Les Miserables

Victor Hugo is a madman who believes he is Victor Hugo, Jean Cocteau reportedly once said, and judging from the adaptations I’ve seen of this Hugo warhorseI still haven’t caught up with the source novelhe must have been a sublime madman at that. In any case, the 129 minutes this film has carved out of the 1,200-page book are certainly vivid. Bille August’s sincere, hokey, and irresistible mounting of Rafael Yglesias’s script shares with Titanic a refusal to look at virtue and vice cynically, though the characters, for all their simplicity, are considerably richer: Jean Valjean (Liam Neeson), emerging from 19 years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to become an enlightened factory owner and mayor a decade later, and the fanatical Inspector Javert (Geoffrey Rush), a sort of 19th-century J. Edgar Hoover who devotes a lifetime to tracking Valjean down. Uma Thurman makes a swell Fantine and Claire Danes and Hans Matheson are fine as Cosette and her revolutionary lover Marius; the production designer, Anna Asp, also worked on Fanny and Alexander. The pacing never flags and the storylet’s face itis well-nigh unbeatable. (JR) Read more