I have seen Les Miserables and Lincoln. Both are deeply moving and credible in their hopeful estimation of humanity’s prospects, despite the ubiquity of suffering and injustice. In the film Dr. Zhivago there is a scene where the revolutionary General Strelnikov scolds Zhivago, saying “the personal life is dead in Russia.” Les Miserables and Lincoln, like that older film, weave intimate personal stories into the fabric of vast historical movements and conflicts, intensifying  everything and belying General Strelnikov’s dismissive remark.

In this latest incarnation of Les Miz, and in Lincoln, what is most authentically personal is magnified by the sweep of history, not extinguished by it. Even when individuals are buried under the flood of impersonal events, their stories and songs have the capacity to lift us to a place higher than heaven and touch us at a place as deep as death.

In the case of both Lincoln and Les Miserables , there is even a place for humor to be found. In the latter film, the “Master of the House” Innkeeper and his wife achieve a kind of transcendent rascality that serves to temper Valjean’s earnest high-mindedness and Javert’s obsessive legalism. In Lincoln, the war-weary president’s homespun humor does not just lighten the mood, it celebrates the absurdity of all human pretensions at mastery or control. In Lincoln, it is clear that no governing body, President, or President’s wife is “Master of the House,” but only some of them get the joke.