I didn’t dislike all of the performances. Hathaway sang her anguished soul out in I Dreamed a Dream. I loved Eddie Redmayne’s performance as Marius, the earnest revolutionary. And the long-suffering Éponine, played by Samantha Barks, was not just technically adept but completely credible. You felt her pain.
As we were told countless times in the build-up to the film’s opening, the cast bravely recorded their vocals live, with no tweaking in the studio afterwards. As someone who is learning to sing, I know how hard it can be to perform live. As Crowe retorted when American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert dared to criticise the cast’s performances – resulting in hundreds of bile-filled tweets – the singing wasn’t meant to be technically perfect, but “raw and real”. Well, I’m fine with raw and real. I don’t believe singing has to be technically perfect but it does need to express emotion.
And for me, at key moments in the score, the vocals just weren’t raw and real enough. They weren’t sung from the gut. A decades-old rivalry between Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe’s characters underpins the entire musical, and they needed to carry the film; instead, they sagged under its weight.
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