labor for stealing a crust of bread.Īfter singing his heart out on a mountaintop for some reason - hey, it’s a musical! - Valjean, with the help of a sympathetic priest, begins a new life under the first of several assumed identities. Hooper did a fine, disciplined job directing the Oscar-winning “The King’s Speech.’’īut for some reason he decided he needed to turn the volume up to 12 - and leave it there - for William Nicholson’s subtlety-free adaptation of the musical by Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel. This is particularly scary in the case of Russell Crowe, whose husky, rock-style baritone is far more frightening than his character, the relentless Inspector Javert, is supposed to be. It’s the worst of times, though, when Hooper repeatedly traps his stars in tight close-ups during the musical numbers - practically shoving the camera down the singers’ tonsils. It’s worth seeing the movie for Hathaway alone. The best of times here include a perfectly cast Hugh Jackman, a veteran song-and-dance man onstage, in his greatest screen performance as the persecuted Jean Valjean.Īnne Hathaway is even better as the doomed Fantine, who will tear your heart out with her film-stopping rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream,’’ which is enough to make anyone forget Susan Boyle (if they haven’t already). ![]() I love musicals, always have - but my feelings about Tom Hooper’s bombastic version of the long-running stage hit “Les Misérables’’ had me thinking about the opening lines of another epic set in Paris, albeit a century earlier. ![]()
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