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. Hugh Jackman, matching Jean Valjean’s fabled strength, carries the plot on his shoulders. Through all that follows, the moments of levity and romance as well as the suffering, Tom Hooper’s adaptation of Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Herbert Kretzmer’s juggernaut of a musical never fails to take its subject matter seriously, its raw, brutal edge in tune with Victor Hugo’s melodrama of the downtrodden and destitute. This is not the sort of musical where people dance their cares away, but one where people’s cares seem to rip songs from their throats. This vast chain gang sings Look Down in a rumbling bass that’s close to a dirge, and the tone is set.
The camera sweeps over gilded, bulbous warships, blasted by coastal waves, to the hundreds of miserable wretches inching one of these monsters into the Toulon dry dock on waterlogged ropes.
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