Never seen it before, but saw the movie over the weekend.
Overall, it was a well-made film. The costumes and sets and makeup is pretty good. Effects mostly work. It’s a musical and the whole film is in song. Some well done singing and emotional work.
I’m not thrilled with the story, primarily the religiosity, but I sat through the film. Some of the group singing was unintelligible - crowd songs, or dual singing. And the boy had a thick accent that made him hard to parse.
I did have a couple plot questions. First, when Anne Hathaway’s character is working in the clothing mill, the other women make a big deal out of her letter and her having a child, and bring that up with the foreman. What was that about? Why was that a problem for them? Were they just jealous that she was actually pretty, or was there something else there? Clearly the foreman was a lech, and he pestered several of the women. Why did they think she in particular was a problem? And why did her having a child get her fired?
Second: when Russell Crowe’s character has his emotional epiphany, he decides that he cannot go on living. Why? He has spent his life believing that once a crook, always a crook, and that a thief is just as bad and might as well be a murderer, apparently. When Hugh Jackman’s character let him live, he didn’t change his mind. It was when he confronted him after the sewer and Jackman said he had to help the wounded lad and dared him to shoot him that it sunk in. But Crowe couldn’t accept letting Jackman just go because he had changed, and so jumped off the bridge and killed himself.
And I am not using their character names, because they’re bloody French, and I can’t remember them, much less figure out how to spell the damn things.
(Stupid French - ignoring letters that are there, and pronouncing ones that aren’t.)
The ladies at the mill don’t like Fantine because she won’t sleep with the foreman and is pretty and they think she thinks she is better than them. She has told them her sister has a child but the letter shows that it is her own child. She has lied and they have an excuse to get her out of there.
Inspector Gladiator, kills himself because he couldn’t do his duty. I guess. He did have a fondness for walking on high ledges. I don’t think jumping off Pont de l’Archevêché would kill you. I have no idea what that was in the Seine beneath him.
To answer your second question first: the despair of Javert is not caused by the realization that Valjean has reformed; it’s caused by his own act of mercy in not shooting Valjean in the sewer when he had the chance. That moment of weakness (in his mind) has caused him to become unmoored from his basic moral compass which values Justice above everything as something holy and pleasing to God.
The whole Valjean/Javert relationship can be seen as the tension between Mercy and Justice. Valjean’s experience with the Bishop in the second scene of the movie causes the same kind of dilemma; and Valjean chooses to embrace the mercy shown to him and live a life of love. Javert beleives that God’s will is revealed in Justice, and when he allows Valjean to escape he has not just a crisis of conscience but a crisis of identity. One of the lines his sings before he jumps is that by saving his live, Valjean has killed him just as surely as if he had killed him with a knife – because Valjean can no longer live with himself.
I thought a beautiful thing about this movie was the short scene where Javert pins his star-shaped medal on the young boy (Gavroche). That’s a perfect depiction of the fact that Javert has changed, but into something he cannot live with.
As far as the factory women getting Fantine tossed out – it was mainly out of jealousy, but they used the excuse that the scandal of having a child out of wedlock would bring shame to all of them and cause them all to lose their jobs. The owner “Lumiere” (Valjean) would surely not tolerate such a wanton woman working for him, they wrongly assume.
I also get the impression in the movie / musical that Javert kills himself because he recognizes that Valjean has redeemed himself, but knows that as long as Javert himself lives, Valjean won’t truly be “safe.”
Does that mean that they do sleep with the foreman? I’m confused. How can she be a wanton woman for having a child out of wedlock, but they’re not wanton women for risking that very thing with the foreman?
A bridge that height hitting just water shouldn’t do the trick, but he appeared to hit some sort of cascade thing.
But his very notion of Justice is fucked up. He believes Valjean is evil by nature or something because he once stole food. “He’s probably a liar and stole other things too, since we* caught* him stealing food. All these theives are shit.” He doesn’t give any consideration to the idea that Justice is more than assuming he’s evil because of one incident. And furthermore, what the hell was with that “iteniary”, that involves traveling miles looking for work? “Go climb a mountain and report here in 2 weeks. Then go to this other city way over here two weeks later. Don’t be late, or you’ll be stuck back in jail. Oh, and your papers say you are dangerous and not to be trusted and shouldn’t be hired.” That’s not Justice. Justice is acknowledging that he changed his ways, that he lived for 20+ years as a hard working business owner, and apparently a mayor for several years. He’s become an honest man. Where’s Justice in throwing him back in slave labor?
