Reviewing a work as massive and as beloved as Les Misérables is a daunting task for anyone to undertake, regardless of familiarity with the source material. Between the massive Victor Hugo novel, the bladder-busting musical that’s been equally beloved and despised for over 25 years, and now Tom Hooper’s follow up to his Oscar winning The King’s Speech, there are a dozen ways to skin this cat and none of them are easy and pretty. As someone whose never read the book or saw the original stage production but grew up with the 2-disc soundtrack on constant rotation thanks to my parents, this was one of my most anticipated films of the year, let alone this winter. Add going in knowing the equal amounts of praise and scorn the film had received, as well as me not being a big fan of Hooper’s previous film but loving his John Adams miniseries, and while the film doesn’t walk away completely unscathed, for the most part I genuinely enjoyed it.

Despite the novel, the world-famous, long running stage phenomenon and countless film adaptations, I had no idea what Les Misérables was actually about. So naive was I that going in to this latest film version, it didn’t click as to what the title referred to. Of course now, I realise it is as bad as not knowing what Snakes On A Plane is about. Had I been more on the ball, the opening 20 minutes in which characters who are 19th century society’s mud on the slummy streets of France are forced into stealing and prostitution to survive, might not have come as such a shock. This is some heavy stuff. Now I know why they gave us a chocolate bar at the preview.

In response to the already polarizing critical reaction to Les Misérables, allow me to discuss my own polarized reaction. Tom Hooper’s follow-up to Oscar winner The King’s Speech is ambitious—far more ambitious than his anointed 2010 entry—and this is both its success and its failure. The result is an ambivalent experience that wants simultaneously to be intimate and grandiose; the music often reaches extraordinary crescendos, yet the camera rarely pulls wide enough to show more than the singer’s head and shoulders. Odder still, it’s not as though one particular stylistic effort works better than the other: both the intimate scenes and the epic scenes have their peaks and valleys. Sequences filmed in hyper close-up work if the intimacy is intense but become myopic and boring if the tone of the song stays stagnant. Epic sequences only pop up when Hooper can’t work around it, and though opening the music to the full scope of the narrative is a welcome change of pace, Hooper’s interpretation of the material doesn’t jibe with expansive staging and choreography. It’s like he wants to be a revolutionary but still clings to tradition, and neither discipline is fully functional.