Playing her grown daughter Cosette, Amanda Seyfrieddelights with clear-as-a-bell high notes, while Samantha Barks, as a lovelorn Eponine, is a vocal powerhouse. On the female side, Anne Hathaway dominates the early going, belting out anguish as the doomed Fantine. Colm Wilkinson, the original Jean Valjean onstage in London and New York, turns up here as the benevolent Bishop of Digne. Crowe, who early in his career starred in The Rocky Horror Show and other musicals onstage in Australia, has a fine, husky baritone, while Eddie Redmayne surprises with a singing voice of lovely clarity. One of the chief interests of the film is discovering the singing abilities of the notable actors assembled here, other than Jackman, whose musical prowess is well-known. PHOTOS: Inside the Fight to Bring ‘Les Mis’ to the Screen
The “live” vocal performances provide an extra vibrancy and immediacy that is palpable, though one cannot say that the technique is necessarily superior in principle, as it was also used by Peter Bogdanovich on his famed folly, At Long Last Love. With Hooper’s undoubted encouragement, the eager thespians give it their all here, for better and for worse. Almost any great musical one can think of features sequences shot in different ways, depending upon the nature of the music and the dramatic moment for Hooper, all musical numbers warrant the same monotonous approach of shoving the camera right in the performer’s face any closer and their breath would fog the lens, as, in this instance, the actors commendably sang live during the shooting, rather than being prerecorded. Greatly compounding the problem is that director Hooper, in his first outing since conquering Hollywood two years ago with his breakthrough feature, The King’s Speech, stages virtually every scene and song in the same manner, with the camera swooping in on the singer and thereafter covering him or her and any other participants with hovering tight shots there hasn’t been a major musical so fond of the close-up since Joshua Logan attempted to photograph Richard Harris‘ tonsils in Camelot. There were 49 identifiable musical numbers in the original show, and one more has been added here. Although not terrible, the music soon begins to slur together to the point where you’d be willing to pay the ticket price all over again just to hear a nice, pithy dialogue exchange between Hugh Jackmanand Russell Crowerather than another noble song that sounds a lot like one you just heard a few minutes earlier. The first thing to know about this Les Miserables is that this creation of Claude-Michel Schonberg, Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel, is, with momentary exceptions, entirely sung, more like an opera than a traditional stage musical.
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