I hadn’t seen Anne Hathaway in many of her other films, but felt like my impression of her as an actress and as a person was really influenced by the opinions of other people (from friends to critics). Most of my association with her acting was in comedic roles, such as her breakout role in The Princess Diaries or her role as Agent 99 in Get Smart. Having seen her in interviews, I thought of her as a very poised, kind of plain woman who didn’t show much dramatic emotion—that is, I found her kind of neutral, and my feelings about her were ambivalent.
I first saw this film in theatre and so the unique cinematography was even more striking than on a smaller screen. To see extreme close-up shots of the familiar faces of star actors when you are used to seeing unfamiliar faces at a distance on a theatre stage was striking, and even watching the movie for the third time or so I find it difficult to not be fully drawn in by these extreme close-ups.
I found Fantine perfectly pitiful, especially in contrast to the brash prostitutes in the “Lovely Ladies” sequence, and I think this is due to director Tom Hooper’s attempt to capture a series of caricatured vignettes in his cinematography. While Hathaway’s persona as a celebrity was distracting in a role like Catwoman (The Dark Knight Rises), I felt I could follow her completely as a character in this film.
Hooper takes this film to a whole new aesthetic of epic. While many epics by nature can verge on chintzy, this film was beautiful in a shaky, provocative, and distorted way. Fantine’s performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” comes within the first half hour of the film, and by that point I think most viewers are convinced of Hathaway’s accuracy in portraying the plight of Fantine. I am tempted to say any actor could have played this role for two reasons: it’s virtually impossible to not feel sympathy for Fantine, and, 2) audiences have never experienced Les Mis in this close-up, super-realist way before. The fact that they performed the music live on set also I think results in a much more realistic acting for all the characters. The dramatic effect of watching a star actor have all of her hair brutally chopped off during filming also had a strong effect on me, making it easier to see the character she was playing by making Hathaway’s recognizable face less physically familiar. All that said, I most definitely attribute the fact that I was able to suspend disbelief not simply to the power of the story, music, and cinematography, but also to Anne Hathaway’s convincingly poignant portrayal of an epic heroine, a grisette bearing the burden of representing the working class’s struggle against injustice.