Posted: Sunday, December 16, 2012 12:00 am | Updated: 5:41 pm, Tue Jul 22, 2014.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Marva Barnett

“Les Misérables,” that most popular of musicals, comes at last to movie theaters — and on Christmas Day! What could be better than to have this story of love, grace and redemption arrive during the season of good will and generosity?

Yet, as other “Les Mis” fans anticipate this long-awaited film, my thoughts have been with my University of Virginia students: This fall we studied the novel and musical together. Eager for the movie, many know the songs by heart.

But as my student Kelly said when we were halfway through “Les Misérables”: “Now that I’m in the know, reading the whole story, I understand and enjoy the musical so much more.” And Tim, who played Jean Valjean in his high school production, has twice said, “I wish I’d read the novel before I played Valjean. It would have meant even more to me.”

Hugh Jackman, starring as Valjean in Tom Hooper’s Universal Studios movie, did read the novel — twice — before filming. He would agree that my students are right.

The musical or movie experience is richer when one has read the novel, because the novel offers depth and complexity — particularly about the central themes of love and moral progress — that the musical on its own cannot. It’s not that the book is “better” than the musical; indeed the musical is brilliant and, despite the movie’s grim trailer, ultimately uplifting. But where the musical shows a rapid, near-miraculous transformation, the novel instead focuses on Valjean’s halting struggle toward moral redemption, in all-too-human terms.

By reading the novel, you can — as Jackman, my students and I did — experience more fully Victor Hugo’s message of love, hope and perseverance.

In the movie previews, we hear the raw despair in Jackman’s, “What have I done? Sweet Jesus, what have I done?” The movie may well bring us a “Les Mis” even more faithful to Hugo’s novel.

“Hugo’s work is unbelievable,” Jackman told me in a recent phone conversation, after we connected through mutual friends in Paris. “The first time, I read it very scientifically, really breaking everything down and writing notes. I then read it again, just before we started the film, and read it just to enjoy, really.”

Jackman reviewed relevant excerpts from the novel before each day’s scene, giving him knowledge that, he said, “really changed things on the set in many ways.” In the movie’s trailers, we see how he and other actors, such as Anne Hathaway as Fantine, translate Hugo’s realism to the screen.

In the official four-minute video on the making of the film and the power of live, on-set singing, Jackman contrasts the standard “What Have I Done?” with the way he performs the song. Bringing his understanding of the novel to the scene, he shows us Valjean’s angst when the yet-to-be hero realizes what he has done and how low he has fallen.

Still, “What Have I Done?” must sum up Valjean’s transformation in only three minutes. In the musical, it’s as though the bishop’s gift of silver candlesticks acts as a magic wand that miraculously put this hardened, hate-filled man on the right track.

Difficult choices remain relatively easy and quick, despite the anguish expressed in Valjean’s “Who Am I?” However heartfelt Jackman’s, Alfie Boe’s or Colm Wilkinson’s rendition of this self-questioning, confessional song, no lyrics can convey the moral torment that Valjean experiences in Hugo’s “Les Misérables.”

In his sweeping novel, Hugo calls Valjean’s moral progress a transfiguration — “more than a transformation.” And Valjean needs several more intensely moving experiences in order to make the grueling journey toward divinity that is transfiguration.

The generous bishop has only jostled the ex-convict’s conscience; it takes Valjean’s unthinking theft from a boy to wake it up. Realizing how morally far he has fallen, he is horrified. Only then does he dedicate his life to progressing toward God — and Hugo emphasizes how arduous and ultimately human such a struggle is.

Jackman said of Valjean, “No matter who he saves, no matter how virtuous, no matter how brave, there is still an undercurrent of shame within him and a feeling that he’s not reaching that perfection — yet he never gives up on that goal.”

Throughout the novel, we see Valjean fight to overcome serious temptations and impediments on his way to transfiguration. When an innocent stranger is arrested in his place, for example, it appears to be a godsend: He need only keep quiet to remain free, accepted by society. But Valjean’s conscience will not let him rest, as Hugo reveals in the chapter “A Storm Inside a Skull.”

When my class read about Valjean’s agonized sleepless night and long day of decision and indecision, wrestling with his conscience, my student Abby called Valjean’s feelings and thoughts a “roller coaster.” Like her, we feel both his soaring hope and anguished despair as he works to make the right decision. Hugo’s novel imbues Valjean’s personal moral combat with nuances and complexity, and these 24 hours with Valjean wring our emotions and test our ethical being.

In the novel, Valjean’s hard-won triumph over self-interest — his decision to turn himself in — is only one small victory in his ongoing effort to live a good life through loving others. Without spoiling the story for you, I can say that Valjean faces and fights ever more difficult battles with the darker side of his deeply human nature.

With philosophical insights and poetic language, Hugo keeps us beside Valjean and thus inspires us to continue our struggle: Anyone can lead a better life, feel more love, move toward God, as does Valjean. We can work our own transfigurations if we truly work at them.

Even if we feel as downtrodden as Valjean, we have hope. And that is, I think, why my student Tim said that always — at the conclusion of his “Les Mis” high-school performance, while singing with the chorus, “It is the music of a people who are climbing to the light” — he felt “serene and enlightened.”

My students have been talking about that light of love in Hugo’s novel for three months. They (and I!) cannot wait to see the movie. But we know that — as faithfully gritty, starkly real and compelling as Tom Hooper’s new film promises to be — in 2½ hours it cannot match this “beautifully written” novel, as Jackman calls it.

The actor wishes he’d read it “younger in life, like when I was a student.” So why not experience both the layered depths of the novel and the searing emotional rush of the movie musical? Join Jackman in reading this great novel “just to enjoy it.”

Marva Barnett is professor and director of the Teaching Resource Center at the University of Virginia, where she teaches in the French Department. She was honored last year with the Thomas Jefferson Award for service, “the highest honor the university community bestows upon its faculty.” Editor of “Victor Hugo on Things That Matter” (Yale University Press, 2009), she is writing a book about what “Les Misérables” — both the novel and the musical — tells us about living well. Contact her at marva@virginia.edu.