Remember when I used to write out adaptation reactions? Well, I sure did watch Les Misérables 2000, and—wow! What an impressively bad piece of television from all directions. I find it deeply compelling and will doubtless watch again. The folks of this year's Les Mis Letters on Discord were treated to my live react. Here, I'll simply outline the high (?) points:
The plotting is bad. This is a curious accomplishment, on account of it's based off of a novel that—despite its length and digressions—has a coherent, tidy, and driven sense of plot. LM2000 fails here, I think, for two reasons: 1) the chronology is wobbly, which creates disorientation for a viewer trying to track events 2) it freestyles subplots but doesn't make alterations to the overall story, resulting in the new material feeling disconnected and meaningless. I am totally fine with adaptations being creative, but when Robert in '52 is a more coherent and meaningful addition to the story, you might have gone wrong.
The acting is bad. So many of the cast members seem tired—I'm a fan of Malkovich, and I think he's interesting here, but he's peculiarly exhausted in his delivery. Steffen Wink (who plays Enjolras) stands out as being enthusiastic (bizarrely), and Asia Argento as Éponine sometimes aspires to be a Hermine Karagheuz in her delivery, but overall: they were definitely handing out downers instead of uppers on this set.
The dialogue is bad. We have all of us writers been journeymen once. Most of us, as journeymen, did not get to script professionally produced television. Good for whoever landed that job, I guess, despite the pain they caused me. And—y'know—despite my love for the fidelity of a '25 or '72, I do not demand an adaptation quote Les Misérables. Further, I understand that the subtitles I was provided with are, with all appreciation for the person who made them, a little wonky. Regardless of both these things: lord, do these characters say some dumb shit. If you haven't watched it yet, wait 'til you get to yellow is the color of happiness.
Did you want a Jean Valjean who is violent, brash, dim-witted, and a sexual predator? Me neither! Given rumors and accusations surrounding Gérard Depardieu's personal conduct, quite possibly he's chosen to play the role as a kind of self-insert. Most adaptations go the "I don't know, I guess this is a story about redemption?" route, but here's LM2000 boldly asking instead: what if criminals are inherently evil? (We could talk about the ways in which '98 and BBC 2018 share this fault—but I cannot emphasize the degree to which Valjean in LM2000 is, ultimately, a villain, which is not at all true for either of those.)
No, really: Jean Valjean is a villain.
Really.
So: a character who makes unambiguously morally bad choices like locking up and wanting to fuck his daughter I wouldn't always call a villain per se—that implies a role in the story as well as being a value judgment. However, even though the show tries to preserve the final moment of Marius' realization that Valjean is his savior and a good man, we the viewer know he is not. We have seen him be menacing, be violent, be controlling, be nasty, we know that Marius was correct to want him separated from Cosette. He's a Bluebeard, and the story of LM2000 knows he's a Bluebeard, it treats him as one, even as it gets incoherently tugged back to being Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and hits emotional beats it hasn't earned and doesn't really want to have.
No, really: Valjean wants to fuck Cosette.
Really.
At the convent, Cosette lets down her hair to indicate to Valjean she will visit him in the gardeners' hut that night. Valjean rhapsodizes to Fauchelevent—in a rare case of Depardieu's acting reflecting that there's a beating heart in his chest—about her beauty. The Mother Superior is shown to equate letting down one's hair to sexual availability. We then cut to Cosette and Valjean in bed together. Their dialogue refutes that they fucked because otherwise it would be very intuitive for the viewer to assume they did so. This viewer remains unconvinced they didn't. I was spoiled for the explicit incest (Valjean, as part of his confession to Marius, makes it clear that his interest is sexual), but I would've known at this moment where the relationship was headed.
You could read this Cosette as an interesting representation of how people who experience abuse can become attached to their abusers, particularly where isolation normalizes the relationship for them. Or not.
They could have given the show the tagline Javert Shows Up. Where's Javert? He's giving Fantine financial advice soon after she becomes a sex worker. He's at the Sergeant of Waterloo asking little Cosette if she's OK because he got lost on the way back to Montreuil. He's at the convent interrogating the Mother Superior. He's in the university as an undercover student telling the Amis not to rebel. I'm used to Javerts showing up where they ought not (at Valjean's release from Montreuil and to the Rue Plumet, mostly), but this version (with an air of exhaustion) is everywhere.
Malkovich and his leather coat are—perhaps unsurprisingly—my favorite part of this adaptation. I like his expressive forehead, his futility, his absurd and unsettling slow walk into the Seine (it's silly—then Malkovich shivers). In precisely one moment LM2000 manages to have an unusual flash of insight into the novel compared to other adaptations: Javert, during the Montreuil era, declines to explain to a colleague/superior (I fail to recall and I refuse to re-watch in this moment) what precisely he's on to—he's career-focused and embodying the artistic desire not to "brush the bloom off the rose", notes lost in television and fandom alike.
I am trying to wrangle the thematic implications of Javert coming from a family who hunt criminals—something about blood and history as destiny? Is LM2000 so invested in the idea of criminality as inherent that an upright police officer being the child of criminals is discordant? Is it simply fucking stupid? I don't know.
I would urge any viewer to anticipate and enjoy the Legless Wife, who is the symbol of Javert's moral awakening.
Really!
Yes, I should say: don't bother watching this, pals. Except: if you are real intense about Les Mis, watch lots of adaptations, and enjoy bad media if it gives you something to chew on, I won't actually say don't—in part, yes, because I like the idea of others suffering with me, but also because this version has been an enriching experience. It prompted bafflement. Confusion. Distress. Contemplation of why you would take a story about the flaws of society and make it about the flaws of a man, and how this is merely an amplification of how the story has been told again and again since its origination. More confusion. An ineffable calm effected by Malkovich's voice. Hilarity. Anxiety. So much! So bad! And yet—yes, I'll watch it again. Despite itself.









