BBC/PBS Adaptation (2018)

(originally published April 30, 2019)

Opening at Waterloo, in a HUGE visual spectacle, would be Hugo-approved. He saw Waterloo as an entryway into the novel, whereas a lot of adaptations (understandably) leave it out. And making one of the first few spoken lines be Pontmercy’s “It’s all over” was an intriguing choice—for Hugo the Battle of Waterloo was just that: an ending that was really a beginning.

Really interested in the choice to put this in chronological order. Although, the chronology is a bit wonky—if the first scenes in Paris were supposed to be late 1815, after Pontmercy came back from war (in June) and recovered, and Jean Valjean’s scenes in prison were simultaneous to that, then he got out of prison a year later? He should have been released 4 months later, in October 1815. And Tholomyès left Fantine, as the book makes abundantly clear, in 1817. It doesn’t matter a lot in the grand scheme, I suppose, apart from that situating Jean Valjean’s release in 1815 was not an accident, and I don't quite see what's gained here by disrupting the timeline.

I think this adaptation added a lot of texture to Tholomyès’s character. We recognize something familiar about him in this, which is less the case in the book. Here, he’s a type that we can feel like we’ve met—and against which we’ve warned, or should warn, every young woman we know! I found I reacted quite viscerally to him here, which is good.

They established Javert’s character well here. Showed him standing on the edge, looking down at the men in the quarry and, in one shot, only watching them by implication—they weren’t in the shot, and all that was behind him was the water—which, of course we remember representing the masses in the book, in the man overboard metaphor, etc. He doesn’t see the individual humans he’s guarding, just the phenomenon of them. And then, of course, his speech to Jean Valjean was built on lots of lines from the book.

On the other hand, I’m not at all sure about the firing squad scene. It makes a point, but I don’t think 1) Javert could have simply called for such an execution on his own authority, or 2) that execution would have taken place by firing squad. I don’t know for sure, but it seemed off to me. (Edit, later: All official executions in France, from the Revolution until the abolition of the death penalty in 1981, were by guillotine.) But it was VERY effective to have that scene, where Javert was eyeing Jean Valjean in particular, juxtaposed with Gillenormand’s line (in the next scene) “Order is restored,” referring to the monarchy. Even if the firing squad scene wasn’t historically on the up and up, it was an effective way to show the violence of “restoring order”—another notion that Hugo would definitely sign off on, particularly after the start of the Second Empire. (“L’ordre est rétabli” -- “Order is restored” is the title of a section of his poetry collection Les Châtiments, which was dedicated to his ire against Napoleon III and the Second Empire.)

It was interesting to see that people distrusted Jean Valjean not only because he was a stranger and looked poor, but also because he was so strong. His strength made the people in the street in Digne all the more afraid of him. This adaptation emphasized that dynamic—that the only thing he has to offer as a worker is a liability socially.

I thought Jean Valjean’s reaction to the Bishop was really good. In the sense that it was bad. In other words, most adaptations don’t let you see Jean Valjean as angry and resistant to the Bishop’s kindness—he’s hungry and needs a place to stay, and mostly keeps quiet during dinner. But not here—here, we get to see how difficult the Bishop’s work is in getting through to him. Jean Valjean has reason to be hostile, even against someone like the Bishop. And then again, when he gives him the candlesticks, his first reaction is anger—in the book, he reacts negatively to this at first too. But adaptations often don’t take the time to unpack the fact that we like the Bishop, but Jean Valjean does not. That takes time and nuance to establish.

I was, on the other hand, disappointed in the scene in the Bishop’s bedroom and the scene in the field outside of Digne. LOTS of potential in both of those scenes for a visual medium, but this adaptation left most of it on the table, just showing us Jean Valjean from the outside, and advancing the plot. We didn’t get to see the visions he saw and work though them with him, which would have let us into his inner life in an interesting way.

They also gratuitously dropped Fantine’s group in Paris from two fours to two threes—making the “galloping horses” carrying the men away quite a bit less apocalyptic. That was unfortunate.

