Les Miserables.
I approached the latest film version of "Les Miserables" with both hope and skepticism. Hope that the impressive cast, headed by Liam Neeson and Geoffrey Rush, might be up to capturing Victor Hugo's sweeping moral vision, and skepticism bred largely by the silly ads for it."Their love was dangerous," the ads witlessly declared, focusing entirely on Claire Danes as Cosette and a lesser known actor as her beau, Marius Pontmercy (Hans Matheson). The "dangerous" part was indicated by cast-of-thousands scenes of the people's uprising, in which Marius is involved, although certainly not as a consequence of his romance with Cosette.
Showcasing Danes must have been a ploy to aim for the younger set, with an eye to drawing in the romance-besotted teenage girls that came to "Titanic." (Danes was, after all, Juliet to Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo.)
I could not help but think the filmmakers were, at the same time, foolishly alienating that same constituency. A perusal of the Internet will reveal any number of sites dedicated to the hugely popular musical version of "Les Miserables," and one quickly realizes that a large majority of these fans are teenage girls who passionately identify with Eponine, the poor street girl whose love for Marius truly is dangerous: She dies on the barricades while delivering a message from Cosette. She is the most poignant, complex character the book or the musical has to offer. The film leaves out Eponine? What were they thinking?
Once I saw the film, I realized that Eponine's absence was symptomatic of something lacking overall. Eponine's doomed love provides a kind of moral check on the idyllic romance between Marius and Cosette -- a reminder that sometimes our happiness is, however innocently, at the cost of someone else's.
The musical, however sentimentalized and simplistic it may be at times, understands this. In its own way, it manages to tap into Hugo's moral center. The film, on the other hand, fails to capture it on any level: whether it is personal self-sacrifice such as Eponine's, the redeeming power of faith or Hugo's radical ideas about society, poverty and justice, the movie lacks a dimension of conscience.
Even on an artistic level, this is detrimental. What is the movie about, other than twin stories of a convict on the run and a pair of lovers in Paris? I was disappointed to see the great vision drained from the story, a vision that was for me nearly religious when I first encountered it 10 years ago.
That vision was defined for me when I took a "literary pilgrimage" to the French town of Digne while I was a student in Avignon. Digne is no great tourist attraction. It has a modest, slightly run-down Gothic cathedral and not much else. However, it was in this town, nestled in the southern French Alps, that an incident occurred that became the seed from which Hugo cultivated Les Miserables.
Hugo heard a story of Digne's bishop, Monseigneur de Miollis, who took in a released convict for the night, and when the convict repaid the bishop by stealing us silver dinnerware, de Miollis told the police that he gave the treasure's to the man. Hugo's fictional bishop, Monseigneur Myriel, tells the convict, "Jean Valjean, you belong no longer to evil, but to good. With this silver, I have bought your soul for God."
I chose to believe Hugo's depiction of the bishop as true: The holy and selflessly good Myriel was de Miollis. I was moved when I visited de Miollis' tomb in Digne's cathedral, l'Eglise St-Jerome. I was brought to tears by the cathedral's brochure, a simple, typed and photocopied affair that mostly described the cathedral's history (noting, of course, de Miollis, "portrayed unforgettably in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables"), and then invited visitors to say a simple prayer "Seigneur, faites de moi un instrument de paix ..."
The prayer of St Francis of Assisi. Whether conscious or not, the prayer chosen perfectly summed up the bishop's famous gift, not just of silver, but of hope, faith and pardon for one of society's outcasts. Monseigneur Myriel never again appears in the story, but he is the soul of the novel, he who sowed love where there was hatred, light where there was darkness. I still have St-Jerome's brochure. The prayer and the novel have been inseparable in my mind.
The new film does not find this soul. although I give it credit for trying. At least when tackling poverty, it doesn't prettify it. The descent of Cosette's mother Fantine, who resorts to prostitution to support her daughter, is heart-wrenchingly played by Uma Thurman, and her destitution is debasing and dirty.
Unfortunately, Fantine is the only one of the story's poor brought into such focus. Missing are the portraits of the criminal poor, personified by Eponine's family and her father's gang, and even the romantic poor in the person of Marius, whose background in the movie is sketchy at best.
