Butler's Cinema Scene

“LES MISERABLES” My rating: B+ (Opens wide on Christmas Day)

157 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

I’ll wasn’t all that eager to see the new film version of the worldwide stage triumph “Les Miserables.”

As a working theater critic I saw the Victor Hugo-inspired stage musical too many times. And whenever I flip to  my local PBS station it seems like there’s a concert version of the show being aired as a fund raiser.

I found much to admire in “Les Miz.” But I never fell in love with it. And, frankly,  I was feeling pretty mizzed out.

Now we have a massive, near-three-hour film version directed by Tom Hooper (the Englishman who burst upon the world cinema scene two years ago with “The King’s Speech”) and starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter and Eddie Redmayne.

Well, I won’t say I’m now in love. But Hooper’s “Les Miz” is filled with deeply moving moments, stirring music and several terrific performances that transcend the superficiality of the characters and the improbabilities of the plot.

In short, I cannot imagine a better screen version of this work.

Spanning something like 40 years in the early 19^th century, this is the story of Jean Valjean, who is imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread and who violates his parole by assuming a false identity and becoming not only a wealthy pillar of society, but a genuinely virtuous man. He adopts the orphaned daughter of one of his factory workers and gets involved in one of France’s periodic political uprisings.

Through all this Valjean is pursued by the relentless policeman Javert, a compassionless ideologue who believes that once a criminal, always a criminal.

So it’s a big, epic, sprawling yarn. And as fashioned by the stage show’s original creators — Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil (with Herbert Kretzmer  providing the English lyrics) – it’s practically nonstop music.  Virtually every word is sung.

The trick, then, is to make audiences who are perhaps not that familiar with musicals – much less one that feels an awful lot like grand opera – accept the essential unreality of the setup.

Hooper has found what I consider a nearly-ideal approach to this dilemma.  Most film musicals first record the music and vocals, then have the players lip sync during filming. Here the cast members’ vocals are recorded live on the set (the players were fed an instrumental track through a tiny earplug).

For the most part this works brilliantly, particularly in hugely emotional solo numbers like Jackman’s rendition of Valjean’s “What Have I Done?” and especially “I Dreamed a Dream,” sung by Hathaway as the dying factory-girl-turned-prostitute Fantine.

By eliminating that barrier between what the actor is actually feeling and his/her recorded vocal performance, many of the film’s musical numbers have an intimacy and power that is nearly overwhelming. Under these circumstances an unplanned pause in delivery, a spontaneous gasp or groan draws us in in ways rarely before experienced in film musicals.

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“CIRQUE DU SOLEIL: WORLDS AWAY” My rating: B- (Opening wide on Dec. 21)

91 minutes | No MPAA rating

“Worlds Away” is Cirque du Soleil’s version of a Greatest Hits album.

This 3-D production takes signature moments from a handful of current Cirque du Soleil stage extravaganzas and links them together with the flimsiest of “plots.”

The results are not unpleasant;  at the very least the film does a fine job of highlighting the high and low points of the Cirque style.

Written and directed by Andrew Adamson, whose resume includes two of the animated “Shrek” films and two of the live-action “Narnia” entries, “Worlds Away” begins at night on the midway of a traveling circus. An unspeaking young woman (Erica Linz) wanders among the side show oddities and grotesque clowns, soaking it all up with an odd smile.

Don’t expect any county fair charm from this big top assembly. We’re talking a three-way mating of “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” Todd Browning’s “Freaks” and the Jim Rose Circus. It’s all rather creepy, the sort of stuff to leave impressionable kids with nightmares.

Anyway, the girl finds herself drawn to a handsome aerialist (Igor Zaripov). When he falls from the trapeze and is sucked into a sawdust vortex that forms below, the girl dives in after him.

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