But overall, very interesting so far, and quite enjoyable to see more detail about Fantine’s story in particular, as well as get a sense of Marius’s background. The choice to straighten out the timeline is interesting—makes for more movement as we jump from story to story. And it’s all been visually rich and fascinating. Looking forward to next week!

(originally published April 30, 2019)

I was really interested in how HUMAN the Thénardiers were when we met them tonight. In the book, making them monsters has its own advantages (and helps us understand the trauma of being a child misérable), but it makes it hard to see ourselves or people in the real world in them. But the actors must have gotten a handle on their motivations, because they’re both true to the book and seem believable as human beings (albeit terrible ones) here.

They did a few interesting things with Fantine here (in addition, of course, to Lily Collins’s amazing performance—such a gut-wrenching role in any form!) The broad, relatively bare landscape where she and Cosette were traveling reminded me a bit of Jean Valjean’s dream, and less abstractly, really highlighted how difficult it would have been to travel like that alone, on foot, with a small child. When she arrived in Montreuil-sur-mer, the focus on the gutter was interesting—both the English expressions that involve being “in the gutter” and the real function that that gutter served—that of a sewer—are foreshadowing for the character.

I wasn’t thrilled to see how Jean Valjean and Fantine’s relationship was made so direct when she was working in the factory. An important part of her being fired in his name but without his knowledge is that his moral principles are applied in a way that becomes immoral when it causes harm. Here, he becomes like Javert: he applies a “law” to the point of forgetting kindness and humanity. But I did appreciate that they kept the sources of “information” about her intact—the public scribe and the Thénardiers—and its character as unreliable rumor that Mme Victurnien seems to want to believe.

I’m also not sure where we’re heading with messing up Marius’s timeline. He should be old enough to go by himself to see his father when he dies, and I’m not certain this could plausibly have the same emotional effect on a child this young....? Even though it does come to him in person in his father’s last words.

And of course, Fantine’s “descent” was excruciating here—more quickly than in the book, but more viscerally. (Who here, other than me, has a dentist appointment soon??) Lily Collins was outstanding (did I say that already?), and thanks to a bit of modern technology, we did not get to forget about those missing teeth, and felt the full irreversibility of that choice. It was strange that all of the suggestions—or maybe just the one suggestion, that Fantine either ignored or misunderstood the first time—came from the public scribe. In the book, he’s just a vessel—for her information, and then for a whole bunch of wine that gets her info out of him. But here, he acts a bit as her confessor, and then pushes her into the abyss in this way, which is unsettling.

For me, having her spit on Madeleine as soon as he arrived on the scene changed things quite a bit. In the book, of course, this happens after he insists she be freed, making it a reaction not unlike the one I so enjoyed last week, Jean Valjean’s anger at the Bishop’s mercy. Mercy is hard to accept, and both of those moments express that. In addition to which, we should remember that that scene was drawn from Hugo’s life, with Hugo in Madeleine’s place—except the spit, which was fictional. Hugo had the woman he rescued spit on “him” after he rescued her, taking the glory away from himself, and in a way, accepting (indirect!) responsibility for her being in that state in the first place.

Finally, we’ll have to wait until next week to see how this adaptation concludes the Champmathieu affair, but I was alarmed to see Jean Valjean let Javert resign, and not stop him—this Jean Valjean is a bit less skilled than in the book—he loses his cool easily, has a bit of a temper, and in this case, seemed to get wrapped up in himself before he could stop Javert from resigning. I bet Javert isn’t going to wind up off the police force, so I wonder how they explain that....

As for the Tempest in a Skull, that’s always a hard scene for an adaptation, as it all happens in Jean Valjean’s head. I can imagine a spectacular series of hallucinations that might convey it, but we didn’t do that here tonight (just as we didn’t last week with Petit-Gervais). I was, however, intrigued by the coin burning into his hand like the stigmata—interesting touch.

Looking forward to seeing where we go with this next!!

(originally published April 30, 2019)

Some themes seem to be emerging, as we’re half way through the series....

