Les Misérables (2012)
Country: US/GB
Technical: col 158m
Director: Tom Hooper
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter
Synopsis:
After nineteen years' hard labour, Jean Valjean tires of living a slave to his identity and breaks parole. Years later, he risks everything to save a prostitute and then adopts her daughter. Everywhere he seems to find himself, his former warder, Javert, crosses his path, determined to put him in chains once more.
Review:
Hugo's paean to the suffering of the common man - and woman - set to the hugely successful and long-running lyrics and score by Boublil and Schönberg finally reached the screen with this faithful realisation, mostly filmed at Pinewood. The decision to have the actors not only sing their roles (understandable in the absence of any real dialogue), but do so live on set, delivers mixed results, with Hathaway harrowingly shrill and Jackman nasal in the higher, more operatic registers; Russell comes out the best, being spared the lamentations and required to be merely grimly powerful. Nevertheless, this is a small reservation when weighed against the cumulative dramatic power of a two-and-a-half-hour songfest. Ultimately, the operatic ambitions of the original stage enterprise - to convey the humanist convictions of a literary classic entirely through music - are done full cinematic justice. That the seething humanity on show here hardly appears worth redeeming by the middle-class stillborn revolution that embraces it is surely only a thematic echo of the priest's redemption of Valjean at the start of the tale.
Country: US/GB
Technical: col 158m
Director: Tom Hooper
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter
Synopsis:
After nineteen years' hard labour, Jean Valjean tires of living a slave to his identity and breaks parole. Years later, he risks everything to save a prostitute and then adopts her daughter. Everywhere he seems to find himself, his former warder, Javert, crosses his path, determined to put him in chains once more.
Review:
Hugo's paean to the suffering of the common man - and woman - set to the hugely successful and long-running lyrics and score by Boublil and Schönberg finally reached the screen with this faithful realisation, mostly filmed at Pinewood. The decision to have the actors not only sing their roles (understandable in the absence of any real dialogue), but do so live on set, delivers mixed results, with Hathaway harrowingly shrill and Jackman nasal in the higher, more operatic registers; Russell comes out the best, being spared the lamentations and required to be merely grimly powerful. Nevertheless, this is a small reservation when weighed against the cumulative dramatic power of a two-and-a-half-hour songfest. Ultimately, the operatic ambitions of the original stage enterprise - to convey the humanist convictions of a literary classic entirely through music - are done full cinematic justice. That the seething humanity on show here hardly appears worth redeeming by the middle-class stillborn revolution that embraces it is surely only a thematic echo of the priest's redemption of Valjean at the start of the tale.
Country: US/GB
Technical: col 158m
Director: Tom Hooper
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter
Synopsis:
After nineteen years' hard labour, Jean Valjean tires of living a slave to his identity and breaks parole. Years later, he risks everything to save a prostitute and then adopts her daughter. Everywhere he seems to find himself, his former warder, Javert, crosses his path, determined to put him in chains once more.
Review:
Hugo's paean to the suffering of the common man - and woman - set to the hugely successful and long-running lyrics and score by Boublil and Schönberg finally reached the screen with this faithful realisation, mostly filmed at Pinewood. The decision to have the actors not only sing their roles (understandable in the absence of any real dialogue), but do so live on set, delivers mixed results, with Hathaway harrowingly shrill and Jackman nasal in the higher, more operatic registers; Russell comes out the best, being spared the lamentations and required to be merely grimly powerful. Nevertheless, this is a small reservation when weighed against the cumulative dramatic power of a two-and-a-half-hour songfest. Ultimately, the operatic ambitions of the original stage enterprise - to convey the humanist convictions of a literary classic entirely through music - are done full cinematic justice. That the seething humanity on show here hardly appears worth redeeming by the middle-class stillborn revolution that embraces it is surely only a thematic echo of the priest's redemption of Valjean at the start of the tale.