reveiws of the movie les miserables

REVIEWS

Les Miserables RELEASE DATE: January 11, 2013 DIRECTOR: Tom Hooper CAST: Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen RUNTIME: 2 hours 28 minutes Jean Valjean (Jackman), imprisoned for 19 years for a minor offence, is paroled but perpetually shadowed by Inspector Javert (Crowe). When Valjean takes in the founding daughter of the tragic Fantine (Hathaway), he finds a reason to keep his freedom. The camera sweeps over gilded, bulbous warships, blasted by coastal waves, to the hundreds of miserable wretches inching one of these monsters into the dock on waterlogged ropes. Hugh Jackman, matching Jean Valjean's fabled strength, carries the plot on his shoulders. Only he and Russell Crowe's Javert remain constants through the 17 years of the film's plot, and only Valjean really grows during that time, since Javert's inflexibility is his defining trait. We first meet Valjean as a convict, making futile demands that his jailer respect him as a fellow human being only to be rebuffed by the didactic Javer. On parole he meets only rejection and prejudice, descending into animal-like desperation and spitting bitterness before a miraculous second chance sees Valjean resolve to match the faith shown in him in the film's most emotionally complex scene. As with all the film's high emotion, this is communicated entirely in song, sung live on set and with veins frequently popping from the effort. VERDICT Like its characters, ragged around the edges, the musical film nevertheless rings with all the emotion and power and provides a new model for musicals.