'Les Mis' reigns on film, minus the message

'Les Mis' reigns on film, minus the message

The verdict is unanimous: Russell Crowe has crowed himself into semi-embarrassment, veins tense and uvula quivering, in the latest film version of the musical Les Miserables, while Anne, dear Anne Hathaway, dreaming a dream in Napoleonic France, has won and will win every supporting-actress prize around with her tonsured turn as the wretched Fantine.

Eddie Redmayne, as Marius, scores with the number Empty Chairs, a woeful lament for a foiled uprising, and Hugh Jackman is adequately reliable as Jean Valjean, the man who hoists the French flag - another post-revolution burden - like the eternal Sisyphus who goes through hell all for stealing a loaf of bread.

Did Jean Valjean suffer much? "Oh, the red coat, the ball on the ankle, a plank to sleep on, heat, cold, toil, the convicts, the thrashings, the double chain for nothing, the cell for one word; even sick and in bed, still the chain!" he told the Bishop early in Victor Hugo's novel. "Dogs, dogs are happier!"

Unlikely as it seems, this prestigious, expensively made A-list movie dressed up with a visible intent to strut around on the Oscar stage also offers a romantic vision of popular revolt for the poor and the disenfranchised, and that sentiment has been taken up by some audiences halfway across the Earth.

With appropriate bombast, the marching anthem sung by young French students of the 1832 uprising (Les Mis is not about the French Revolution) Do You Hear the People Sing? - "Do you hear the people sing?/Singing a song of angry men/This is the music of the people who will not be slaves again" - has been translated into Thai by the guys called Art Bact' & Ardisto, and the sound clip has gone viral in the past week. The Thai verses impressively retain the meaning of the English original, and also its romantic spirit (it could tip over into naivete) that seems to fire up most revolutionaries, or those who dream the dream of one day becoming revolutionaries.

Stretching it a bit more, an activist photo-shopper has made a face-match putting Jean Valjean (it's actually Jackman, less shiny, with fake Hollywood filth) next to that of the jailed editor Somyot Prueksakasemsuk. I sincerely hope that Jackman won't pick up the Oscar in two weeks, because the sight of him as a glossy, glamorous, well-paid superstar, which he is, would be the most anti-revolutionary image of all.

The best thing about Les Miserables is not Hathaway, nor Jackman. Neither is it I Dream a Dream, nor Do You Hear the People Sing? It's Victor Hugo. Now when we talk about Les Mis, we automatically assume it to be the popular musical and, in the past month, the movie. But let's return to Hugo's text, that massive 1,500-page tome with plenty of drama and digressions, quaint historical essays, yarns, anecdotes, Napoleonic melancholy and pro-people statements, all propelled by such moral and political complexity that it's inevitable for the musical - and film - to become hits only through reductionism.

Hugo was a royalist who later threw himself behind republicanism. He was elevated to the peerage before turning against Napoleon III. Life is full of contradictions; so are the characters in Les Miserables living the whirlwind of his pages: Valjean was a galley slave before he becomes a bourgeoisie; Marius had a monarchist ancestor but fought in the barricades against the army; the Thenardiers are the thieving working-class and yet Hugo wrote with conviction in Book First of Volume V, "There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated the magnificences of the lower classes".

One thing is clear, though: Hugo was adamant in addressing injustice and social ills (he was also a big fan of a European union). He sided with the people while acknowledging the difficult context surrounding it. His romantic vision has a humanist soul, and too bad that it's impossible for the film to capture it. Les Mis the movie is drama without complexity. The glaring evidence (spoiler alert) is the suicide of Javert, played by the almost-comical Russell Crowe here, which, to me, is one of the most poignant moral dilemmas in literature because Javert, the strict enforcer of the law and unflinching believer in the distinction between good and evil, simply can't accept the fact that life is more complex than he thinks and mercy can come from the most unlikely of places, namely someone whom he believes to be the archetype of villainy.

The anthem Do You Hear the People Sing? filters Hugo's sentiment into catchy verses and melody, but to go beyond pop-socialism and the romance of the barricade, perhaps it's time to dig into that big book with the big message once again. It's called Les Miserables, but it's more enlightening than melancholy.


Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.

Kong Rithdee

Bangkok Post columnist

Kong Rithdee is a Bangkok Post columnist. He has written about films for 18 years with the Bangkok Post and other publications, and is one of the most prominent writers on cinema in the region.

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