Lily Collins continued to do amazing work tonight, and the headline, I think, was Fantine’s death scene, which was stunning all around. Apart from the metal bar that connects this scene to the one by the Bishop’s bedside in the book, and provides the physical threat here (see below my growing relationship with Jean Valjean as physical threat in this adaptation), it kept very closely to the book, including Javert’s insistence on technical fact and legality being the last straw that Fantine could not support.

As with the Thénardiers last week, I appreciated how human Champmathieu was here. Hugo writes his distressed female characters, his drunks, and his very poor/benighted characters all similarly, with the incoherent floods of words that we’ve discussed in the podcast as signaling a disconnect from reality or an inability to make the world around them into a clear narrative. The problem is that this can make the characters hard to adapt—turning those floods of words into long monologues on screen doesn’t convey what the scenes need. This adaptation has handled this well—boiling down what the characters say, and giving the actors something they can work with.

There were a couple of occasions where I felt changes were made to create opportunities for action—by arresting Jean Valjean in the courtroom to create a bit of action in Montreuil(-sur-mer), and in the scene in the woods between Jean Valjean and Thénardier. I think both of those could have done more interesting things if they had chosen subtlety. Imagine the tension of a sequence where Jean Valjean is allowed by a stupefied crowd to walk out of the courtroom, and has to stay ahead of Javert until he’s done what he needed to do, as in the book.... Or the opportunities for the actors that a gun-free, headlock-free scene between Jean Valjean and Thénardier would have been....

At the root of that, it seems to me, is the ongoing need this adaptation seems to have to make Jean Valjean prone to outbursts of anger. The Jean Valjean we know in the book draws his strength from simply knowing he’s strong, both physically and mentally. He doesn’t have to fight a pissant like Thénardier, and he commands the space in the courtroom once he starts speaking because his force and depth of character shine through. He doesn’t need to shout. I do wish we could see the other version of Jean Valjean.

In having him physically fight Thénardier, we also lost the moment where he gave Thénardier the note from Fantine. That’s surprisingly significant to the plot—Thénardier is one of the only people who knows of his connection to Fantine, and that makes him more dangerous. When he gives him the note, which Thénardier keeps, he has physical proof of that connection, and that hangs (silently, mostly) over all the subsequent scenes between Thénardier and Jean Valjean.

And why did we have to make Jean Valjean’s very significant nine-month delay in getting to Montfermeil into two years?! That seemed quite gratuitous to me, when the nine months between Fantine’s entrusting Cosette to Jean Valjean (Annunciation) and his fetching her (Christmas) were so clear. They’re commonly understood to represent Jean Valjean’s symbolic pregnancy. Maybe here he’s an elephant—aren’t they pregnant for two years?

But nonetheless, the Thénardiers continue to be unimaginably terrible people, which is right. I thought Thénardier’s offer to send Cosette to Jean Valjean's room worked—this is not the first adaptation to do such a thing, even though it’s not in the book, and I think the reason for that is the way it sits beneath the surface in the book later, when Éponine and Azelma are teenagers, and gives an explicit sense of Thénardier’s relationship with everyone weaker than himself. I also appreciated the detail of them almost leaving Gavroche behind. The circumstance there reminds us (although it isn’t exactly the same) of the way the two little brothers wound up abandoned, and this was a nice nod to that.

I appreciated the way Mère Innocente kept her wit, intelligence, and power here. The other changes to the convent were understandable—in the book, he takes a LONG time getting in there, and we have the whole detour with the false burial farce—so I don’t mind the departures from the plot, although I missed seeing Fauchelevent again. But I didn’t love having Jean Valjean kick down the door to the nuns’ chapel at the moment when he should have been standing in reverence of them. We get that reverence back later in a scene that’s quite nice, but that seemed like another cheap action move that cost more than it provided.

I’ll be intrigued to see what we do next. We didn’t see Marius this week, but it looks like he’ll be back next time, as the melodramatic young man we know and love.....

