Skyweir: Actually, the movie hews closer to the novel on all those points. Eponine WAS less sympathetic in the book. Sure, she wasn't as bad as her parents were, but she was hardly the tragic heroine the musical transformed her into. Likewise, Valjean was a saintly figure, a violent and brutal robber transformed into something beautiful: "A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict, returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy, saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more nearly akin to an angel than to a man." Hugo was using him to demonstrate to his readers that a criminal could be changed through love and forgiveness, rather than hard labor and harsh imprisonment, and could even possibly become better than the ostensible agents of the law.
As for Javert, he's not a particularly tragic figure in the book, and I was glad that the musical tried to implement a few scenes from the novel to reflect that (the part where he demands punishment for himself from Mr. Madeleine for reporting him to the police as an escaped convict being but one example). He's pitiful, yes, but he's not very sympathetic at all. He doesn't believe in good or evil, only the law and lawbreakers, and it is his own lack of compassion and mercy that ultimately brings about Fantine's death - and, in the end, his own.
.