By the time the story reaches the uprising in Paris, it's so involved with developing Marius and Cosette's unconvincing romance that the uprising merely seems to be a plot convenience. Some attempt is made to explain the reasons for it -- people are poor, disenfranchised -- and we are outraged to see soldiers shoot down protesters in the street, but the uprising doesn't occupy the central place in the story that it should.
This is in large part due to the loss of the vivid cast of characters that led Hugo's small corner of the uprising. In the film, all are faceless except for Marius (despite the laudable inclusion of a black actor among his compatriots). Since we're led to be primarily concerned with the love story, the rebellion gets shunted aside.
In the end, though, it may be that too much realism sinks the movie's potential to emulate the extravagant emotional experience that is Les Miserables. Victor Hugo could never be called a realist. Deeply concerned with social issues, yes, but a realist, no. He painted the canvas in broad, dramatic strokes. His achievement was that his characters are archetypes but not cartoons: They may not be people you'd recognize as your next-door neighbor, but they are still recognizably human.
In view of this, Liam Neeson's desire to make Jean Valjean less an angel and more visibly flawed, as he said in a recent interview, may have been the movie's biggest mistake, despite Neeson's excellent performance. His earliest scenes forcefully convey Jean Valjean the dangerous criminal, full of hatred and what Hugo called a blind desire to do harm. But his redemption that follows Monseigneur Myriel's gift is less convincing.
Jean Valjean of the novel becomes a towering figure of saintliness. He is human enough to be faced with crises of conscience, but each time he rejects the impulse towards evil. As I read and reread the book, I adopted a "What would Jean Valjean do?" code of ethics. He's that good, that inspiring.
Neeson's Valjean leaves one with the impression that he merely succeeded in becoming a respectable citizen, who is shown doing a few good deeds (did they have soup kitchens in the Paris of the 1830s?), but he is still prone to violence and rage. We never feel his overwhelming love for his adopted daughter, Cosette only his over-protectiveness. He seems just slightly fond of her.
As if to make it ultimately clear that the filmmakers missed the point, the most off-putting scene is the final one. Javert, the police inspector that has been tracking Jean Valjean for years, kills himself after Valjean throws Javert's ordered world into turmoil by saving his life. In the book, this happens some 100 pages before the end, when a solitary and broken Javert throws himself into the Seine.
The movie, however, ends with Javert's death, witnessed by Valjean. Valjean looks properly horrified that a man has killed himself right there in front of him, but then as he walks away, his step grows lighter and soon a smile breaks out on his face. I presume we're meant to see that Valjean realizes he is finally free of the inspector's persecution.
I could not feel his joy. "A man just killed himself!" I protested inwardly. I cannot believe that Hugo's hero, who placed virtue and the good of others above his own safety (the reason he spared Javert's life in the first place), would rejoice in Javert's suicide, particularly seconds after he witnessed it. Saintliness aside, I don't think any feeling person would recover so quickly.
Both the book and that unavoidable musical end with Valjean's death. Ostensibly an unhappy ending, but one that leaves the reader and the playgoer uplifted. The joy comes not from the fact that Valjean made it through life without being arrested again, but that he was redeemed by the boundless good he bestowed on others and by his devoted love for Cosette, the orphan daughter of a prostitute.
The makers of the musical reportedly told its first cast that the show was "about God." In the end, it brings out Fantine, Eponine and the cast of those who died on the barricades to turn the song of revolution into a song of salvation: "All the wretched of the earth/There is a flame that never dies/Even the darkest night will end/and the sun will rise."
I'm still waiting for the perfect non-singing dramatization. OK, maybe I won't be satisfied with anything less than a strictly faithful, gloriously moving, perfectly cast (let's bring in Neeson, Rush and Thurman again), 10-hour miniseries. A&E, are you listening?
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| Author: | Malcolm, Teresa |
|---|---|
| Publication: | National Catholic Reporter |
| Date: | May 29, 1998 |
| Words: | 1592 |
| Previous Article: | Justice: A Question of Race. |
| Next Article: | The bell tolls not for Fiand but for the church. |
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