(originally published on May 6, 2019)

OK, so let’s just get this out of the way: THERE IS NO BROTHEL SCENE IN LES MISÉRABLES. Also, Éponine is not in the business of free peep shows to the neighbors, and Hugo worked very hard to make every interaction between Marius and Cosette pure as the driven snow, even down to their thoughts about each other. In short, I did NOT dig the tawdry efforts to unnecessarily sex this story up.

There. Now we can move on.

Two things I thought this adaptation did exceptionally well tonight were the politics and the ambush. The political context of Les Misérables, as we’ve discussed on the podcast, is a complicated one, and it can be difficult for adaptations to work all that exposition in. This one has done what’s necessary in that area relatively seamlessly, such that Marius’s conversations with Gillenormand, when they have their falling-out, and with the revolutionaries in the café Musain, can happen very much as they do in the book (until it becomes about the brothel, for some reason -- that reason being, apparently, that we want to insult TV audiences by assuming they can’t pay attention this long without a little sexy-sexy -- but I said I’d move on….). The ambush, too, worked much as it did in the book, and it was cool to see that action scene play out. It may as well have been built for the screen, but adaptations sometimes shorten it up, and it was nice to have time to get it right, in a six-hour adaptation.

The one flaw in the ambush wasn’t really in the ambush itself, it was in what they’ve done so far with Jean Valjean’s character. Part of what’s impressive about his show of force in the book is that he is generally quiet, gentle, generous, and taciturn, and his ability to dominate the Patron-Minette gang creates a contrast. By making him grumpier and more prone to outbursts of anger here -- which he has been all along -- what he did in the ambush was just another one, and it took away its punch.

And, relatedly, I’m finding myself quite bugged by the shift in character motivations around Cosette, Jean Valjean, and their relationship -- it changes both characters, but, again, chiefly Jean Valjean’s. If he is the one who decides to leave the convent, deciding to offer her choices before she demands them, then he is being, again, thoughtful, generous, selfless. Here, it’s her idea -- which is interesting in a way, and gives her a kind of agency that the character in the book is capable of, but rarely gets -- but Jean Valjean’s response is kind of appalling: he sets out to spite and punish her, showing her, on purpose, the worst of the world that she wants so badly to see, intentionally upsetting her so that she’ll wish she never wanted freedom or knowledge. That’s hardly the Jean Valjean we know. I can sympathize with wanting to find a way to avoid shading the edges of incest the way the book does. That’s WAY uncomfortable. But I can think of two or three better ways than this.

I also think we lost something in the openness of this Jean Valjean with Cosette about her mother. In the book Fantine becomes very nearly unnamable, especially as Cosette reaches adolescence, because her story is too horrible, or because her sacrifice is too sacred, or both. Having Jean Valjean and Cosette talk openly about her is so 21st century, first of all, but also, it banalizes the story, which is exactly the reason it’s treated as a holy story in the book. This, too, might be related to giving Jean Valjean a reason other than really nervous-making jealousy to not want Cosette to meet boys, but I think the cost is too high.

Motivation continues to be an issue with Javert, too--he shows up so implausibly often in Jean Valjean’s path that it’s tempting to explain that by creating the obsession we’re seeing here, where he’s still thinking about him when he hasn’t made a peep in 10 years (like, 6 or 7 years, really). But that’s just not how it works in the book. Javert is the embodiment of the Law, and the Law will never release Jean Valjean. But it’s not obsessed with him, exactly. It’s just in the nature of the Law to be a relentless problem for someone like him. That’s a bit literary, but I think a film could do it.

Still, I loved seeing Gavroche, and Mabeuf, and the Friends of the ABC tonight. I think we’ve got each of them right, so far, and as with the exposition around the politics and the ambush, I’m grateful for the time we have here to include them. Hope we’ll see more of them next time!

(originally published May 13, 2019)

I think we all learned a lesson tonight: Hugo didn’t know that cinema would be invented within a half-century of when he wrote Les Misérables, but he did write for the stage, and if he’d known about cinema, he would have wanted in. So when adapting him, in action scenes and interactions between characters, just get out of his way.

