Last night I saw -for the uptenth time- the 1998's version of 'Les Miserables' by director Billie August, and as excited and hopeful as I am to see the new musical version by director Tom Hooper, I couldn't shake the vague suspicion of impeding abridgments to land a commercial-(and Oscar)-worthy crowd pleaser.
So here are the metrics by which to judge whether 'trimming down' a timeless classic is actually 'dumbing down' complexities for a less 'alert' generation:
- Extending Fantine's role past her set expiration time mid-story in order to give Anne Hathaway more time to shine.
- Extruding all catholic references (which are pivotal to the story) to make the movie less-religion driven and more "politically correct". Whatever that means in this day and age.
- Fumbling around with French History ignoring the time, the place, and the circumstances that led to the June Rebellion, in order to serve the masses an archetypal and timeless "French Revolution" setting, which in reality would be a masticated galvanization of all the key years (1789, 1793, 1830, 1832, 1848, 1870) which served as stopovers that ended in the consolidation of the French Third Republic.
All the above notwithstanding, the new version of 'Les Miserables' will still be great -me thinks-, and even more so if my suspicions turn out to be baseless. I can't wait to be proven wrong.
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