Les Miserables Review

Tom Hooper bet the picture on one technical decision, recording every vocal live on set instead of to playback, and the wager pays and costs in roughly equal measure. It pays in Anne Hathaway, whose I Dreamed a Dream is held in a single unbroken close-up while Fantine's voice cracks and thins into something nearer speech than song, the rawest four minutes in any recent musical.

It costs in Russell Crowe, stranded in a register that gives him nowhere to hide, whose Stars flattens the one antagonist the story cannot do without. Jackman sings Valjean with strain audible on the high notes and puts it to use, playing a man whose body is failing decades before his conscience does. The real problem is Danny Cohen's camera.

Wide lenses pushed into faces, tilted frames, handheld drift during numbers that want stillness, all of it insisting on an intimacy the songs already contain. Samantha Barks and Eddie Redmayne survive the crowding. The barricade looks muddy in a way that reads as budget rather than design, and Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter arrive from a broader film entirely, mugging through Master of the House while the scenes around them attempt misery.