Les Miserables: Bringing it Home Indeed

   Hugh Jackman apparently practicing amid the electronic equipment.

I have to admit that were it not for the fact this movie was so well nominated for Academy Awards, I probably wouldn't have rushed to see it. Len Speaks tells me we saw a version of the play at the Hollywood Bowl, but to tell the truth I don't remember that.

I don't know. There are some books and movies that I avoid and then when finally I run into them, I wonder why the resistance. That's the case with Les Miserables. I never read the Victor Hugo novel. I figured I had done enough reading about the time around the time (here a bit after) the French Revolution by reading a Tale of Two Cities. Maybe something about the incredible darkness of the time frame, not that there haven't been and won't be darker times and places in history. Also, I like musicals all right, but I prefer them to be with bright and cheery scripts as their context.

But it was between Amour and Les Miz when Len called and I decided, ok, time, go see Les Miz. Suck it up. Maybe it won't be that bad. 

Whoa. Tears streamed down my face more times than I can count as the protagonists sang their love and anguish about their personal worlds and the big world of rebellion and revolution.

I won't assume you know the story, other than the part where this tenacious and unforgiving letter of the law guy Inspector Javert chases down the poor man who had been imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a piece of bread for his dying relative after he "breaks parole", and well makes the former prisoner, well, miserable.

But it is about so much more. It is about sacrifice, and truth, betrayal and man's place in the world, individually and cosmically. It's about the Divine, and about His plan for us that so often seems random and arbirary, and even cruel, and about acceptance of it to triumph, even unto death itself.

It really pays to listen to the lyrics of the songs that are performed in a most passionate way by the cast. Javert is a man obsessed by the Truth and so obsessed that he misses it entirely. A man steals a loaf of bread for a loved one's very survival and Javert's world of judgment admits of no mitigation.

It is no wonder that Valjean is bitter until he comes across a Catholic priest who confirms Valjean's lie about having permission to take silver that he actually stole which could have cost him yet another 19 years servitude. Valjean thereafter devotes himself to his God. He becomes a man of means in the years after he breaks his parole, and adopts the daughter of a girl whom he was unable to save (the amazing Anne Hathaway; her I Dreamed a Dream was heart wrenching), raising her as his own. Over the years his path crosses with Javert, who still is determined to bring what he insists is an irretrievable human being to a justtice now really of his own tortured making. Valjean's adopted girl, Cosette, grows to woman hood and falls quickly in love (over one song; now there's true love!) with a well heeled young revolutinary whom Valjean nearly sacrifices himself to save for his foster child whom he loves humbly and unreservedly. And he spares the spy amid the barricades---Javert--from death at his hands. The act of charity, of compassion so varies his conclusion of the evil of Valjean that he actually kills himself in the throes of his cognitive dissonance that this man he has so brutally misjudged, was actually good.

Human nature, often distressingly ugly, and sometimes sublime. And for the good, the promise indeed of reward.

.