Becoming Fantine: Anne Hathaway Reboots 'Les Misérables'

Tom Hooper's Les Misérables opens this week carrying a piece of received wisdom already hardening into fact: Anne Hathaway's Fantine, on screen for barely a quarter of the film, is the thing nobody walks out unshaken by.

The role is a gauntlet by design. Hooper shot the musical with live on-set vocals — no lip-syncing to studio tracks — which means Hathaway performs 'I Dreamed a Dream' in a single unbroken close-up, ragged where the stage version soars. She lost twenty-five pounds on a punishing diet, and the shearing of Fantine's hair was done for real, on camera, in one take. 'I was inconsolable,' she said later; the footage agrees.

There's family history braided in: her mother, Kate McCauley Hathaway, played Fantine in the first U.S. national tour of the musical. The part is, in the least sentimental sense, inherited.

Victor Hugo gave Fantine one of literature's most brutal arcs — a woman dismantled piece by piece by respectable society. Hathaway's version restores the horror the melody can smooth over. The Oscar she is about to win (we're comfortable with the tense) will be for refusing to make it pretty. The film and Hugo's novel are cataloged here.