Those were the days. Steal a loaf of bread to keep from starving and get years of hard labor in the slams. Have an accident at work and lose your job and catch tuberculosis? Become a whore until you become so sick that nobody wants to pay for "a corpse." Except in this case, the poor woman is Uma Thurman. She's thoroughly deglamorized, true, and her bloody mouth is off-putting but still, whatever she's charging isn't enough. She's tall and lissome. Come to think of it, put Uma Thurman together with Mariel Hemingway and Famke Janssen and you've got a complete girl's basketball team.

What a splendid adaptation of Hugo's novel, which I barely remember. It's not hard to follow the story but, as in the case of so many 19th-century novels, it's filled with subplots and implausibilities. Somehow -- whether it's in Paris or St. Petersberg -- everybody seems to know everybody else, and they keep bumping into one another under curious circumstances.

I see I'm skipping much of the main plot but its basic features are already familiar. Liam Neeson, the convict, breaks his parole, establishes himself as the mayor of a French village. He turns into a good and moral man and he adopts, Cosette, the illegitimate daughter of Uma Thurman. Alas, his latent identity is found out by Geoffrey Rush as Javert, the kind of bitterly devoted police official who follows the rules abjectly, even to his own disadvantage. His is one of the most famous names in literature and for good reason. He is not the personification of evil. He's an ambiguous figure whose own father was a criminal and who wants to see punishment meted out wholesale in an attempt at his own redemption. When he changes his mind, it's a stunning moment. And Rush handles the character flawlessly.

In fact, all of the performances are uniformly good and they more than make up for some of the evident weaknesses in the plot. Why, for instance, doesn't Liam Neason level with his adopted daughter and tell her the truth about his background. The daughter is played by Clare Danes, a New Yorker who sounds as if she has perfect pitch for English accents and who has the widest, most curious eyes in the business. But she has to pry Neason's story out of him. And Neasom, sheltering his secret and his adopted daughter, finds himself in the same situation as poor Humbert Humbert, becoming a jealous and demanding authoritarian father trying to control the amorous and otherwise self-indulgent impulses of a resentful adolescent girl.

The location shooting was done in the Czech Republic, which has done duty for 19th-century cities like Vienna, Paris, and others. I forget them all. In Prague you can still find thoroughfares with old stately buildings and no McDonalds. The wintry rural scenes are utterly dreary, the result of continental climates that make every exurban landscape look like a vest-pocket park in Linden, New Jersey. What a climate to be poor in.

Poverty was a cruel condition in Hugo's time or Dickens' time for that matter. And, as now, many ordinary, good, religious people attributed it entirely to a lack of ambition. It's much easier to think like a psychologist than like a sociologist. We can all understand what "motives" are because we all experience them consciously. It's much more difficult for us to sense the extraordinarily powerful social conditions that affect everyday lives. Think you have free will and can do what you want? Try wearing a toga to school. We never seem to realize how much others are impacted by systemic conditions until the results are self evident. If poverty is due to laziness, about one third of all Americans suddenly became a lot lazier in 1929 than they had been.

This is an involving story with fine performances, and you won't regret watching it.

The book is a mammoth and hugely detailed one, so it is inevitable that things would be missed out and that it wouldn't be word for word, Victor Hugo's writing is far too rich for that. Even if the details are missing or changed around the spirit of the source material is welcome(though I try not to be a "purist, I have always believed in judging things on their own merits),something that the second half of this film doesn't really do. It is not an awful film, there are a lot of impressive things but it didn't entirely work and fares the weakest film version of Les Miserables.

It is very beautifully shot and the costumes, settings and scenery are authentic(at least it doesn't look too clean) and very easy on the eye, so it is a very well-made film. Basil Poledouris' music score is as stirring and hauntingly beautiful as is characteristic of him and his other scores like Conan the Barbarian and Hunt for Red October. Billie August at least directs with style and pace without being too flashy or dull, though it's the kind that gets the job done admirably but passion-wise rather lukewarm. There are three excellent performances as well.

Liam Neeson commands the screen as he always does and gives a real nobility and dignity to Valjean, with an effort in the first half to make him compassionate, the second half doesn't allow for him to go into as much depth as it could and should but Neeson, the great and conscientious actor he is, gives it his all. Geoffrey Rush's Javert is ruthlessly cold and authoritative, yet there is signs of a tortured soul too which stops Javert from being too one-dimensional. On paper, Uma Thurman seemed all wrong, on film she is a deeply moving Fantine(even perfectly fitting the role physically) and of the adaptations her Fantine is one of the better developed ones. Peter Vaughn is appropriately kindly as the Bishop,and young Cosette is adorable. The first half was excellent to me, fidelity to the book is strong, Fantine's plight is very tragic and poignant and Valjean and young Cosette's escape from Javert and to the Convent does have a tension to it.

Unfortunately the second half doesn't maintain that promise, the production values, music and Neeson and Rush's performances are still top drawer, but Claire Danes, the characterisation and the ending are off. Claire Danes I found terrible as Cosette, she is both a spoiled brat/rich girl and completely bland(it's like her Juliet from Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet again) and her pouting is annoying. Hans Mattheson fares a little better but not much, he has the looks but he is stiff and tries too hard, also coming across as a rather wimpy leader for the barricade. The ending has no emotional impact whatsoever and is very abrupt, if you have not read the book or seen the musical you will be asking why Javert committed suicide, in fact this is the sort of adaptation that evokes more questions than answers. Most of the lines in the script are true to period and don't resort to cheesiness or awkwardness, but characterisation is very thin here, with perhaps the exception of Fantine and her chemistry with Valjean.

You never really see why Javert is pursuing Valjean in the first place and why he continues to do so(those familiar with the source material will do but others won't, did the script-writers think that everybody knows the book or something?). Cosette and Marius' relationship is very shallow and seems to be focused on too much(if Eponine was intact there definitely would have been much more depth),Javert has moments where what he does contradicts what he stands for(especially at the end) and Valjean has moments like at the end and when he's hitting people around where he doesn't seem to have changed or still show signs of being immoral(or better put, finding that goodness doesn't come easy to him) which renders Javert's suicide meaningless somewhat. In the end, because of the lack of depth it is the case of not caring for the characters or not getting to know them. The story is powerful, tense and poignant in the first half but feels underdeveloped and without any true passion in the second half, the barricade just doesn't have the impact.

Overall, not a bad film because the first half is strong and those who people would have seen the film for in the first place likewise, but the second half made it a disappointing one. On its own, while under-characterised and with a bad ending, it is relatively decent but adaptation-wise there's much better like the 1934 film. 5/10 Bethany Cox

I should admit that I've never read Victor Hugo's novel, so I can't comment on how Bille August's movie compares. But I thought that it was a good movie. An obvious point is that protagonist Jean Valjean (Liam Neeson) stole the bread in the first place because he was starving, as were pretty much all French peasants; what other choice did he have? OK, so there have been so many movie versions of "Les Miserables" that why did we need another one? Well, any way that they can get the story across is important. Liam Neeson, Geoffrey Rush, Uma Thurman and Claire Danes all make the most of their roles. So I recommend this one. Worth seeing.