Bille August's new film version of Les Misérables takes a similar approach. It zeroes in on the novel's heart--Javert's misplaced zeal for justice and Valjean's inability to escape his past--and cuts away everything that doesn't advance that plotline. The result is a serviceable but only occasionally engrossing film that will frustrate anyone hoping to be immersed in another time and place.

Liam Neeson is well cast as Valjean, who spent 19 years at hard labor for stealing bread before being paroled in 1815. Inspired by the trust of a cleric, he settles in the town of Vigau and becomes its mayor and a respected industrialist. But Javert (Geoffrey Rush), a former guard in the prison quarry who has been assigned to Vigau, recognizes Valjean and denounces him.

Javert is further angered by Valjean's kindness toward Fantine (a grimy Uma Thurman), an unwed mother whose death leaves her daughter Cosette without money or guardians. Valjean retrieves Cosette and manages to elude Javert long enough to establish a life in Paris, where the girl grows up to be Claire Danes and falls in love with a young revolutionary, drawing the renewed attentions of the obsessed policeman.

No attempt is made to explain or even evoke the complexities of Parisian politics in the post-Napoleonic period; Marius, the revolutionary, talks vaguely of the king and suffrage but names no names. Without context, the student agitators look like foolish idealists, Cosette's love for Marius comes across as a moony crush, and the themes of freedom and order that give resonance to Valjean's struggle are muted and oversimplified. All that's left to dramatize is Valjean's occasional confrontations with Javert, which do exhibit enough tension to drive the story along. Neeson and Rush are at ease with both their dialogue and their silence, which is more than can be said for the mutating accents of Thurman and Danes.

The filmmakers match the stripped-down story with a spare, clean production design and uncomplicated cinematography. It's hard to blame August or screenwriter Rafael Yglesias for the bare adequacy of Les Misérables; their bosses no doubt did everything but storyboard this for them. The arthouse version of Les Misérables had been done in 1995 by French director Claude Lelouch; all Columbia Pictures and Mandalay Entertainment wanted out of this version was a film with some prestige names to capitalize on the popularity of the musical.

If I had remained a teenager interested only in finding out what happens next, I might be satisfied with a movie that accomplishes those meager goals with some integrity. But grown-ups should know that what seems like disposable digression is actually the stage that supports the action.