Les Miserables

Christmas was wonderful.  Family, presents, caroling, (more) family, sugar, sugar, cats, and sugar are all the key ingredients of any successful holiday and boy did we have all but one of those things.  But we made up for that one lacking ingredient by going to see Les Miserables.

Now, before I go any further, I want to give a heartfelt thank-you to everybody in the movie theater business.  Over the months that I’ve worked in retail, I understand how much working on holidays suck, and Christmas is the most important holiday in America.  This is the time when you want to recreate and be with your own families.  Instead, you have to be at the same smelly, messy, and boring job you deal with on every other day of the year, watching other families come in to recreate and rub it in your over-worked faces.  That sucks.  And yet, it’s such an invaluable service to the rest of us, because going to the movies on a holiday is a wonderful way to spend time together.  It certainly keeps us from fighting over the dinner table and throwing food at each other.  In a public place, we have to keep some semblance of culture and mannerisms and we have you to thank for it.

It means a huge amount as well when you consider that this was not only the best Christmas movie we could see that day, but it’s the most Christian movie to come out in years.

Horrible things happen in this story; really, the entire movie goes from one devastating tragedy to the next.  The start of the movie goes from the pains of Jean Valjean’s slavery and the pains of his parole, to Fantine having to sell her body in three different, brutal ways, the wantonness of the Thenardiers, the boy Gavroche’s death, and that horrible scene in the sewers.  These are hard things to watch, especially because in every case, the good guys never seem to come out on top.

Valjean loses the only family he has, the poor stay poor, those who fight for freedom or for their own child die, and the harsh culture never changes.  And yet, the whole time, I admire them for doing the right thing.  The sacrifices made are tragic and yet I root for every noble choice they make.  And the end of the film shouts out the message that it’s an eternal reward that they fought for and not something for the here and now.  Valjean’s core story is that he was bought by God and at the end of his life, he was not forgotten.

It’s the best movie I expect to come out in this decade.

Also, the music is fantastic and may have just burst the dam for musicals.  There are only ten lines spoken in the whole film.  Everything else is in song and the voices were strong enough to match the instruments.

But maybe the greatest success with this film is the cinematography.  From the opening shot, I was amazed at the depth of each background; not only does it look gorgeous but each set-piece conveys the emotion and sets the mood for each song.  The “Lovely Ladies” setting was marvelously hellish, and I really loved the white elephant and each shot at the barricades.  They were just how I imagined it when I read the book last year.