I suppose it's a bit unreasonable of us to complain that "you have to want to 'improve' the text" and then accuse Davies of being smug for evidently feeling that he has improved on it... But yes, it was the sense of smugness that rankled; the idea that the screenwriter was fixing things that to him were obviously lacking in the plot.
To be fair, I think a lot of it can be filed under the heading of trying to reduce the amount of pure coincidence that plays a part in the novel -- the trouble is the tin ear of the 'fixer' in question for the effect these changes have on the characters themselves. Having Javert, who is constrained by his sense of duty to an almost restrictive level, actively neglect his duty because of an invented personal vendetta is just wrong. Wrong about the character, and a thing that is wrong to do.
I've always been pretty sceptical about the 'Javert was a gypsy' dictum in fan-fiction, since it seems to be fuelled by a desire to see him as an oppressed minority; so far as I recall, the whole edifice (which appears nowhere in the book: Javert never meets gypsies, never speaks of them, and is never compared to one favourably or adversely in appearance or habits, either by the narrator or anyone he encounters in the course of the novel) is erected upon a single sentence, the one saying that his mother was 'a bohemian', which in the context of his being born inside a jail is equally likely to imply that she was simply a vagabond. (Nobody has ever suggested that the protagonists of La Bohème, or its source material, Scènes de la vie de Bohème, were intended to be either Czechs or gypsies.)
If Hugo as a nineteenth-century author had really intended one of his characters to be a gypsy, then I think he would have stuck a few stereotypes in, I'm afraid. Dark eyes and hair, swarthy complexion, second sight, an earring or two, an affinity for animals -- it's not the sort of idea you would have dropped into a random half-sentence without any point to make by it.
If you'd asked me whether Fantine was blonde or brunette I think I'd have said blonde, but I certainly didn't notice the hair colour of the actress in this version at all ;-) (And I don't really know enough about the hair styles of the period to tell whether something is accurate or not; just enough to know that up until the 1920s when short hair first became an option, putting up your hair was a marker of adulthood, and that adult women with full-length hair didn't run around with flowing locks over their shoulders... as a matter of practicality as much as anything else, I imagine.)
I don't remember Cosette in the book ever being resentful or rebellious on her own behalf -- certainly not the stroppy teenager we see on TV, although that was presumably supposed to make her more 'representative' of the viewing audience -- but one significant element Davies actively chose to suppress was the fact that Valjean basically sets her up as a princess in the house on the rue Plumet, while insisting on living like a servant himself in the outbuildings. And that Cosette quite deliberately and consciously foiled his attempt by insisting on 'visiting' him so often that he was obliged to heat his quarters and serve proper food for her benefit. She was not stupid, she was not rebelling, but she got her own way -- and she did so not for her own benefit, but for the sake of others.
That's Book-Cosette. That's the epitome of a young lady of both spirit and essential goodness, as held up to the reader by a 19th-century author. And it's ironic that a 21st-century adaptor prefers to suppress her actively powerful qualities and make her into a petulant child.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2019-05-29 05:30 pm (UTC)To be fair, I think a lot of it can be filed under the heading of trying to reduce the amount of pure coincidence that plays a part in the novel -- the trouble is the tin ear of the 'fixer' in question for the effect these changes have on the characters themselves. Having Javert, who is constrained by his sense of duty to an almost restrictive level, actively neglect his duty because of an invented personal vendetta is just wrong. Wrong about the character, and a thing that is wrong to do.
I've always been pretty sceptical about the 'Javert was a gypsy' dictum in fan-fiction, since it seems to be fuelled by a desire to see him as an oppressed minority; so far as I recall, the whole edifice (which appears nowhere in the book: Javert never meets gypsies, never speaks of them, and is never compared to one favourably or adversely in appearance or habits, either by the narrator or anyone he encounters in the course of the novel) is erected upon a single sentence, the one saying that his mother was 'a bohemian', which in the context of his being born inside a jail is equally likely to imply that she was simply a vagabond. (Nobody has ever suggested that the protagonists of La Bohème, or its source material, Scènes de la vie de Bohème, were intended to be either Czechs or gypsies.)
If Hugo as a nineteenth-century author had really intended one of his characters to be a gypsy, then I think he would have stuck a few stereotypes in, I'm afraid. Dark eyes and hair, swarthy complexion, second sight, an earring or two, an affinity for animals -- it's not the sort of idea you would have dropped into a random half-sentence without any point to make by it.
If you'd asked me whether Fantine was blonde or brunette I think I'd have said blonde, but I certainly didn't notice the hair colour of the actress in this version at all ;-)
(And I don't really know enough about the hair styles of the period to tell whether something is accurate or not; just enough to know that up until the 1920s when short hair first became an option, putting up your hair was a marker of adulthood, and that adult women with full-length hair didn't run around with flowing locks over their shoulders... as a matter of practicality as much as anything else, I imagine.)
I don't remember Cosette in the book ever being resentful or rebellious on her own behalf -- certainly not the stroppy teenager we see on TV, although that was presumably supposed to make her more 'representative' of the viewing audience -- but one significant element Davies actively chose to suppress was the fact that Valjean basically sets her up as a princess in the house on the rue Plumet, while insisting on living like a servant himself in the outbuildings. And that Cosette quite deliberately and consciously foiled his attempt by insisting on 'visiting' him so often that he was obliged to heat his quarters and serve proper food for her benefit. She was not stupid, she was not rebelling, but she got her own way -- and she did so not for her own benefit, but for the sake of others.
That's Book-Cosette. That's the epitome of a young lady of both spirit and essential goodness, as held up to the reader by a 19th-century author. And it's ironic that a 21st-century adaptor prefers to suppress her actively powerful qualities and make her into a petulant child.