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I cannot watch Les Miserables Again. I just can’t do it. I have seen the movie and read the novel too many times. I know every scene and anguish over what the movie director has left out. This is not the same as watching Saving Private Ryan 50 times–that movie gets better each time you see it. The problem here is a 2 hour film cannot tell the complete story of a novel of more than 1,000 pages. In this novel every word counts.
My mom says I was obsessed with Les Miserables in my youth. It all began when I first picked up the heavy novel as a teenager. I read Victor Hugo’s novel and was drawn in by its story. Then the musical opened in London in 1985. This remarkable novel became an equally remarkable musical with its ballads of rebellion, camaraderie, humour, anguish, liberté, égalité, fraternité written by the musician Claude-Michel Schönberg and put into words in English by Alain Boublil and French by Herbert Kretzmer. Not only was the musical wonderful to see, meaning the script, the music itself stayed with you a lifetime like, say, Fiddler on the Roof.
When the musical moved from London to New York it gained momentum and became a worldwide sensation. Who can forget the musical’s tri color logo and portrait of the young Cosette set against the blue, white, and red of the flag of the French Rebellion. Last year the newest film’s producers copied the idea from the logo and created a stunning portrait of the same young girl with blue eyes who looks out from the movie poster. One cannot help but stare.
Given my long history with Les Miserables, the current movie could be nothing but a disappointment. As a teenager I flew to New York by myself to see the musical stopping off at the French book store at Rockefeller Center to buy the French version of the musical as well as the original British production. Then I bought the two volume French language novel, the original language, and read through the same with great effort, my Petite Robert dictionary at my side. I bought various sections distilled into short books for kids which were easier to read. And then I read Hugo’s other novel which anyone who watches Walt Disney knows as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”. In short I bought everything related to the novel and musical except a pair of sans culottes.
The current Les Miserables movie copied the New York musical note for note and word for word. That was probably a safe bet as the previous version, starring Liam Neeson, fell flat having no music to mask the garroted and guillotined script. The 2012 film might have resonated with someone who had not read the novel as it certainly resonated with many at the Academy Awards. But if you have read the novel, seen the musical, memorized the music then the plot simply followed a straight line, plodding ahead predictably and leaving out large swaths of the novel that are important to the story.
For example, we begin at the beginning. Jean Valjean spent 29 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. His family was starving and the desperate man became a convict, banished to hard labor, and forced to wear the yellow arm band of criminal. When he was freed from prison he set across the landscape of France where no one would let him pass the night in any inn. This scene is where the New York musical does wonders with the story. The man tells a woman in the street that no one will provide him lodging, he having knocked on every door. She tells him, pointing at the residency of the priest, “Knock there”. This is the home of the village priest. He opens the door and lights up the face of the convict with a lamp. The priest gives the criminal lodging for the night and Jean Valjean repays this kindness by stealing the silver candlesticks. Apprehended by the gendarmes he is returned to the priest who covers up his crime telling the gendarmes the silver was a gift. Then he tells Jean Valjean “Go. Now your soul belongs to God”. The next day the freed convict robs a boy on the highway. He is riddled with guilt. So he does as the priest told him and vows to use the silver to buy a new life and do good. He buys false papers and new name. In a few years he buys a mill in a new village, grows rich, and employs most of townspeople. As fate would have it he comes to the aid of one of his workers Fantine, who in the film is the Academy Award winning actress Anne Hathaway. Ho! Hum! How boring. It is remarkable that singing for one or two scenes until she dies is enough to earn one an Oscar.
The novel is a miracle. The musical, a holy relic. Where one lifts the spirits, the other dazzles the eyes and moves the soul. One great scene in the musical is when the barricades are set up in streets of Paris. One side is Jean Valjean who by this time was known as Monsieur Le Maire, a man who forswore violence at the behest of the forgiving priest, now thrust into war. Valjean is there to protect Marius who is the love of his adopted daughter Cosette the daughter of Fantine who died in his arms. Not far behind the barricade is Eponin who too is in love with Marius. On the other side are the gendarmes and Javert, the prison guard whose charge was Jean Valjean also known as prisoner number 24601 we are told many times in song. The barricade on this side shows the rebels loading their muskets. The whole apparatus swivels around on stage to show the other side of the barricade and the short battle. The gamin (street urchin) Gavroche bravely climbs to the top to retrieve ammunition. The guns are fired. Javert is captured and he and Jean Valjean disappear into the sewers. Spotlights follow Jean Valjean as he makes his way and once can imagine him actually making his way below the streets of Paris.
On the big screen all of this is cobbled together in dozens of versions dating from 1909 which according to the Internet Movie Database has been made and remade more than 75 times. This is a highly lauded film starring Anne Hathaway, Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman and a whole host of Hollywood glitterati.
Who else having seen these films would feel let down that the movie leaves out the entire Battle of Waterloo? This is where we first meet the hideous and cruel Thernadiers who kept poor Cosette sleeping in a box under the stairs in the Inn that they keep. The poor girl is sent out into the dark alone to retrieve buckets of water. The reader cries with pity when she sees that the poor girl has only one toy to amuse herself: the broken end of a sword which she dresses as a doll. The evil Thernadiers, who have extorted money from Fantine, Cosette’s mother, are there on the Battlefield where Napoleon was defeated by the British and Prussians. The husband and wife empty the pockets of the dead soldiers. This is many hundreds of pages before we see them again.
Crime is the family business. Victor Hugo shows the young Gavroche and his sister Eponin working in tandem with their parents the Thernadiers as they pick pockets and rob people in Paris. An entire chapter of the novel is spent teaching the reader the language of “Argot”, which is the slang used by the criminals on the streets of Paris.
The novel is filled with details which the film leaps over in large gaps. Monsieur Le Maire sees that a cart has fallen upon a man who is being crushed to death as it sinks into the mud. His name is Fauchelevent. Men gather but together they cannot lift it. Le Maire climbs under the cart and with his back strengthened by many years of breaking rocks in jail Jean Valjean lifts the heavy burden and the man is rescued albeit maimed. It is here that Javert, the dim witted policeman who has never had an inspirational thought, realizes than the man he has long suspected is in fact the escaped convict.
Fauchelevent is forgotten in the film but in the novel he provides shelter to Valjean and Cosette whose freedom Valjean bought from the greedy Thernadiers. Javert is guarding the entrance to the walled city of Paris so Le Maire scales an impossibly high wall, like the high walls of a prison, and lifts Cossette to safety. Fauchelevent is living in a cloister, a job arranged for the man by the benevolent mayor. Now the favor can be repaid as he convinces the nuns to take in the man he says is his brother and allow him to work as a gardener. Jean Valjean and Cosette remain there for many years until the girl becomes a woman, having received her education from the nuns. Javert suspects Valjean is hiding in the cloister but the headmistress blocks his entree as no man is allowed inside where the sisters live.
All of these details bring back warm memories of the novel and the genius which was Victor Hugo. He was never celebrated as a literary titan like Balzac. But Hugo was a hero to the French people who let him lie in state at his death and whose soldiers it was said marched into battles with a copy of Les Miserables in their pockets. Hugo’s protagonist Jean Valjean, Monsieur Le Maire, spared the life of Javert thus showing one can expunge evil in the human soul by teaching and exposing the same. In doing so, he showed us hope. This is one of those novels that changes one’s life like “The Magic Mountain” or “Crime and Punishment”. Read it and then go back and see the film. No need to wait long as it will no doubt will be remade again, and soon.