(That's especially problematic when the bigger, grander tale that's supposed to be the backdrop - the French students' revolution - wasn't that compelling on stage to begin with.) Hooper, who previously directed The King's Speech, gives us a few moments of eye-popping spectacle, but overall doesn't take nearly as much advantage of the opportunity as he could have. That's what happens when so much of the story is told through close-ups and two-shots: you lose the sense that there is a bigger, grander tale unfolding. There are trade-offs to this method, however, and while Hooper's version of Les Misérables is magnificent in many ways - strengthened by all-in performances from Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Eddie Redmayne, and Samantha Barks - it often feels curiously small in scale. It's more like being on the stage, staring Jean Valjean in the face while he vocalizes his inner struggles. It's better than a front-row seat on Broadway. To take full advantage of this, Hooper made another unusual decision and filmed most of the songs in close-up, often in long, unbroken takes. They could truly act.Īnd act they do! Not the big, stylized theatrical acting you see in most stage musicals and movie adaptations thereof, but intimate, realistic performances, grounded in real human emotion. (A pianist accompanied them on set the full orchestra was added later.) Freed from the duty of mimicking canned performances they'd given weeks earlier in a recording studio, the actors could now make choices in the moment, to adjust the emotion on this line or the delivery on that one according to how the scene was going.

Instead of following the normal practice of recording the songs in advance and having the actors lip-sync during filming, Hooper had them sing live. When it became his privilege to direct the movie version of the Les Misérables stage musical that has enthralled the world for more than a quarter-century, Tom Hooper made one crucial, momentous decision.

Les miserables full movie 2012