Les Misérables (2012), Tom Hooper
- IMDB.COM: Rating: 7.8 (107,000+ votes); Metascore: 63 (40+ critics)
- ROTTEN TOMATOES: Tomatometer: 70% (152-217)
- TOP7 NEWSPAPERS: 63 AVG, no 4-star reviews
Award-winning director Tom Hooper continued his tradition of dissecting the complex relation-ships between two great men. While he previously delved into the liaisons of real-life characters (those of the legendary soccer coach Bryan Clough and his assistent and best friend, Peter Taylor in The Damned United and the British king George VI and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue in The King’s Speech), this time he set his mind on Les Misérables, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schon- berg’s 80’s stage musical based upon Victor Hugo’s 1862 magnum opus of the same title. And here’s where the inception of the film’s problem was already conceived.
By adapting the musical, not the novel, Hooper was not able to implement his more personal interpretation of the Valjean-Javert dialectics upon which Les Misérables so famously blossomed and consequently became a cornerstone of French Romanticist prose. More than anything, he had an obligation to chiefly focus on the musical’s lines, actors’ and actresses’ body language and art decoration. Add to that the crossroads of Valjean’s (Jackman) tenor conscience, depletion of Javert’s (Crowe) strength by actor’s strained singing, demanding background political situation in France that eventually led to an uprising and time-impoverished sparkle between Cosette (Seyfried) and Marius (Redmayne) and the ground to work on was as chaotic as a revolution. It is somewhat of an indicator if not one of the big name critics gave your film four stars. I liked Hathaway (Fantine), loved brilliant Huttlestone boy (Gavroche), thought Jackman was decent as Javert and so-so enjoyed the Bonham Carter-Baron Cohen duet (Mr. and Mrs. Thenardier), but that’s wasn’t nearly enough for this project to seriously compete with the likes of Argo, Lincoln or Zero Dark Thirty. Apart from the opening and closing scenes, production didn’t look all that impressive. It definitively did not compensate for some other flaws or made them look better. Furthermore, at intervals it did those flaws a disfavor, like the time the sound mixing of Javert’s back-breaking fall outshone gendarme’s actual suicide act. Javert’s suicide was painful, but instant death, yet in the long run, it seems like it will hurt Les Mis dras- tically more.
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