Last week, during my visit to Nashville, I went to see the new movie adaptation of Les Misérables with my friends Katie, Paige and Johnny Rees from the cajun band, L’Angélus. They had all seen it twice already but were keen to escort me to the theatre, convinced that I would share their great admiration for it. They were right. It’s a truly great movie and as profoundly and movingly Christian, in its own way, and almost as intense, as Mel Gibson’s Passion.
 
I had seen the stage production of Les Misérables in London’s West End about twenty years earlier and remember being very pleasantly surprised at how healthy and Christian it was. I could not believe that the movie version would be as good, even though I’d heard from several people whose judgment I trusted that it was a good and morally healthy adaptation. Yet, as I watched the film to the  accompaniment of Katie and Paige Rees’ audible weeping beside me, I came to see that it is even more overtly Christian than the stage production. The bishop’s role appears to be even more axiomatic as is shown by the film’s final denouement, the sheer eucatastophe of which caused my own masculine trickle of tears to join the feminine flood in the seats beside me.
 
As I ponder the depths of truth that surface in this marvelous film, I can’t help but lament the cheapening of language in which the word “miserable” seems to mean “wretched” and very little else. Indeed it is often equated with something entirely negative, as in “miser”, so that the miserable are held at arms length or even in scorn. And yet, from a Christian perspective, “miserable” is inextricably connected to “miserere”, a cry for mercy. In Les Misérables our encounter with the miserable evokes our desire that they be shown mercy, not merely by their fellow man but by their loving God. The natural and the supernatural are interwoven seamlessly so that we see the hand of Providence working its healing power, redeeming the wretchedness of misery into something redeemed and therefore beautiful.