Les Miserables, Or Aren't We All?

I broke down and watched Les Miserables on DVD.

I had mixed reviews of the play when I saw it on Broadway in 1998.  I was with my daughter, who was 11.  We were planning on moving from Long Island to South Carolina the following year, and it was our Farewell to Broadway trip to the city.

What I remember most was that the play was too long.  I have as good an attention span as the next fairly cultured person, but I was impatient with the stupid morality of Victor Hugo's time.

But the movie was different.  I got caught up in it.  The music was phenomenal.  The acting was grand.  The children were breathtaking.

Sasha Baron Cohen, of course, stole every scene he was in.

What surprised me most was Russell Crowe's portrayal of Javert.  And the fact that he has such a sweet, pure voice.  Which he used to convey his tortured mind, the pure evil that comes from pure thoughts, unfiltered by charity.

The play wasn't as interminable as I recalled.  And yet, to the minute, I reached the point where I had had it.  There they were, the dead had been mourned, Cosette and Marius about to live happily ever after.  This was a state totally unacceptable for Jean Valjean.  At that point, he decides he can have no part of a happy life with his beloved daughter.

Damn that loaf of bread.

So he runs off, Marius bound not to tell.  And then it appears they watch Valjean ride off, both apparently too overcome with the emotion of the scene to run after him and ask what the hell he is doing.

And this is where I lose it.  As Jean Valjean is taking far too long to die, I would like to help him along.

When I was a child, my mother, along with everyone else's mother, watched the daytime soaps (Back then, there were only daytime soaps.).  She cleaned house fearlessly, played games with my sister and myself, visited neighbors, but between noon and one o'clock, my mother watched her soaps.

I tried to watch soaps for awhile, but I found that I kept wanting to yell at the actors for doing such stupid things.  "You know he loves you, for God's sake, just tell him you're pregnant!"

But no, soap operas represented the same need for interminable torture and misery as Hugo painted for us in his aptly named tale, but which he did with better music.  Is it a human need, to suffer and sacrifice, and while you're at it bring everyone down with you?  I think not a need, although we certainly do it.  And we do crave watching others suffer through their own moral twistings.

So Jean Valjean, now on Blu-ray, will continue to drive people insane with the masochistic need to make others suffer through his absence.  An agonized man who even needed to be persuaded to heaven.

At least Javert jumped.