The most effective scenes we saw tonight, in my opinion, were those that looked the way Hugo wrote them: Cosette finding the letter (as she was afraid of being in the house with just Toussaint--nice keeping that detail in), the scene between Gillenormand and Marius, the image of Mabeuf atop the barricade, the powder-keg scene, Éponine’s death. Also effective was the way they portrayed the general situation in Paris in the spring of 1832: the unrest and feeling that something big was coming, and the cholera epidemic, which most adaptations leave out--juxtaposing teen romance, revolutionary idealism, and violent gastrointestinal upset is, after all, a tricky business. But here, I think we really got a good sense of what was going on in Paris at the time.

But. BUT. There are a few choices that are being made consistently here that are becoming bigger problems all the time.

The first of these is in the relationship between Jean Valjean and Cosette. This was an issue at least last week, if not earlier: Jean Valjean seems angry with her for her desire to be freer and know more about the world, and this adaptation is suggesting that his feelings and unreasonableness are the only things keeping her from running free. Here, she seemed to think that too--and, in a cringe-worthy teen-movie moment, she declared “I hate you!” as a result. Now, I know that the nineteenth-century restrictions on women are hard to portray--they’re just underlying assumptions, something everyone would have known without discussing. But even she didn’t put all of that on Jean Valjean. Meanwhile, his protection of her in the book has two sources: his knowledge of how easily she could end up like her mother--which would not have been remotely unreasonable--and the fact that she is all he has, and he doesn’t want her to leave him alone in the world. But this never expresses itself as anger toward her, or the kind of aggressive exposure to the world that we saw last week when he intentionally took her to be horrified by the men being transported to the bagne. In the book, it’s always a kind of wise and tragic resignation, that I wish we got to see here.

Related to that is Jean Valjean’s tendency toward ill-temperedness and meanness in this adaptation, which is deeply unfair to his character. Tonight, that showed up when he met Gavroche. In the book, Jean Valjean is kind to him there, and gives him a coin for his trouble in delivering the letter. Here, he forcefully takes the letter from him and frightens him off--not at all unlike what he did to Petit-Gervais. The Jean Valjean in the book would not have aggressed another tween boy without serious emotional consequences. Here, it’s as if that seminal moment outside of Digne is just….gone. If we can remember it for 1000 pages of the book, I think we can remember it for 4 hours of TV -- a follow-up to the insult to TV audiences that was last week’s brothel scene, I guess.

And of course, we still have Javert’s unreasonable obsession with Jean Valjean--to the point where he brushed off the threat of insurrection, only interested in pursuing this petty criminal from a decade earlier--even to the point where he assumed Jean Valjean would be the insurrection’s leader. Maybe this is meant to be thought of as symbolic--if it were, as the Law’s relentless pursuit of Jean Valjean is one and the same as its support of the status quo and power structures in place, then thinking of Jean Valjean as a prime example of what’s going on at the barricade is not entirely wrong. Hugo would have called them both workers in the upper mine, and imagining Jean Valjean as the head of that work crew would be fair enough. But we don’t seem to be operating in those sorts of symbolic ways here--in any event, I haven’t seen anything to signal that we are. Instead, it seems like an effort to simplify Javert, to explain his relentlessness as specific to Jean Valjean, rather than as a feature of the inexorability that he represents--that is, this obsession seems like it’s here to avoid the symbolic meanings of the character in the novel. I find that to be an unfortunate thinning of what he’s all about.

And on a somewhat more personal note, I was quite disappointed by Éponine’s scene in front of the rue Plumet gate. It stripped her of her power. She screamed almost immediately (whereas, in the book, she never had to) and what scared the bandits off (3, not 6) was a dog barking, not even her. She did eventually tell her father she wasn’t afraid of him, but only after the danger was over. This is another scene that is excellent as Hugo wrote it--not sure why we couldn’t see it that way here…. I’ll just have to keep waiting until someone does it justice.

But I will give this episode credit for keeping the various plotlines intact and in sync across a part of the plot where the novel is at its most complicated. That’s no easy task, and other than some funkiness with the overall timeline early on, the chronology of multiple-plot structure has been very well managed here.

