Les Miserables (2012)

PG-13 and a lot of it comes from the first act.  It's not like there isn't mature content in the later parts of the movie.  But the first third has the absolute torture and forced prostitution of Fantine.  Without going too much into it, there's also a very gruesome suicide at one point in the story.  Violence and death pervades this story.  It just has a lot, but it rarely feels manipulative. PG-13.

DIRECTOR: Tom Hooper

I know that REAL Les Mis fans don't care for the movie.  Maybe that's not absolute.  Maybe it's just anecdotal.  But it feels like the real Les Mis musicals find this to be some kind of abomination.  Me?  I love it.  Like, I really love it.  In fact, I kind of secretly love it more than the play...of which I've only seen once. Listen, I get that the voice of Javert is way more impressively operatic than Russell Crowe.  And yeah, if there's a weaker casting...it might be Russell Crowe.  But also, like, he's fine? Like, he's not terrible at what he does in this movie.  Yeah, it's one of those things of comparison.  

I was also positive that I've written about this before.  I've seen it so many times in the past ten years that it is unfathomable that I haven't written about it up until now.  I tried linking the Les Mis blog to a reference I made in a previous entry and I was flabbergasted that I haven't done anything with this movie up to this point.  So just be aware, I don't know where I'm going to take this.

I teach The Count of Monte Cristo.  No, I'm not going to show my class that movie.  That movie is genuinely a perversion of the original book.  (See my hypocrisy?  I like the movie of Les Mis while the musical nerds love the play, but I won't play the movie of The Count of Monte Cristo.)  I do so because, not only tonally and temporally are there a lot of connections between the two novels, but thematically and narratively as well.  We do a compare and contrast thing with Les Mis and The Count of Monte Cristo.  If I had infinite time, space, and patience, I would teach Victor Hugo's novel.  But also, if you thought that The Count of Monte Cristo was a tank of a novel, Les Miserables puts it to shame.  

The thing about Les Miserables is that it might be one of those really rare perfect stories.  Ironically, I didn't really care for it when I first saw it.  I was late to come to the game and my wife's family was obsessed with this play.  Me with my heavy weight of skepticism when it comes to obsession took a while to glom onto the story.  They probably think it is a bit of blasphemy that I like Tom Hooper's version so much.  I have a degree in theatre.  I just proved that I do by spelling "theatre" with the "-re" ending.  It's not that I don't love theatre.  I really do.  Ask my wife. My 40th birthday gift was seeing four plays in three days.  I love them.  But I also think that some stories actually lend themselves quite well to being filmed.  I know that Tom Hooper is living under the cloud of Cats right now and that it is going to take a while to backpedal from that.  If you want my opinions on Cats, I don't have one.  I actively disliked Cats when it wasn't an abomination of a movie.  They come out into the audience and no thank you.  

But Tom Hooper grasped the grandeur of the stage show and translated that as best as he could.  So, I wrote this whole thing about how The Phantom of the Opera is kind of a travesty.  I always considered that musical so spectacle heavy that it undermined an intimate story that could be happening.  Les Miserables has its fair share of spectacle.  It's why a lot of local theatre companies can't pull it off because it is a technical nightmare.  Hooper refuses to let his version of the production to simply be a spectacle drive though.  I mean, it is a spectacle.  Golly, some of those shots.  Jean Valjean tearing up his papers?  But Les Miserables lends an emotional weight to a spectacle filled story.  As much as some people remember the flag-and-the-ship or the barricade, that's all very nice.  But this is one of those musicals where so much character is being revealed through song.  Again, I read the Victor Hugo novel.  It's a tank.  It's not better than the novel (although it could be argued that I never want to read it again while I will watch Les Miserables annually without frustration).  It's just that the use of song to explain the characters' inner monologues works better here than I've ever seen in musicals.

