Les Misérables (2012) Review

Just to get this out of the way, I have never seen or read any incarnation of this story before and so I came into the film completely fresh. Despite being nominated for several Oscars the general public has had a rather mixed response to the film, where as some people love it, I have talked to several people who dreaded every minute. The fact that the film is two and half-hours of purely singing makes it really hard for some to like it, however it may not help that it is incredibly ambitious in its craft either and I kind of worried about these things going into it.

The story itself is also a rather ambitious one, set in France in the 1800s telling a massive story of love, justice and revolution, presented in an often morally ambiguous way. The main character, Jean Valjean, is a former slave who was released on parole, which he eventually skipped, but left the life of crime and became an honest man. However this does not keep his parole officer, so to speak, from being obsessed with hunting him down as he constantly eludes him over the years. As this is going on he also promises to take care of the daughter of a factory worker turned prostitute as she is unable to care for her and it sort of becomes his purpose in life to make sure this child is happy and gets the happy life her mother is unable to give her, or have herself for that matter.

Tom Hooper, who won the Oscar a couple years back for The King´s Speech, directs the film and you can definitely recognize his style when it comes to choice of camera angles and production value. The cinematography has been getting a lot of crap for overusing close-ups, however I must say I absolutely adored the cinematography. It is very ambitious and takes many risks, however it really paid off. By being so ambitious and risky, we got something that is very unique and so interesting too look at. When doing something like this, the biggest risk is that the camera work becomes distracting and takes attention away what is actually going on, however despite using many odd angles here, it flowed so well and I had to really focus to even notice the camera work.

However good camera work is nothing without anything to film, luckily the production design is out of this world. The sets and costumes are absolutely beautiful too look and while keeping a sense of theatricality to it, as it is an musical after all, it still felt like I was is 1800s France, but not in that dull costume drama way. I cannot quite put my finger on what it was, but something just felt so unique about the look of everything and it really helped me getting immersed in the film.

All that good stuff aside, the one thing that really makes the movie, is the acting. I was so blown away by the acting in this film, where even people singing only one line are great. In a film as melodramatic as this, where there is someone crying almost every ten minutes, the acting really has to work and it does on every level. Despite being big and melodramatic, the film still manages to bring chilling emotion because the acting is so unbelievably good. One of the problems I find with musicals is that I have a hard time caring or taking the characters seriously because they are singing, however I was emotionally invested throughout this film. A huge factor this is the fact that they have the actors singing live on set, as opposed to recording it in studio in post-production. This makes the singing feel more real and raw, more affected by the scene.

Like I said the acting is brilliant pretty much all around, but some people deserve a special mention, most notably Anne Hathaway. I had heard she was good, but from the trailers it just looked like one of those performances that tries too hard to get an Oscar and get one, but while it was all that, it was so incredibly brilliant. She isn’t in the movie very much, however when she is she brings such a presence in every scene, such vulnerability and most of all so much emotion. There is a scene where Hooper leaves the camera on her for maybe three-four minutes while she is singing and it is one of the most incredible things I have seen in quite some time. While being an Oscar screaming performance, she really brought so much more to it then just screaming for an Oscar. Then there is of course Hugh Jackman in the lead role, who is also mesmerising to watch. However someone who I think has been overlooked is Samantha Barks, who I don’t think I have ever seen before, but she pretty much stole every scene she was in. People have been complaining about Russell Crowe´s singing and while he is no where as good as others in the film, I thought the singing complimented the character as this very brute man. Two other I quickly want to mention are Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bohem Carter, which were in the film much more then expected as a sort of comic relief and they worked surprisingly well considering the most of the characters are depressed, yet they worked as comic relief with breaking the tone of the film.

One exception that I have to make for the acting is Eddie Redmayne as Marius who has a couple of solos in the second half. Sadly I just couldn’t stand this guy, whilst all the others actors managed to find that place in the melodrama where they still managed to pull us in emotionally, this guy was just melodramatic and I never managed to care or connect with him. The solo moments with him were the definite low in the film; luckily they were few and didn’t really ruin the film for me.

I hate musicals to be honest, I usually find them excruciatingly painful to watch, however somehow this film just worked so well. The 2 and half-hours flew by and I was genuinely invested throughout the movie and never found myself bored. It is a huge credit the director and the actors, who took these risks, but which paid off in the end, giving us an epic and emotional film, quite unlike anything I have seen before.     

4.5/5