A Christian friend in the movie industry, upon seeing the
new “Les Mis” in advance, mentioned that someone opined that the last shot
seemed to attempt a somewhat anti-Christian final message. I don’t really agree with that; it seems that
sort of final shot is pretty much exactly what is called for by the “everybody
reprise” finale chorus; moreover, the notion that those who had died in the
course of the film would live on in some way (if that was his objection) is not
inherently anti-Christ.
However.
The real attempted strike against the obvious (and
gorgeously portrayed, in the original show as written) Christian theme of the
story was made at the very heart of the story.
In the stage production, the climax of the play is Valjean’s
prayer. Marius has been seriously
wounded, Valjean risks his own life to haul him off the barricade and flees
with him into the sewer. It is there, in
the dark, filthy tunnel, in the literal shadow of death, that Valjean sends up
his desperate prayer begging for the life of Marius, and offering his own in
exchange. This is the climax of the
story, and the climax of Valjean’s spiritual journey of Christian
sanctification from bitter, selfish thievery to self-sacrificing Christian
charitas (“greater love hath no man. . .”).
The emotional punch of Valjean’s aria there is, in this context, quite
literally breathtaking (as anyone who has seen the show and has any kind of
functioning human heart can attest).
The first thing the filmmakers did to attenuate the
power of this clearly Christian message of self-sacrificial love was to utterly
obliterate the emotional impact by setting the prayer before the battle. In the movie, Valjean is singing this prayer
while Marius is perfectly safe, sleeping peacefully. Not only does this rob the number of its
desperate emotional punch, it makes Valjean’s (now-vague) pleadings seem a bit
whiny. “Oh, he might get hurt; please
let’s not let him get hurt or anything, or maybe die, or maybe whatever; stuff
could happen, it could be bad; could that please maybe not happen?” Sheesh, Valjean; sure, he could be hurt, or
he might be fine. The song that was a
desperate plea to God for a man’s life, and an open offering of his own in
exchange, is now reduced to an anxious father’s borrowing of trouble for his
daughter’s boyfriend.
Worse, by having Marius wounded AFTER the prayer, the
statement is made that the prayer was utterly ineffective. Rather than another demonstration of the
sovereignty of God in this man’s life, instead he prays this prayer, then
Marius is indeed wounded and they end up in the sewers, literally swimming in
unimaginable filth.
You might think, “Well, they could create that kind of
environment in the movie as you never could on stage, so maybe they just really
wanted the sewers to be truly disgusting, that’s why they did that. And if the sewer was going to be that sort of
experience, they really couldn’t have him singing in there, so they had to put
the prayer elsewhere.” And indeed, it
could be that, but for a couple of things.
For one, they did seem to be making some effort at
creating a believable 19th century Paris. But anyone with any kind of serious wound who
then was literally soaked in that kind of filth would surely never have
survived in a pre-antibiotic era. Their
own standards of verisimilitude (witness Fantine’s wrenchingly graphic descent
into prostitution) thus argue against this.
If you still want to give them the benefit of the doubt—and
it is true, filmmakers often seem to get carried away when it comes to violent
or disgusting special effects these days—the filmmakers themselves have given
us blatant, unmistakable signs that their treatment of the prayer was intended
to be as anti-Christ as it could be (while yet retaining that song, which after
all could never be cut, as it is one of the most recognized and popular of the
show).
Now pulled from its proper emotional context, the
emasculated song is shot in a setting where anti-Christ symbols are overarching
and unmissable. For much of the song,
Valjean is shown to be standing in front of a wall where a huge and obvious “all-seeing
eye” is prominently displayed, and in fact given the most powerful position on
the screen (above him and on the audience’s left, where Western viewers would
look first to begin scanning, as a page of text). If you are a Christian, you might wish to
interpret this as some kind of “God is watching over him” message—as I first
tried to do—but again, with their apparent attention to historical accuracy,
what on Earth is that big painted eye even doing on a wall there? And why not, again to be period-true, simply
incorporate a recognizable Christian symbol instead? Indeed, the filmmakers have been willing to
include at least some crucifixes in the film (more on that later); so why not—if
your intention is to show the presence of God visually-- simply have a crucifix
on the wall inside the room where Valjean is singing the song?