The crazy part about Les Miserables is the French-to-English translation.  I think I mentioned in Casablanca and The Grand Illusion ​that I get weirdly patriotic over the French National Anthem.  Les Miserables hits a lot of the same beats for me.  I am a big fan of protest rights and Les Miserables hits that need to be heard message pretty hard.  The funny thing is, as emotional as I get over the barricade sequences, it might be some of my least favorite parts of the story.  I'm a guy who adores Jean Valjean.  I'm not the only guy out there who is mesmorized by this story either. Heck Star Trek: Deep Space Nine did their own homage to this story as well.  One of the major reasons that I show this while reading The Count of Monte Cristo is that, despite both protagonists sharing similar origins, Jean Valjean goes left while Edmond Dantes goes right.  Both men are able to redefine themselves in the face of grave injustice.  But while Edmond Dantes finds value in the abject humilation of his antagonists, Jean Valjean uses his newfound wealth and anonymity to become the best man.

Often, I'll lament that the world is a terrible place.  I could quote Gandalf right now, but that would mean me Googling it and who has time for that in Late Stage Capitalism.  What Les Miserables gets right is that it doesn't deny that that the world is a terrible place (hence, the name "The Miserable"). But instead of simply embracing the misery of existence and writing it off as an ending in itself, like The Bicycle Thieves, it stresses that mankind needs to be aggressively selfless in the face of evil.  If we had to be critical of Jean Valjean, symbolized by lifting the flag and the cart on his back, he puts too much on his own shoulders.  Fantine has every right to yell at Valjean because she's been through Hell.  From her perspective, Valjean is culpable for her and Cosette's dilemma.  He's not solely responsible, but his act of noninterference ultimately led her into the position she was in.  But given the power of dramatic irony, we know that it wasn't so much that Valjean wrote off Fantine, but was almost unaware of this story as he was embroiled in his Javert drama.  Yet, he still takes care of this girl.

And the insane part is that he's trying to care for his pursuer for the entire length of the movie.  Javert, who probably comes across as lawful evil a bit throughout, is so blinded by his own past and his own anecdotal experiences with criminals that he can't see the greater good and convoluted morality of his own actions.  But Valjean keeps presenting him with reasonable requests.  When he sacrifices his own freedom for the man misidentified as Jean Valjean, Javert comes full bore onto him.  Valjean asks for three days to put right Cosette's home life.  Now, we can demonize Javert here.  Realistically, Javert has heard similar things before.  But this continues throughout.  Every time that Javert confronts him, Valjean offers a reasonable solution.  He even offers to give himself up if he can just BLANK.  In his own way, he's caring for Javert there.  He knows that his own defiance of the law is an abhorrance to Javert and he wants to heal this man.  Those final confrontations, he offers where he can be found.  

If Valjean knew that Javert was going to commit suicide, I wonder what his response would be.  It's not that Valjean wouldn't turn himself in given the confrontations.  It's just that there was always something incredibly pressing that required Valjean's temporary freedom.  Like It's a Wonderful Life, we realize the value of one person to society.   Unlike George Bailey who has a hard time seeing the forest for the trees, Valjean is only too aware of his responsibility for others.  When the man accused of being Valjean is on trial, the true Valjean's concerns are for all of his workers who need employment.  Never is it really for his own freedom beyond that initial choice to fake the death of Jean Valjean.  It's this noble action.

I need that stuff.  I need the knowledge that our choices mean something.  The world will be terrible and there will be a mass of people out there who are only looking out for themselves.  But I do love that we have a character like Jean Valjean who is continually punished for his good deeds and his response time-and-time-again is only to escalate this notion of self-sacrifice.  It's a beautiful story.  Through and through.  Each character has something they fundamentally believe in and they they explore it deeply.  Even the Thenardiers, in their own way, break free of their caricatures at times and show their true evil beyond the jest.  It's all great.  I love complex characters and the world that keeps them all woven together.  Les Miserables is just a marvel of a story and Tom Hooper crushes it.  I know it was up for Best Picture, but I think some of the love for this movie has faded since its release.  Yet, my students always seem to really dig it.