Georges Sand apparently felt that there was too much Christianity in Hugo’s novel Mr. Part of the tug of “Les Misérables” is that it recounts a familiar, reassuring story of oppression, liberation and redemption, complete with period costumes and tear-yanking songs. As a child, Cosette was rescued by Valjean from her caretakers, the Thénardiers (the energetic Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, who nicely stir, and stink up, the air). The first pivots on the antagonism of a onetime prison guard, now inspector, Javert (Russell Crowe, strained) toward a former convict, Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman, earnest) the second involves the love-at-first-sight swooning between Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) and Marius (Eddie Redmayne), a revolutionary firebrand. She has become one of the abject castaways of the musical’s title, a wretched of the earth. By that point, with her dignity and most of her pretty hair gone, Fantine has fallen as far as she can. Moving the camera slightly with her - she lurches somewhat out of frame at one point, suggesting a violent, existential wrenching - he shoots the song in a head-and-shoulder close-up, with the background blurred. Whatever the case, he keeps it relatively simple. The director Tom Hooper can be a maddening busybody behind the camera, but this is one number in which he doesn’t try to upstage his performers. She devours the song, the scene, the movie, and turns her astonishing, cavernous mouth into a vision of the void.

Hathaway, though, holds you rapt with raw, trembling emotion.

The artful grunge layered onto the cast can be a distraction, as you imagine assistant dirt wranglers anxiously hovering off camera. It’s a gusher! She’s playing Fantine, the factory worker turned prostitute turned martyr, and singing the showstopping “I Dreamed a Dream,” her gaunt face splotched red and brown. In the first long act of “Les Misérables,” Anne Hathaway opens her mouth, and the agony, passion and violence that have decorously idled in the background of this all-singing, all-suffering pop opera pour out.

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