Les Misérables

Bille August's Victor Hugo adaptation, and one of the most heavily pruned film versions of the novel: more than fourteen hundred pages cut to a hundred and thirty-four minutes. The barricade section is shortened and the Marius and Cosette story almost entirely removed. What it does keep is the novel's real engine: the pursuit between Jean Valjean and Javert. Valjean served nineteen years at hard labour for a loaf of bread, changed his identity and became a respectable factory owner. When Javert recognises him it stops being about catching a criminal; the man cannot accept the idea that a person can change. Liam Neeson plays Valjean and Geoffrey Rush plays Javert, with Uma Thurman as Fantine and Claire Danes as Cosette. The most argued-over choice is the ending. The film closes on Javert's suicide, with Valjean walking away smiling from the spot where the inspector threw himself into the Seine. In the novel the story runs on for months from there and ends with Valjean's death; the wedding of Marius and Cosette and the farewell at Valjean's deathbed are both absent here. Who it is for: viewers who like a classic reduced to the tension between two performers, told in an orderly period register. Who it is not for: anyone who loved the novel. Too much has been cut, and Hugo's social argument is largely gone.