Les Mis

The opening of the new movie of “Les Misérables” is complete with a slimmed-down Anne Hathaway—but was there anything for her to slim down from? And has anyone adequately remarked on how odd it is to have a film star who shares a name with the wife of our top bard?—about as likely as to have a Fellini actress named Beatrice Portinari. Anyway, the release of the new film is one of the truly cheering events of the Christmas season. Cheering because it suggests that what the boys in the quarterlies used to call “a continuity of culture” persists, that old stories can still be the best stories. We insist that this is so to our students and our kids often enough, but only when a big entertainment conglomerate is willing to make a box-office bet on it—not in the half-hearted way of an “updated” “Gatsby” but in the whole-hearted, bet-the-barricades manner of an operetta adaptation set in the Paris of the eighteen-thirties—does it seem truly so.