Les Miserables.

Let me do Neil Jordan's interesting new movie The Butcher Boy a terrible injustice by telling you what's in it. Drunkenness. Suicide. Vandalization of a house by defecation. Madness. Hallucination. Child abuse. Brawling. The slaughter of animals. The slaughter and dismemberment of a woman. A corpse rotting in a parlor. A near-suicide by immolation. A child charred from head to toe. And...oh yes, a vision of the Virgin Mary (portrayed, so help me, by Sinead O'Connor!) who here uses the f-word and winks seductively at the boy who's dreaming of her.

You don't want to see this catalogue of horrors, do you? Of course not. So just flip the page to the next article and join me in two weeks.

There. Now let me confess to those of you who have inexplicably continued reading that as I watched The Butcher Boy I couldn't stop laughing. And the audience about me (a full house) was laughing harder than I. How can this be?

The Butcher Boy is about what human consciousness does when it is in constant peril of humiliation. Twelve-year-old Francie Brady hears a neighbor woman denounce publicly his drunken father and mentally fragile mother. For any boy living in a small Irish town in the early '60s where everybody knows everybody else, this would be bad enough. But for Francie, who dreams about the happy home and personal dignity he's never enjoyed, it is a monumental catastrophe. So the boy's defenses go up. They include fantasies fed by TV shows and comic books, bravura lies, fits of violence, idealization of his only friend (a level-headed boy whose very level-headedness finally estranges him from Francie), and a vendetta against that denouncing neighbor whose own son enjoys all the advantages Francie has always been denied. But, most of all, Young Brady defends himself by creating within his own skull a sort of ongoing vaudeville show of which he is the host and indefatigably spieling star. No matter what happens to the boy - the tragic loss of both parents, physical assaults on him and by him, hallucinations, sexual molestation, confinements in reform school, asylum, and prison - "The Francie Brady Show" never receives anything less than great reviews and fantastic ratings from its one and only audience: Francie Brady himself.

But "one and only"is not quite accurate. For we watch "The Francie Brady Show," too. It is Neil Jordan's triumph that, though we never lose sight of what is really happening to the boy, we are caught up in the vaudeville that our hero has made of his life. That is why the movie, like the Patrick McCabe novel it faithfully adapts, makes us laugh. Out of the wrong side of the mouth, through tears, with a sick sensation at the pit of the belly, but laugh we do.

Jordan has brought off this stunt through the following devices. He's kept the camera's perspective shallow, so that the action is as "in-our-face" as any TV sitcom. Depth-of-focus might have given this movie a clarity and objectivity that would have rendered its horrible events unbearable. And he's evoked from his cast near-farcical performances which turn the characters into members of Francie's comedy troupe. But, just as McCabe's novel permits us to detect realities that Francie's addled mind can't deal with, Jordan's direction allows his actors a moderate degree of realism so they don't all come across as mere puppets of Francie's dementia. It's a layered effect: what Francie perceives and doesn't perceive are both visible to us. We live within his insanity without being deluded by it.

Occasionally though, Jordan's staging does completely surrender to Francie's twisted perceptions, and it is precisely then that the movie becomes most like music hall. The delinquents whom Francie meets in reform school are just ordinary farmboys who've run afoul of the law. But when our hero labels them "The Bog Boys," they turn into strolling players capering in unison. Similarly, the gossipy ladies in a grocery store are just that, but they are also a comic chorus galvanized into eyerolling and lip-smacking by the boy's boasts and lies. And the off-screen voice of the adult Francie who narrates the movie quizzes and heckles the on-screen juvenile Francie like a comic badgering his "straight man."

Not all of the movie works so well. The parallels McCabe and Jordan try to draw between the boy's growing insanity and the madness of the cold war (the movie climaxes during the Cuban missile crisis) seem forced to me, because what torments Francie - parental irresponsibility, the malice and snoopiness of neighbors, poverty's subversion of dignity - would have tormented him in the nineteenth century or earlier. The supporting cast (including author McCabe as the town drunk) is uniformly apt but, though Jordan gets some nice moments from Eamon Owens as Francie, this novice actor can't deliver all the shadings the character needs to engage us completely. The director has revved the boy up for every scene and, in a film as hectic as this one, the childish shouting grows tiresome. Worst of all is Jordan's failure to dramatize the destruction of Francie's most cherished dream: the blissful honeymoon his parents supposedly enjoyed at a seaside hotel. A lyrical dream sequence was called for to show how much this fantasy mattered but, surprisingly, the director treats it perfunctorily.

Otherwise, The Butcher Boy succeeds as a piteous comedy of horrors. It marks a return to form for Neil Jordan after the conventional bustle and posturing of Michael Collins. That movie biography needed a master of spectacle like David Lean at its helm. Jordan is something else: a bad boy with a heart, a purveyor of shock who can also tug at heartstrings.

Life is unfair, especially at the movies. The current version of Les Miserables is nowhere near as inventive an adaptation as The Butcher Boy, nor does it cram as much of Hugo's novel within its two-and-a-quarter hour running time as the 1935 Hollywood entry (which was twenty-five minutes shorter!). But it doesn't matter. Inferior in artistry to The Butcher Boy, Les Miserables nevertheless grips just as hard. It seems that if a director can get Hugo's big set pieces right (the bishop's candlesticks, the overnight rescue of Cosette, the death agony of Fantine, the escape through the sewers, the final confrontation of Valjean and Javert), whatever is done to the connective tissue in between tends to fade from memory.

Rafael Yglesias's script is a Reader's Digest Abridged Books skim-job that soon turns into Evelyn Wood speed-reading. Yet the writing doesn't completely lack subtlety. For instance, Yglesias manages to suggest that both Valjean's brutalization in prison and his spiritual reformation turned him into something of a sexual puritan and, consequently, a rather stifling father to Cosette. Therefore, the girl's rebellious love for Marius the revolutionary seems psychologically inevitable.

Bille August has never been the most limber of directors even at his best (Pelle the Conqueror). His work here ranges from the cut-rate (the sewer escape needs more murk and more labyrinthine perilousness) to the first-rate (Javert's suicide truly shocks, and if I hadn't been familiar with the story, would have caught me off guard). Although I sense that August didn't have the funds necessary for all the spectacle he had in mind, the costumes are magnificent. In fact, in one scene a mother superior's headgear almost upstages Liam Neeson.

Nothing else does. The key to playing Valjean is to suggest fathomless goodness within invincible animality, as if the soul of Francis of Assisi had transmigrated into the body of a Kodiak bear. Whether lifting the cart off the crushed worker (and Neeson is the only star actor around, aside from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who looks physically capable of that feat) or tenderly watching his adopted daughter brush her hair, this Irish actor has captured Hugo's saintly brute to perfection. As his policeman-nemesis, Geoffrey Rush is an electric current skimpily fleshed, the perfect foil for Neeson's brawny humanity. Claire Danes pleases as Cosette, and Uma Thurman has a good time, as all beautiful actresses do, making herself look tubercular and ugly. The supporting cast is fine, especially Peter Vaughan, who makes the bishop's loving nature almost palpable. (How much better than Cedric Hardwicke's desiccated rectitude in the 1935 version.)

But the real hero of this film is neither Yglesias nor August nor the costume designer nor even Neeson or Rush. It is Hugo: poet, populist, and future powerhouse of the West End, Broadway and Hollywood.