The first thing you notice is the breathing. Jean Valjean is standing atop a hill in the French mountains, contemplating his future after 19 years of prison, and you can hear the weariness in his singing, the gasps between words. Director Tom Hooper quickly makes clear that his film adaptation of the hit stage musical Les Misérables will not be a collection of technically perfect, glossy renditions of its songs. The film features excellent singing, for the most part, but it also emphasizes fragility in a work that’s largely defined by its grandiosity.
As many are aware (perhaps painfully so, depending how often their multiplex played the pre-movie featurette), Hooper insisted on recording the vocal performances live during filming. He tossed out the usual—and logistically much more practical—method: Record the actors in the studio, then film them lip-syncing months later. It would be easy to dismiss the move as a gimmick—plenty of great musicals have been made with the standard technique—but the difference is noticeable. In addition to freeing the actors to indulge in spontaneity, the techniques connects the songs to their settings. The performers are coping with the physical demands of location work, not standing still in a vocal booth.
The process would be a microphone man’s nightmare, yet the sound is pristine. Every warble, cry and mumble comes through with extreme clarity. It’s a reminder that grittiness comes out in details, not through substandard quality.
Where other recent musical adaptations like Rent and Phantom of the Opera went for a slick aesthetic, Hooper wants to create an intense, visceral experience. He isn’t out to remove the sweeping emotion—Les Misérables would likely deflate without it. But he is looking for opportunities to get down and dirty. (We don’t merely get the sewers of Paris, we get an underground fecal river.) Not everything he tries works, but he achieves an intimate connection with his characters. His camera gets right in the actors’ faces and holds shots for long stretches.
The play and its music have always been about milking as much emotion as possible from the audience. It distills the themes of Victor Hugo’s 19th Century French novel into sweeping orchestration and belting voices. Characters despair at their degrading lives, find religion and redemption, and pine over various forms of love. A non-musical film could never get away with abruptly introducing a love triangle of non-established characters, then having all three of them whine about their feelings for 20 minutes. But the music opens the audience to an emotional assault.
It makes sense that Hooper focuses on the one thing that can convey these intense emotions as swiftly as music: the human face. In the film’s standout moment, Anne Hathaway beautifully captures the essence of despair in a long, shaky take of “I Dreamed a Dream.” Hathaway intensely feels the music. Her character, Fantine, has been stripped of all dignity in her efforts to earn money to care for her daughter. Hathaway sings the song not just with desperation, but with anger and heartbreak. It’s great singing and great acting. Perhaps the film’s biggest disadvantage is that nothing in the remaining two hours can quite top it.