Smart Movies with Caroline: Les Miserables Ain't Miserable!

"Les Miserables was the WORST play ever! Everyone dies and then they sing all the time while they die. Yuck!" my mom told me after seeing the theater version of  Les Mis. She still refuses to watch the movie with me! LAME.

And what about my sister Melissa, who saw Les Mis with Mom? To answer that, she showed me this meme the other day:

I had no opinions on Les Mis until my boyfriend Andy's sister Anna encouraged me to see the new movie version with her. Since she and I tend to have really similar tastes in movies and books, I decided to give it a chance. 

Three hours later, Anna and I left the theater sobbing, red-eyed and for the rest of the day drove the other Hazeltons nuts with our "Meh remember when Jean Valjean blah blah blah? THAT WAS SO BEAUTIFUL!" shrieks all day. I loved Les Mis so much I drug Andy to see it again for Valentine's Day. That dummy laughed hysterically when I cried quietly during "I Dreamed a Dream." Hmph.

But what makes Les Miserables beautiful instead of miserable like we cognate-noticing folk might assume? For me, Les Mis takes the cake on its themes. 

Redemption. Jean Valjean is a convicted thief. Serving a  19 year jail term, he was known nothing more than "24601," his prisoner number. Released on probation, no one will give him a day's work and he finds himself dying of starvation until a priest has compassion on him and gives him food and shelter. Still a thief, 24601 steals the church's silver. Instead being sent back to jail after his capture by the guards, the priest insists that he gave Valjean the silver as gift. Shocked, the priest tells Valjean to take the silver and to use it to turn his life around.

Valjean does so and more. Years later when the story returns, he's the mayor of a town with a  purpose of rescuing those who have fallen.  He saves Fantine, a woman whose affair left her as a single, struggling mom who resorts to prostitution to care for her child Cosette. He redeems Cosette from her orphan status upon Fantine's death and saves her lover from death in a sewer. He even forgives Javert, his mortal enemy.

Love. "To love another person is to see the face of God." When we see at the end of the movie all of the people  that Valjean has helped through the love the priest showed him long ago with the silver, we see how sacrificial love's chain reaction originates from God's flawless love.

Hope. " I love Les Mis because it's real. Life is full of pain and rarely goes the way we want it to. We never move forward, like boats in a harbor.

For the poor of France, their short-lived revolution ends in blood soaked streets and "Empty Chairs and Empty Tables." For Fantine who once had hope, "Life has killed the dream I dreamed." 

Yet when this world fails us, when this world kills our dreams, there is a "world beyond the barricade that you long to see." Our mistakes have left us 24601s but God's redemption has re-birthed us into Jean Valjeans. 

And that's the truth. We spend our life here as les miserables, meaning the wretched ones, but when tomorrow comes we will cross the barricade into God's presence forever.