In 2009 the awkward duckling Susan Boyle became a swan and a world brand with her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” on the television show “Britain’s Got Talent.” In 1996 Hong Kong mourners sang “Do You Hear the People Sing” to memorialize Tiananmen Square. Its Web site hints at its reach: Since the English-language version was first performed in London in 1985, it has been translated into 21 languages, performed in 43 countries, won almost 100 awards (Tony, Grammy) and been seen by more than 60 million people. Written by Alain Boublil and the composer Claude-Michel Schönberg (with English-language lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer), the musical “Les Misérables” is of course one really big show, perhaps the biggest and certainly one of the longest-running. 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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