I saw Les Misérables this afternoon, and I bawled my eyes out.
But it wasn't because the film version of the famous stage musical was that good.
And I don't think it was because the characters in it were all that miserable.
There's something about seeing another person crying that makes us in the audience want to cry, like the contagion of yawns or bathroom breaks.
At some level, I think I just needed permission to cry. I was in a dark theater, sitting all alone, facing characters that were sobbing their way through songs, barely carrying the melody through teary whispers and gasps. It was OK for me to cry, too.
I cried because I love the music dearly, and have ever since high school when Harmony, an appropriately-named fellow alto in chorus introduced me to it and the nuanced differences between the Original London Cast and Original Broadway cast versions. I cried because it reminded me of spending a college semester abroad in London, where I saw the West End stage production.
I cried because the tigers come at night.
I cried because I feel my soul on fire.
I cried because he was never mine to lose.
I cried because every word that he says is a dagger in me.
I cried because I wanted it to be better. I wanted to see what I'd been hearing for the last 20 years. I wanted Marius to be handsome. I wanted Eponine to be gut-wrenching. And they weren't. And so I bawled.
But obviously, I needed a good cry, and seeing this film somehow opened the floodgates for me, even if I was crying about something less epic, like my disastrous unemployment or my hopeless spinsterhood.
Can I relate to the Paris uprising, beyond the barricades where women must sell their hair and prostitute themselves and still die of unspeakably horrible causes? No. But I can relate to desperate longing, abandonment, helplessness and identity crises?
Yes, tearfully so.
And sometimes those hidden, dark spaces need to be tapped into, their noxious gases released, just a little, just for a couple of hours, until the ducts are capped, the cheeks are wiped, ready to enter the world again, composed.
For that purpose, Les Mis did its job. (But it is not my favorite movie of the year.)