Based on the musical written by Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schönberg (with English-language lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer), Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables opens up the teeming fresco of squalor and upheaval beyond the limitations of the theater. This story of oppression, liberation, and redemption produces a swooping, splashy cinematic panorama of an unjust, compassionless, unfeeling world, in which the innocent and the idealistic pay for crimes they have not committed, and plants a seed of barely flickering hope.
A
work of audacious ambition, Les Misérables,
Victor Hugo’s 19th century 1,400-page historical novel of rebellion and romance
ran the emotional gamut, and the film, as well, sweeps viewers on a stirring,
swelling wave of feeling that will leave few eyes dry. Mixing gritty, grimy
realism with the artifice of stage production, Hooper brings Hugo’s characters
to celluloid life with gusto and grace.