Yeah, I caught that line, but not the why.
And I don’t get that. Back to that whole virginal or married attitude? But how does her status get the rest of them shame?
It’s been sometime since I’ve seen the b’way version but I think that when Valjean changes and has the factory he lectures them about being ‘good’ or something like that. He doesn’t want them whoring at night. This wasn’t in the film but I think that is in the show.
But basically life shits on everyone every chance it gets. That’s why she loses her job. If people acted reasonably they wouldn’t be so miserable.
Javert lives in a world of certainty, where bad people are always bad and cannot be reformed. Valjean’s existence shows that Javert’s entire worldview is flawed, and everything he’s done has been wrong. Presumably, Javert hounded men other than Valjean, his certainty allowing him to accept any suffering he caused them. Now that he no longer has this certainty, the others he hounded (and possibly driven to suicide or been killed by Javert) included people who truly had reformed. He can’t live with the uncertainty, and the possibility that he caused the death of innocents is too much for him.
Nitpick: not “Lumiere”. Javert refers to him has Monsieur le Maire (Mr. Mayor – his title, not his name. He was living under the name Monsieur Madeleine.)
Javert’s dilemma is that arresting Valjean would be immoral (because Valjean spared Javert’s life and he risked his own life to save Marius), yet letting him go is unlawful (because he’s still guilty of breaking parole and taking part in the attempted revolution.) He feels the only solution is to remove himself.
With Fantine, the other women wanted her fired because they just didn’t like her. The foreman wanted her fired because she refused his advances. The fact that she was paying for the care of her child was only a justification (“You can guess how she picks up the extra.”) Valjean let the foreman use his own judgment (“I look to you to sort this out, and be as patient as you can.”) because he just didn’t want to be bothered to take the time to listen to any of them, a decision he regretted later.
In the movie, it’s clear that he’s suddenly nervous because he’s noticed Javert in the factory, so he’s distracted and thinking more of his own skin than the women’s squabble.
Look, it’s really very simple. Javert is Lawful Good. When he breaks the law by letting Valjean go with Marius, he’s no longer Lawful. (The first time Valjean left, at Fantine’s deathbed, didn’t count, because he overcame Javert by force.) There’s no room in Javert’s world view for Neutral Good or Chaotic Good. Therefore, since he’s no longer Lawful, he can no longer be Good. If he’s not Good, he’s Evil (in his own worldview), and he can’t live with himself if he’s Evil.
There’s a little more to it in the novel, but there are nearly 2000 pages in which to explore the background, relationships and finer motivations of each character. ETA: We see a lot more of how rattled Javert is by Valjean’s mercy (traces of this are left in Stars) and the self-doubt that places in him, but it still boils down to “Bad Guy GOOD? Good Guy BAD? Does not compute. Can’t cope. Goodbye, not-so-cruel world.”) In the musical/movie, it’s pretty simplified.
Since we’re imparting knowledge, the rest of that line about wearing a different chain is a reference to the fact that Mayors would wear a decorative chain to denote their status as Mayor (the different chain of course being a ball and chain).
Had to read Les Miserables in the original French as a part of French class in High School and the Teacher used the musical as a study aid (we even went to see the show on Broadway which was my first of several times) so she explained references like that to us and that was one I remember :).
I’ve seen the musical and read the book years ago. The musical actually does a good job and stays true to the story but there are huge gaps which I think is why some people find the musical hard to understand. Also the characters motivations have to be reduced from about 100 pages of text detailing every minute thought down to a catchy 3 minute song.
As I recall about Fantine, she was a nobody, just one more member of the unwashed masses. There was trouble with the women so the foreman just fired the source and hired somebody else to do the job without giving any consideration to Fantine as a person.
