Sing it Again

Six inches of heavy wet snow has fallen this afternoon.  Chicago natives are breathing a sigh of relief that winter seems to be looking more normal. Our Christmas tree is dropping its needles at an ever increasing rate.  With my belly pushing against the buttons of my pants and leftover scraps of wrapping paper littering the condo floor, I feel that happy contentment of a holiday well spent. Snow is falling outside, the girls are playing at a friends’ houses, and I get to take a few hours to see the much anticipated Les Miserables.

I loved every 157 minutes of it.  I know critics dismiss the film as overly emotional, bombastic, amateurish, an everyman’s cinema version of an already overly dramatic musical, but what do they expect???  It is musical theater, people!  Don’t order a pizza and then complain there is cheese on it.  The genre defines the art.   Love it or hate it, musical theater is meant to pull on your heartstrings with loud, big, emotional music and plot.  Les Miserables does not disappoint.  It has all the love, the angst, the sorrow, the arm raising, chorus singing, grand-scale producing, emotionally delivered songs any good musical worth its weight in intermission snacks can deliver.

I admit my relationship with Les Miserables is not entirely neutral.  By the tenth grade I had the whole musical memorized.   I’ve seen the production on stage more than once.  Under the starry eyed cloud of adolescent love with a singing thespian in my own high school, I saw Les Miserables when it came to Atlanta.  With Cosette and Marius singing in the background I felt the first flutters of teenage love. Caught up in an idealized view of the theater at my private school and a teenage sense of self importance, I was quickly under the spell of Les Miserables and its songs.  It was only later that I realized the story of Les Miserables is much less about Cosette, Marius, or Eponine, but rather much more about the experience of redemption and grace in the life of Jean Valjean.  

Ultimately, I think this is why this story is so appealing.  We see a man “standing in his grave” receive forgiveness and mercy.  We see another man, Javert, obsessed with proving his own righteousness, with making the world ‘right’ in his own power, and unable to receive grace.  The contrast of these two men, the chase of the self righteous pursuit of justice verses the brokenness of a man whose life is changed by grace, is as stark as the way their lives end.  Seeing them sing at the same time in a melodic argument of dramatic tension gives the audience an emotional hanger on which to hang a universal struggle.  Why is it so hard to forgive?  Why is it so difficult to be forgiven?  How can forgiveness change us?  Can broken relationships ever be mended? How can our receiving God’s forgiveness free us to live for others? Is there a reason to live that is bigger than myself?  These are the questions that Les Miserables makes accessible to people of different ages and experiences.

I am glad the theater was dark, because I like to think no one saw me singing along with almost every song in the film.  I didn’t think there was a bad actor in the bunch.  Anne Hathaway has gotten a lot of attention for her performance of “I Dreamed a Dream,” but it was Eddie Redmayne’s performance of Marius and his delivery of “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” that brought tears to my eyes.  Russell Crowe does a praiseworthy job of playing Javert, but I really like Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean.  I like it when a story spans different seasons of my life, and the characters with whom I identify change as I grow older.  Like Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, which I’ve read several times in different seasons of my life, Les Miserables has spanned the decades.  With each new reading or telling of the story I find myself sympathizing in different ways with different characters.  What stories keep telling themselves to you?  How do they change?  How have you changed? How is that reflected in the way you hear the old stories?