Director: Tom Hooper
Talent: Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried
Fresh from the chamber drama that was 2010’s The King’s Speech, Tom Hooper’s adaptation of the beloved French Revolution-set stage musical owes little to the theatrical staging that has survived the bridging of media in many of its big-screen bedfellows (Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd among the more recent examples). While “the cinematic” may in itself suggest sprawling mise-en-scènes and spatial chaos, Hooper chooses instead to shoot almost all of the film’s many individual songs in extreme close-up, allowing his actors to perform both on a musical and a dramaturgical level. The result is an extremely affecting drama which, despite its revolutionary codas, seems to have left history and politics as afterthoughts to the personal—a decision which suits its formal approach perfectly. The sweeping, epic shots that are “the stuff of cinema”, while sparingly used, fall prey to the increasingly common complaint, in 2013, of “terrible CGI”, but Les Misérables is a four-handkerchief film whose strength lies in its narrow focus.