Valjean isn’t really as good of a person as he’s portrayed in the play. His instinct is always to run and look for shortcuts hence the reason he was arrested. He also has a propensity towards violence if I recall correctly. He has to deliberately stop his instinct and consciously choose to make the right choice as he sees it. It raises the question of how much we’re defined by our nature vs what we choose to do.
Javert believes we’re defined by our nature and nothing more. It’s that world view that he realizes is wrong during the uprising and it’s that world view that he can’t comprehend. I wish I could remember more of his motivations but it’s been too long. WhyNot is definitely correct with her interpretation of Lawful Good.
I’m still not convinced Javert didn’t have other recourse. For instance, when Valjean is saying he needs to take the lad to a doctor and then will surrender, why doesn’t Javert help him, and then arrest him? Simple recourse, doesn’t let him free, but doesn’t let the guy die. Lawful Good still preserved. In fact, Lawful Good upheld tighter, because “wounded man needs doctor” trumps “criminal must be apprehended”, and getting both accomplished is a bigger win.
In Javert’s world “Wounded man needs a doctor” doesn’t trump “criminals must be apprehended”. Nothing trumps “criminals must be apprehended”. Javert was raised in a prison, his mother must’ve been a convict. Instead of making him sympathetic towards convicts, it makes him resolve that virtue must be the only path towards salvation, religious and otherwise. He is as hard on himself as he is on others - when he thought he’d wrongly suspected “M. Madeleine” of being an escaped convict, he turned himself right over to the Mayor, expecting to be fired.
As for Fantine, I think the women turned on her because she was always putting up a virtuous front on the workshop. If she’d told them she was a widow with a child at first, instead of saying she was a single woman, she probably would’ve been fine. But they seemed to have bawdy jokes that she didn’t join in on, and she wouldn’t put out for the foreman, which they probably had to do. Their employer was known to be an upright and religious man. They were making rosaries. When it came out that Fantine was a “fallen woman”, he could easily (and legally) tell the foreman to sack the whole crew and hire some decent women. They needed those jobs. So telling the foreman and getting her out before M. Madeleine found out was saving their bacon, plus getting rid of someone they thought was acting above her station as a slut.
My wife and I have different opinions as to why Javert offed himself. As others here have said, Javert spent his whole life in a world of black and white, in which a person is either good or bad. (“A man like you can never change.”)
When Valjean spares his life, a seed is planted. Then he sees that the students were idealists and not just insurrectionists, and he pins the medal on Gavroche’s corpse (which isn’t in the play; I don’t know if its in the book or not). The final straw comes when he chooses not to shoot/apprehend Valjean and thereby ensure Marius’s death.
Clearly his suicide stems from his realization that the world is filled with shades of gray, and that good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things.
More specifically, though, my wife says he kills himself because he can’t handle the realization that the world view he’d been living with his whole life was not, in fact, true. I believe that he kills himself because he does not want to/cannot live in a world that is not black and white, good and evil. (There is at least one line in his final song that supports this interpretation, but I can’t look it up right now.)
Btw, seeing the musical again and having received a new Kindle for Christmas has inspired me to go read Hugo’s novel for the first time (in English of course). I’ve only read about 15 chapters, I think, but he is still introducing his first character (the bishop, who is barely a cameo in the musical). So I believe those who say that the novel goes into quite a bit more detail about the various charcter’s motivations.
Depending on your definition of ‘spares’ - when Javert meets up with Valjean in the sewers, Javert ‘has the drop on him’, as the kids would say. Valjean is exhausted and unarmed, and carrying the unconscious Marius; Javert is rested, may be armed and has pursued Valjean relentlessly for ~20 years.
Javert lets Valjean go, and in the subsequent musical number, tries (and fails) to come to terms with this act of mercy toward a criminal.
Javert and Valjean were both presented with an existential crisis. (Valjean saw that he was able to be more than a petty criminal for the rest of his life. Javert saw that people can change, and that criminals can be good people.)
When you have an existential crisis you can either progress, revert or be unable to deal with it (which leaves you in turmoil or you end up killing yourself)
Valjean progressed and became more than a petty criminal.
Javert was unable to deal with his crisis, so he killed himself.
At least that’s what I’ve gotten from both movies.
