Les Misérables
At first I thought the ending, with its ambiguous fade to black and <PERSON> quote (“There are no bad herbs or bad men, only bad cultivators”), was a cop-out, a way to avoid taking a stance, but I don't think any of the alternatives (both lowering their weapons, or one of them attacking) would have been more satisfying. If they both had lowered their weapons, it would have been false humanism, as if shared recognition of one another’s humanity is the cure to the tensions the film depicts; if the cop had shot, it would have been a Blues Lives Matter moment; if the cocktail were thrown, it would have been even worse. All are (im)moral tales with varying levels of optimism/pessimism, but none feel intelligent or truthful.
So where did Les Misérables go wrong? To understand its shortcomings, it is helpful to look at some of the films to which it has been compared. <PERSON>, whose ending provides the source for this film's, is a better film than Les Misérables because its viewpoint on race, poverty, and policing is multidimensional and it takes seriously the individuality of its characters. The tensions within the impoverished exist in La Haine not to provide a narrative payoff, but to flesh out the film’s reality. It is not panoramic—it hones in on a trio of characters—but the result is not a smaller scope but, on the contrary, more memorable secondary and tertiary characters and conflicts. Events and interactions divorced from hermeneutics and narrative mechanisms are more, not less, significant precisely because they “don’t matter.” They replicate the real-world conditions that inform the film rather than trying to impose meaning on them through what is—as all films are—an incomplete, fragmented, and constructed work. La Haine convinces us of its reality by letting significance linger in the background, while Les Mis rings hollow by virtue of its insistence.
Do The Right Thing is also a better film than Les Mis, in part because it assumes very little. 306
Les Misérables assumes a great deal about the relations between citizens and police, and its characters feel less like individual agents than archetypes, plot devices, and symbols. Its events, accordingly, feel like they are making a point rather than emerging organically from the internal drama.
The question Do The Right Thing poses is also more specific, and by investigating one topic—the presence/absence (or lack thereof) of African-Americans in public spaces—it is also able to ask about related questions. Race relations, capital, ownership, the line between private and public spaces, gentrification, immigration and assimilation all become subjects of the film. Les Mis asks too large a question⁠—in fact, it doesn't even ask a question, it mostly just presents a topic⁠—about the racialized relationship between poor Muslim residents and the mostly white police. There is no nuance to extract and no other issues to ponder, and the central thesis—that little has changed about the unjust system <PERSON> observed in that very neighborhood 150 years ago—is laid out at the beginning and demonstrated with efficiency. This is worth repeating: it is laid out; it does not emerge from the fabric of the film. It is demonstrated rather than explored. It works with efficiency rather than with any one of a number of nouns that are more desirable when experiencing art, like "beauty" or "brilliance" or even "aplomb" and (perhaps the best of all of them) "contradictions."
The baby lion is cute af though. 306