We’ll conclude next week, with lots of plot to go--looking forward to it!

(originally published May 26, 2019)

As you may have noticed, it’s taken me a minute to get my final thoughts on this miniseries adaptation of Les Misérables in order -- there were a few reasons for that, some more related to general professoring than to podcasting. But I also wanted to take my time and think through what I have to say, both about episode 6 and about the series in general. For the most part, what I have to say about episode 6 pertains to the series in general, so I’m going to take them together.

Overall, this series has allowed us to see a number of scenes that give readers of the book a kind of pleasure of recognition, and that continued in the final episode: the leaders of the uprising asking breadwinners not to hurt their families by sacrificing themselves, Gavroche’s song (including some of the original French lyrics) in his final scene, the fall of the barricade and the final moments of Enjolras and Grantaire, Jean Valjean’s struggle through the sewers, and especially the subsidence, Marius’s visit from Thénardier.

But there are some very serious absences from that list, and therein lies my disappointment. We saw so many other Very Important Scenes in episode 6, and many of them had the same liabilities that have become increasingly troublesome with each episode of this series.

One relatively simple example is that, in an effort to make Cosette’s turmoil visible on screen, it got lost in over-the-top melodrama, and she became a bit too much of a bratty teenager -- a disservice to Hugo’s spiritual treatment of the love between her and Marius. In the book, we’re on their side, even though we know it hurts Jean Valjean, and while we understand his caution at people haunting around his house/garden/adoptive daughter, we know more about Marius than he does, and we can’t help but feel he’s wrong to separate them -- which he figures out by the end as well. Here, I kinda wanted to send her to her room and lock her in there too. It would, after all, be the only sensible choice for a 19th-century parent whose daughter puts on a bright red dress and goes running through lines of soldiers with her hair down. *clutches pearls*

I will say in passing, before I leave Cosette entirely, that I nonetheless appreciated that she had a brain in this adaptation -- she was the one who put all the pieces of the puzzle together and figured out that Jean Valjean was the mysterious hero who had rescued Marius. In the book, she is too infantilized even to witness that conversation. This was a departure, but one that I, with my 21st-century biases, didn’t mind.

The biggest liabilities in episode 6 continued to be the way Jean Valjean, Javert, and their relationship were written. To be clear, this is ABSOLUTELY NOT a criticism of Dominic West or David Oyelowo -- both actors were superb, but David Oyelowo in particular did such stunning work that, during Javert’s derailment, I found myself (fleetingly) not caring about the problems with how it was set up. He would absolutely have my Emmy vote (if I got one) for that scene alone.

But the way I see it, the problem with both of these characters and the relationship between them was this: in the book, the psychological place where each character ends up is deeply rooted in larger philosophical issues about what the law, goodness, and morality are, and in how they understand their relationship to those things -- issues that are difficult to develop on screen, I’ll grant, but not, I don’t think, impossible. In any case, this adaptation didn’t try -- either consciously, perhaps to simplify the story for TV audiences, or out of a shallow reading of the novel -- and instead, rewrote the characters’ motivations and psychological profiles to make their end points make sense another way. For Javert, that meant making him obsessed with Jean Valjean in particular, with him as a sort of fetishized criminal whose capture is more important than all others -- and so it becomes Javert’s relationship with Jean Valjean, not with law and order itself, that is upended at the barricade, taking away a lot of the depth and significance of what follows.

