Les Misérables : new movie

 
It's two years since Oscar bowed down before Tom Hooper to crown The King's Speech best picture. Now Hooper bobs obligingly back, offering the Academy not just what it wants to see but a mirror of sorts; a movie that takes its cues from the greatest Oscar night hits, recalling that glorious night last year when Hooper was honoured four times and host Anne Hathaway belted out On My Own to Hugh Jackman. It also bids to anticipate the highlights of the next one.

For the few uninitiated (the stage show has been seen by 60 million people), Les Misérables is Cameron Mackintosh's adaptation of Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil's musical based on the Victor Hugo saga set in early 19th century France.
But beware: it's not strictly a musical. There's no dancing, there are no jazz hands and there is next to no speech. Rather, it is lobotomised opera, in which incidental dialogue like "I don't understand" and "I don't know what to say" is warbled, liturgy-style. The phrase "We will nip it in the bud" becomes a rousing chorus; presumably "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched" doesn't scan so well.
Hooper's big innovation is that his actors sing "live" – that is, they taped the vocal tracks while shooting, rather than in post-production – to amp up the realism. One might argue that if you were struggling to suspend your disbelief with Les Mis, it'd probably take more than a dubbing tweak to convince you.
But it's a canny move that allows Hooper to wring Oscar-contending turns from his cast and inject some X Factor-style tension. Will Hugh Jackman hit that opening high-note? Yes! He will! And so accustomed are audiences to applauding after the first bar they dutifully follow suit here. It's almost a shock Simon Cowell doesn't stalk on afterwards.
Les Mis's best known song is I Dreamed a Dream – the heroine Fantine's death-rattle rail against her new life of poverty and prostitution; aka the Susan Boyle song. Anne Hathaway sobs her way gamely through it, togs ripped, gnashers stained (the backstreet dentist she's just flogged a few teeth to left the front ones intact). In one unbroken take, she turns the tune into a symphony of phlegmy upset, climaxing in a panic attack of bloke woe ("He took my childhood in his stride / But he was gone when autumn came"). It's a performance of monumental welly.
Such a potentially exposing conceit has its pitfalls – and word online suggested Russell Crowe might have tumbled into them. But his low-key vocals as bad cop Javert are a happy contrast to the coshing professionalism elsewhere. When Crowe bleats out Stars beneath a twinkly CGI sky, resplendent in a blue fez with massive tassle, the karaoke vibe feels friendly, not risible.
Yes, Jackman (as our bona fide hero, ex-con Valjean) is unimpeachable, but best-actor chat seems premature. More of a revelation is Eddie Redmayne, an actor apparently incapable of a look that is other than longing, well cast as revolutionary dreamboat Marius. Meanwhile Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter effortlessly steal the show as the cackling Thénardiers (seldom has a film called out so urgently for comic relief).
Hooper's grand canvas is impressive, and your temples throb at the logistics of those final scenes; all those extras and horses, flags and cannons, not to mention an elephant and castle. In fact, other than a bit of a thing for distressed paintwork, it's all but impossible to detect his thumbprints.
You can't blame him for wanting to marshall a parade, to march out of the low-budget ghetto. But the experience of sitting through all 160 minutes of Les Mis can feel less like an awards bash than an epic wake, at which the band is always playing and women forever wailing. By the end, you feel like a piñata: in pieces, the victim of prolonged assault by killer pipes.