The powerful film Les Miserables is not only wrenching in its portrayal of human squalor and immensely hopeful; it also is an expansive summary of the meaning of Christianity.
The premise of the story is simple: a man shown grace lives a life of showing grace, while another man shown grace rejects it and in its face self destructs. That grace shown cuts each man to his core and causes an agony answerable only by reinvention. The inspiring protagonist works out his redeeming salvation by exercising that grace; the other man refuses to accept or show grace, sticks to rightful insistence, and can face living no more.
Love versus law, giving dignity to the ashamed versus meting out just desserts, persistent hope versus historical grievance: the cinematic dichotomies are the material of a New Testament treatise, without the baggage of conditional theology. Les Miserables is but a story about people accepting (or not) the only possible enduring response to our human fallibility: grace.
To accept that grace is to receive welcome permission to live graciously; to reject that grace advances one’s own meaningless destruction.
3 Comments
ShirleyK
Not to take from your welcome and provocative slant on things, here's David Edelstein's little rant on Fresh Air:
GROSS: So one of the big movies is "Les Mis," the movie adaptation of the Broadway musical. I don't know if you saw the Broadway show. Some people are so attached to that show and other people think that it's, you know, just pretty treacly in its music. So I don't know if you have a preexisting opinion of the show and the music, but what did you think of the movie?
EDELSTEIN: No.
GROSS: Yeah.
EDELSTEIN: I came to it a virgin and what I saw onscreen was a transcendentally tasteless bombardment, an absolute horror show that in a just world would send people screaming from the theater. I saw a director, Tom Hooper, so eager to underline the fact that his actors were singing live, as opposed to post-synching to their own voices – which, by the way, I heard on this very show, Barbra Streisand has sung live despite the fact that the makers of "Les Mis" say this is an innovation.
He's so eager to draw our attention to that that, he gets his camera in really, really close, generally underneath. And the camera cants and tilts and follows them and gets right in their faces. You can practically see their tonsils. You can see every pore in their skin.
And this horrible music is coming out of the screen by actors who, in many cases, can't hit the notes. They're either sharp or flat or, in the case of Russell Crowe in some water buffalo zone of their own. And I'm sorry, I can't concede anything about this film. It is ghastly from first frame to last.
goodbadi
Fascinating. My own virgin ears must be horribly tone-deaf, as I didn't notice the pitchiness. And frankly, I didn't mind their pores. In other news, I think maybe Mr. E missed the point.
KTdid
I liked the movie, though I turned up my nose at the "glimpse only" love infatuation. I care not at all about how absolutely "on pitch" the actors are. But I ponder the deeper story. What exactly is it that steers one man in the direction of "grace" and the other in the direction of suicide? What is it?
Q.