Mad about Les Misérables

Do you hear the people sing? Roar is more like it, given the clamour surrounding Les Misérables, the film version of the ongoing stage phenomenon that had its gala UK premiere this week in London and opens on Christmas Day in America, where Tom Hooper’s first film since The King’s Speech is circling copious Oscar nominations.

A movie musical and Oscars? Time was when that was the norm: six film musicals took the Best Picture Oscar between An American in Paris in 1951 and Oliver! in 1968, since when only one (Chicago, in 2002) has gone the distance. Countless others have fallen by the wayside, and while Mamma Mia! made a fortune on screen as on stage, it is thought of as a frothy chick flick as opposed to a prestige entry that scores with critics and public alike.

So, finally, here is the movie of Les Mis in all its perverse majesty — “perverse” because of a running time of nearly three hours, not to mention certain conventions on which some onlookers were ready to call time. The fact is, Hooper hasn’t just made a film with musical numbers folded within it: Les Mis is genuinely through-sung, so much so that the rare passages of dialogue bring one up short. In a conceptual gamble, Hooper had his cast sing live on set so as to offer up the musical numbers as extensions of character, not just an amalgam of heavily tweaked “turns” arrived at via post-production dubbing. The singing had to seem as natural as breathing, and with this cast it does.

Buzz surrounding the film has built following initial screenings in America late last month; social media worked itself up into a whirl of anticipation. “It hits all the right notes and is, in this writer’s estimation, the newly minted front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar,” wrote The Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern. Once London caught up with the movie this week, the encomia followed suit. “I hate musicals. I hate films that last longer than 90 mins,” announced Jemima Khan via Twitter. “But I LOVED Les Misérables. Epic. Well done.” 

I join the salute. From the initial sequence of a gaunt, fierce-eyed Hugh Jackman, as Jean Valjean, ensnared in the hard labour that would break a less gallant spirit, Hooper and co avoid the pitfalls of preposterousness or camp that hover over such ventures. To its credit, Les Mis in an instant solves the all-important question of why all these people are singing all the time. The answer: because that is their preferred mode of speech, the music communicating truths that transcend ordinary discourse.

And how wonderful to hear these actors have a go at this score, not least with half the West End in attendance: spot London theatre regulars Daniel Evans, Bertie Carvel, Hannah Waddingham and an  especially striking Kate Fleetwood.

Much has been made of Anne Hathaway’s ravaged portrayal of the stricken prostitute Fantine, a role the actress’s own mother once played in a US production of the stage show. But whereas Fantine’s big number, I Dreamed a Dream (the Susan Boyle song), can lead to theatrical histrionics, Hathaway does the opposite, drawing us into the gasping, gulping plight of a single mum with nothing left to live for but her beloved daughter, Cosette, whom Jean Valjean will soon thereafter take in as his own. Her vocal prowess won’t surprise those New York playgoers who saw the actress, then still at university, win raves in 2002 in a concert performance of the musical Carnival, in which she played an orphaned 16-year-old.

Hathaway has emerged as the frontrunner for the Supporting Actress Oscar but look for musicals neophyte Eddie Redmayne flying the flag for England in a Supporting Actor race likely to be dominated by such heavyweights as Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Tommy Lee Jones. Inheriting Michael Ball’s original stage role of the young rebel, Marius, Redmayne brings ardour to what could be a stock role, and his tenor lifts to falsetto with an ease not always achieved by Jackman, who has trouble with the top notes on Bring Him Home, Valjean’s signature number.  

On the other hand, you couldn’t ask for a better-acted Valjean from a stage musicals veteran who not only ages convincingly but seems to come genuinely by the sainthood the material bestows upon him. And how nice that the film’s one entirely new song, Suddenly, an undoubted Oscar contender for the team of Herbert Kretzmer, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, emerges as the gentle, ruminative awakening of one man’s love and not just a pro forma power ballad.

Will Les Mis kickstart the movie musical anew? That’s hard to say when the truth is that for every Chicago there is a Rock of Ages or Rent: hit shows that did a celluloid crash and burn. Still, the last of Cameron Mackintosh’s “big four” Eighties mega-musicals, Miss Saigon, has been mooted for the large screen, and Hollywood in any case likes to follow up one success with others of a comparable stripe. And if you can’t get into an early showing of Les Mis the film, well, there’s always the stage show, which after 27 years and no end in sight looks likely to outlive us all.

Opens nationwide January 11