As for Jean Valjean, this adaptation took away a significant part of how the character speaks to the novel’s central questions by never really transforming him. In the book, he has saint-like levels of generosity and longsuffering, and superhuman strength and guile to apply to them, so that in the end, when he still seems to see himself as a criminal, a misérable, and when all of society -- including, until the last possible second, Cosette and Marius -- seems to agree, we are baffled, and more than a little outraged. We are left feeling that the whole social structure -- you know, law and custom -- that makes someone like him end up as he does -- you know, in a state of social damnation -- IS WRONG. But, of course, Hugo wants us to think that. He told us that in the Preface that I not-so-subtly cited two sentences ago. The feeling of indignation for Jean Valjean at the end is carefully constructed by Hugo to show us precisely this. But this adaptation didn’t want to sit with that feeling, it seems, so it gave us a Jean Valjean who remained angry and dangerous, who had a reason, in the end, to think and to articulate to Marius that it wasn’t safe to have him around. He continued to be someone who was capable of going to the barricade “with half a mind to kill” Marius, just as, during his night at the Bishop’s house, he was torn between crushing the Bishop’s skull and kissing his hand. In the 17 years between his interactions with these two unconscious men, this Jean Valjean apparently didn’t evolve. But the one in the book became an entirely new man, one who could, apart from a bit of misdirection on Hugo’s part that we found mostly unsuccessful, be trusted with the injured Marius’s life. The result is that when Javert pursues this Jean Valjean relentlessly, or when Jean Valjean exiles himself from Marius and Cosette’s life, it seems to make some sense, because it’s not ridiculous to see him as the “very dangerous man” that he was when he left the bagne. But much of what the book has to say about the law, through Jean Valjean and Javert in particular, hinges precisely on that being ridiculous, on there being an almost unfathomable discrepancy between who we know Jean Valjean to be and what he is in the eyes of the law (and of Javert, and to a great extent of Jean Valjean himself). 

In order to do all that in a way that corresponds more to the book, I will freely grant that an adaptation would need more time, especially with the part of the story that we saw in episode 6, and probably with other portions too, to set up these dénouement scenes. The proof of that, in this adaptation, was that a similar strategy succeeded quite nicely in the relationship between Marius and Gillenormand. Where often Gillenormand is written out of adaptations altogether, and if he is included, he’s flattened out into his royalist beliefs to give Marius something to rebel against, here, they kept very close to the pair’s full complement of emotional baggage: the differences in culture between the pre-Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary/Romantic character types, the deeply personal matters of Gillenormand having kept Marius’s father from him, insulted his legacy, and made the end of Colonel Pontmercy’s life so pitiable, and, arguably least importantly, the political differences of opinion. That is difficult to do in an adaptation too, especially for modern non-French audiences that may not be well versed in the politics of the era -- but this adaptation took the time and energy, and pulled it off quite nicely. It’s unfortunate that it couldn’t devote the same care to Jean Valjean.

Finally, and perhaps relatedly, Jean Valjean’s death scene felt “off” in a couple of ways, even though it remained affecting. It felt rushed--we lost the slow decline, like a pendulum winding down (as it’s described at one point), that we have in the book. And I was distracted by the unnecessary return to Digne -- the choice to bring the story full circle geographically was an interesting idea, I guess, and the location was beautiful, but it didn’t make sense (did the Bishop, what, leave him some property down there or something?), and didn’t fit the overall grimness of Jean Valjean’s death. In his death, just like in the end of his life, we should be left feeling that he was cheated, like fate got it wrong, apart from the tiny recompense that was Cosette’s appearance to comfort his last moments. Instead, he’s retired to this kind of Eden, still working blissfully in the garden, although he knows he will die soon, and his comfort arrived before his decline really began. He seemed to get at least a part of his reward here on Earth. Again, it seems like this adaptation succumbed to the temptation to take the edge off our feeling of injustice at Jean Valjean’s end, where Hugo asks us to sit with it in all its unease.

But the final image of this adaptation did get just a bit of that unease back, because it reminded us of Gavroche’s two little brothers, who made a fleeting appearance in an earlier episode. They are indeed two of the only surviving characters in the novel, and this is the right way to imagine them, when all is said and done. Hugo doesn’t emphasize their continued existence in misère in this same way, but we did of course see, buried in the middle of the barricade sequence -- just after Gavroche’s death -- them continuing to apply his lessons to survive on the streets. Here, by making that the final image, this adaptation reminds us that the novel’s problems aren’t solved, that Jean Valjean only saved one little orphan girl, and that all of the characters’ other efforts against misère were for naught. So long as these problems shall exist -- in Hugo’s century or in any century -- this story, in any form, may not be without use.