If we still weren’t sure that the eye was intended to
be anything but “God watching over him,” the other shot prominent in the
filming of the prayer makes firmly clear the filmmaker’s intent. This is the image of Valjean through a window
pane in the shape of a pyramid, with an ambiguous shape atop it that, combined
with the large and obvious single eye, leaves perfectly clear that these are
anti-Christian marks upon this scene. To
those “in the know,” they are clearly saying “Don’t worry, we get that his
words sound Christian, but we negate their meaning.”
Still reeling from this, and wishing/hoping I had to be
mistaken about it, we come to the “confession” scene, where Valjean tells
Marius the lie he has been living. When
we first see them together, there is a small crucifix on the wall behind them
(all crucifixes in the film are tiny), and the entire shot is filmed at an
angle. This stood out glaringly to me,
but I thought, “well, that could be cool—they might be showing how Valjean’s
lie has made his life unbalanced before God, and after the confession, they
might return to this shot, now straight up, and show how confessing the truth
allowed him to get ‘right’ with God.”
But no, we see only the small, unstable Christian symbol, and after the
confession, no sign of Christ at all.
As a further smack in the face against Valjean’s
self-sacrifice for Marius, the filmmakers give us a little clip that apparently
is only in there to show us that Valjean’s death in fact has nothing to do with
Marius; we see this man whose practically super-human strength has been on
display throughout the film suddenly falter and apparently have a heart attack
lifting his chest of worldly wealth into a carriage. So, he hasn’t given his life for his fellow
man; rather, his worldly strength just apparently stumbles to a rather ignoble end
as he runs away from his daughter.
In the final scene, Valjean is dying in a convent. This is certainly an environment where one
would expect to find Christian symbols in prominent display (we have a convent
near our home, which I visit frequently; believe me, there is no room or
hallway where one is not visually reminded of God’s relationship with us). However, in the stark stone room in this
film, there is only a chair, some sort of table (an altar?) seen only in part,
and two candle stands with lit candles, the light from one of which displays a
clearly pyramidal shape.
My Christian friend concluded that, no matter what the
filmmakers may have intended, they couldn’t really negate the statement in that
last scene that “to love another person is to see the face of God.” True enough.
But “new age” anti-Christ teaching is happy to equate people with gods—to
appeal to original sin; quite literally, the oldest story in the book—to tempt
us to believe that in fact somehow we are God or can be God; so simply making
sure that nothing refers to Christ (and thus the reality of God in relationship
TO people, rather than “people themselves are god”) is probably enough to make
them quite comfortable with that statement, rendered “to love another person is
to see the face of god-as-that-person-is-god-so-are-you-really.”
Still, while I cannot deny that the filmmakers did
their level (un-level?) best to weaken the Christian message of this clearly
Christian story, I must ultimately conclude, “it is to laugh.” The story is about redemption and
self-sacrificial love, period. Anything
you do to weaken that theme just degrades the quality of your storytelling of
it (and indeed, they have done so with this adaptation, as the shape of the
film now leaves ambiguous what exactly the climax even is), not the quality of
the original story. God knows the end
from the beginning, and those of us who know Christ know the end, too: God wins.
The dragon can thrash his tail all he likes, and damage this or that
material thing, but in the end, the Word is vastly more powerful. An excellent example is this film adaptation,
which aside from these silly and gratuitous attempts to weaken the Christian
message, otherwise contains some elements of very good filmmaking—the opening
scene, especially, is stunningly well done with respect to transferring the
sense of the play into cinema—and which, despite the filmmaker’s best(?)
efforts to minimize its message, nevertheless continues to tell the story of
one man’s redemption through Christ.
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