A Marvelous Excursion in the Lion's Kingdom

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

The New York Sun, December 8, 2005

If there's one thing that Brits of the old school didn't appreciate, it was a fuss, and if there's one thing we know about the repressed, eccentric, and misogynistic C.S. Lewis, it's that he was a Brit of the old school. Nevertheless, it's easy to imagine that Lewis, a man who relished vigorous debate, would have enjoyed the fuss that has newly enveloped his Narnia in controversy, rancor, and - from the faithful - fresh adulation. As scolds scold, his vision is sexist, Anglocentric, and - fashionably - maybe even Islamophobic. The Narnia stories are, allegedly, cunning and deceitful propaganda for that nasty Jesus, an insidious trap for generations of unwary secularist tots. Writing in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik even cast doubts on Lewis' grasp of Christian theology. Aslan should, he wrote, have been something less glorious, a donkey, perhaps, rather than a lion. Aslan an ass? As if.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the culture wars, great hopes have been pinned on the Disney version of the lion's tale. The film was co-produced by a billionaire Christian entrepreneur (Philip Anschutz and his Walden Media) and even endorsed by the odd but oddly influential Focus on the Family. Sensing that this movie may be a second coming of "The Passion of the Christ," other evangelical groups have discreetly dropped the boycott long imposed on Disney for gay days, the Weinstein brothers, and other offenses. Disney has returned the compliment, enlisting evangelicals and Christian marketing groups to help promote the movie.

But all this is to miss the point. The tales of Narnia were always intended as something subtler than allegory. It's easy for a child to read them and miss the Christian resonance altogether (age 8 or 9, I did). As Lewis recalled, the first inspiration for the stories was visual - not spiritual - a picture that came to him "of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood," and much of the force, and the wonder, of these books comes from the striking images they contain. These images, especially when reinforced by Pauline Baynes's marvelous illustrations, do so much to bring this fictional world to vivid, memorable, and compelling life.

In this, and not only this, this movie version of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," directed by Andrew Adamson of "Shrek" fame, is a terrific interpretation of Lewis's vision. An earlier attempt, the BBC's 1988 version (available on DVD in this country, but don't bother), was shipwrecked by puppet level performances, primitive effects, and a budget that cannot have exceeded £5, 2 pence, and a prayer. Stagy and contrived, it had the conviction of a pantomime horse, or, more accurately, lion, and belongs with Ralph Bakshi's atrocious "Lord of the Rings" in that special hell reserved for those movies that turn Inklings' dreams into dross. By contrast, the CGI that underpins Mr. Adamson's film will transport its audiences into a Narnia of witches, fauns, minotaurs, monsters (younger members of the audience will get a fright or two, which will probably do them good), giants, and talking animals as effectively as the train in the movie's early sequences carries the Pevensie children from the London Blitz into the depths of the lush, green English countryside (New Zealand, actually, once again passing itself off as the Shire), the heart of an Albion where landscape, legend, and history merge into myth.

These effects pass their toughest test in the film's climax, which is, if we're honest about it, a battle between two menageries. Handled incorrectly, this could easily descend into absurdity, but instead we're shown a stirring struggle that matches anything witnessed at Helm's Deep, and which does more than justice to that sense of the epic that plays so large a part in the enchantment that is Narnia.

As even the hapless nerds who plowed their weary way through the three most recent "Star Wars" films could tell you, though, special effects by themselves are not enough. The strength of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is that it not only features animals that can talk, it also boasts actors who can act. Almost without exception, the fine cast (even, such as in the case of Rupert Everett's delightful fox, when we only hear their voices) adds to the pleasure of the film, but it is Tilda Swinton's extraordinary Jadis who succeeds in stealing the movie despite failing to hang on to Narnia. With her almost translucent skin and austere, angular Scots features, Ms. Swinton is a natural to portray Lewis's witch:

"Her face was white - not merely pale, but white like snow or paper or icing-sugar, except for her very red mouth. It was a beautiful face in other respects, but proud and cold and stern."

And she is, as Ms. Swinton's commanding performance leaves no doubt, every inch a queen and in every thought and deed a force for bleak, relentless evil.

The young actors and actresses playing the four children who stand between the White Witch and her winter without end are more than up to the challenge, however. In particular, little Lucy Pevensie (Georgie Henley) is a beguiling, wide-eyed imp whose anarchic enthusiasm lights up the screen whenever she appears. Meanwhile her oldest brother, grave, responsible Peter (William Moseley), will delight the girls with his classic, slightly old-fashioned good looks and faint aura of the doomed subaltern of the trenches that C.S. Lewis so nearly was. And it would be invidious not to mention James McAvoy's charming, delicately touching Mr. Tumnus, the faun who is white rabbit to Lucy's Alice, and her introduction, and ours, to Narnia and the weird, heroic adventure that Lewis set out to describe.

It's a story to which Mr. Adamson and his writers have remained, quite rightly, almost completely faithful. They have, fortunately, avoided reproducing the feel of those passages in the original novel where Lewis comes across as a rather condescending vicar, but any changes or embellishments to the plot itself are minimal and, if it's not heresy to say so, an improvement. What's more, from the snowy wastes of the witch's domain to the glistening, gathering signs of thaw that signal that Aslan is indeed on the move, this unusually beautiful film also looks right: This is the Narnia that I saw when I read this book as a small boy nearly four decades ago, and there will be, I suspect, many others who will succumb to the same delighted nostalgia.

As for the book's message, such as it is, that's in the movie, as it should be, but why that should offend or upset anyone is beyond me. The film is never explicitly preachy, and the story itself stands on its own merits. Lewis, an inveterate (and, complained Tolkien, somewhat indiscriminate) miner of myth, knew that well-told sagas of quest, comradeship, war, self-sacrifice, and even resurrection have long gripped the human imagination. Under the circumstances, it's no great shock that "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" was not to be the only excursion to Narnia, and it's not much more of a surprise that the combined "Chronicles" have now sold around 90 million copies.

Back to work, Mr. Adamson, your audience is waiting.