I’ve been a fan of Les Miserables ever since I saw it on Broadway in 1988, and watching the movie a few weeks ago only renewed my enthusiasm, even despite Russell Crowe’s “singing”.
The play and the movies have have been called everything from “a cauldron of harmonic mush” (Anthony Lane), to “overblown and underdeveloped” (Ted Hoover) to “the most miserable cinematic experience I’ve ever suffered through” (Matt Walsh), but I don’t care. The melodramatic story moves me. And the sentimental music makes me swoon like a 13-year-old.
Because I’ve been thinking about the musical lately (and listening to Philip Quast’s skillful rendering of Javert’s soliloquy to wash Russell Crowe out of my brain), it has struck me that Les Miz keeps cropping up in my life in various incarnations at different times.There doesn’t seem to be an overarching narrative here, so I won’t try to invent one. I’ll simply present my Les Miz stories, one by one.
A Childhood Memory
My mother was not a literary person. She never read much except for Newsweek magazine and an occasional Agatha Christie novel. When I got into literature as a teenager, she’d never heard of any of the books I was reading, Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises. When I asked her if she’d ever heard of Tess of the d’Urbervillles, she replied no, but that she had heard of The Hound of the Baskervilles.
This is why it is so strange that she had not only heard of Les Miserables, but often referred to it and even quoted from it. She explained when I was little that the title wasn’t pronounced the way it looked—Less Miserablz—and taught me what I would later discover to be a pretty good approximation of the French (a language she’d never studied). She liked the name Jean Valjean—so rhythmic!—and said it whenever she could find a way to work it into the conversation. And she told me the basic fact of Valjean’s life: he was a guy who stole some bread.
Why did my mother know anything about Les Miserableswhen she knew nothing about any other work of literature? Why did she refer to it so often? Of all the novels in the world, why Les Miserables, rather than, say, Jane Eyre or The Scarlet Letter? All that will forever remain a mystery to me, one of the lost pieces to the puzzle that was my mother.
A Marital Argument
My first husband detested theater and I loved it, a conflict intensified by the fact that we were living in the theater capital of the country, Manhattan. His refusal to ever go to a play led me to find a group of theater friends—struggling actors and wannabe playwrights, mainly, who went to two or three plays a week and held Tony parties in their apartments, where they’d watch the awards, cheering and arguing like soccer fans.
It wasn’t until we had friends visit from out of town that my husband begrudgingly agreed to go to Les Miz.
He loved it. He was astounded by it. He was in awe. My theater friends sniffed that it was not true theater, just “spectacle.” But as far as my husband went, I felt triumphant somehow, as if I’d produced the play myself.
A Complaint
Has anyone else ever noticed that the men’s songs in Les Miz are mostly about Great Things—Justice! Revolution! Truth!—while the women get sad little songs about their personal lives? Even that awful Javert gets to sing about his relationship to God, while the women mainly sing about how victimized they are. For example:
Cosette: “I have to sweep all these floors and I don’t even get a decent doll.”
Fantine: “Seduced and abandoned and now I’m a whore, plus I’m dying.”
Eponine: “Marius doesn’t love me, so I might as well go get shot.”
Not that they aren’t all lovely songs. But would it upset the apple cart too much to let the girls have a single song about, I don’t know, righteousness or something?
The Upshot
As any sophomore lit major can tell you, the spiritual message of Les Miz is clear, and, aside from the “harmonic mush” and “overblown” libretto, it’s that message that I adore. Two competing visions of the divine: Javert’s God of vengeance and Valjean’s of compassion. As Valjean sings at the end, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” I don’t even know if that line is in the novel, but it’s in the musical, and I love it.
I love it, too.
If you haven’t seen the Philip Quast clip, do. Do it now.