Film Review |
Not Your Father's Cowardly Lion: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobeby George Sax |
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Is the new film version of C.S. Lewis’ famous children’s novel, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, a stealth Christian vehicle? Is there a religious message embedded within the fantastic adventure movie? Probably, but neither you nor the film’s young target audience need pay it much, if any, heed as the movie’s spectacle and fantasy narrative unfold.
Disney, which is distributing Narnia, would probably be just as pleased if you don’t, although in model capitalist hedging mode it’s quietly marketing it as Christian entertainment to churches and religious groups, as well as buying a big-media advertising blitz to brightline its broad secular appeal.
The efforts of right-wing, fundamentalist religionists like Pat Roberts to flog this as morally suitable fare, according to their heavily filtered lights (which are a far cry from Lewis’ neo-Platonist theology) are rather beside the point. (However, it’s not entirely immaterial that the movie was made by a company controlled by Philip F. Anschutz, a billionaire reactionary Republican.)
For a half-century, youngsters have responded to the world of the Narnia series much as they have to other fantastical children’s literature. There may be a serious and somber subtext working its subtle way through Lewis’ tales, but it hasn’t seemed to encumber readers with theological considerations.
Director Andrew Adams (Shrek) and his colleagues have tried to make their movie hew as closely as possible to Lewis’ work. It follows the four Pevensie children as they are sent by their mother from London to the countryside during the German bombing campaign against British cities in 1940. Uneasily lodged in the large Elizabethan mansion of a reclusive “professor” (Jim Broadbent), they eventually discover an ordinary-looking wardrobe through which they can gain access to another world, Narnia. This frozen, bucolic land (there don’t seem to be any villages or towns) has no “sons of Adam” or “daughters of Eve” (i.e., humans), but is populated by fauns, satyrs, centaurs and a variety of critters with the power of speech.
There may not be any humans in Narnia, but the four youngsters’ arrival has been foretold in a prophetic vision (no one says whose vision it is). This prophecy is of particular interest to the White Witch (Tilda Swinton), who holds cold tyrannical sway over Narnia, assisted by an S.S.-like strike force of vicious wolves. When she entices away the second youngest of the Pevensies, the secretive, vaguely resentful, self-indulgent Edmund (Skandar Keynes), with false visions of royal prerogatives and promises of Turkish Delight candy, his siblings must undertake a perilous quest to rescue him, making reluctant common cause with a weak underground resistance to the witch.
Among these resisters are a doughty, rural working class beaver couple (the voices of Ray Winstone and Dawn French) and a wily, courageous fox (Rupert Everett). The youngsters’ odyssey takes them in search of Aslan the lion (Liam Neeson), the benign founding father and guiding spirit in whose long absence the witch has established her cruel regime.
Aslan is the most obvious emblem of Lewis’ low-key, neo-Christian allegorizing; he’s a sort of Lion King of Kings, as a USA Today reporter quipped. Lewis at least once expressed his distaste for the visual “buffoonery” and exaggeration that he believed resulted from live-action movie depictions of anthropomorphic animals like Aslan. Amusingly enough, he left a small opening for an animated film, while deploring the combined “vulgarization” and “genius” of Disney’s work.
Aslan is the symbolic lodestar of the story, but the film’s recreation of him inadvertently illustrates the problem Lewis cited. Its digital and electronic embodiment of the lion is competent but uncompelling. One is persistently aware that he’s not really there amid the naturalistic settings and the human actors. Part of the problem lies in the direction and writing, which treat him so nearly reverentially, save in one fleeting confrontation with the witch.
Adams has had notable success—and maybe luck—with the four young actors, who give accomplished, emotionally persuasive performances, including even newcomer William Moseley as Peter, the eldest and the unenthusiastic hero. Georgie Hensley, as Lucy, the youngest, who discovers the magic passageway, is preternaturally engaging and intense, as required.
Narnia isn’t as Miltonically grand, tragic and arrestingly imagined as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, nor is it in the very first rank of children’s fantasies (in either book or movie form). There is a slightly confining feeling of earnestness informing the proceedings. But this probably is faithful to Lewis’ writing and it doesn’t much dampen the movie’s excitements or its genuine, mythic but homely appeal.
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