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So, after all my hoo-hah upthread, have I seen the film? Yes. Yes I have. Last weekend, in fact. My thoughts (WARNING: long and contentious):
To begin with the big question: I thought the film walked the amazingly fine line with the Christian elements of the story, managing to neither emphasize nor downplay them. It did this by being an exceedingly literal and direct presentation of the events of the book. This is the most “faithful” movie adaptation I’ve seen since Chris Columbus’s first two Harry Potter movies. It’s all there.
Which is, frankly, part of the problem. For all its skill in capturing the surface of the story, the film brings precious little of its own to the proceedings. With Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films—which must be the inevitable touchstone when discussing fantasy filmmaking from now on, I’m afraid—you got a sense of immersion and completeness, a sense that these places and people had long lived in Peter Jackson’s imagination (and those of Alan Lee, Brian Froud, etc), a visionary quality.
By contrast, with Lion, as with Columbus’s Harry Potters, the author of the books has already done all the imagining, and the director is merely putting it up on screen. Peter Jackson, with his heavy directorial hand, becomes de facto co-author, with Tolkien, of Rings: Adamson and Columbus are more like translators: they’re trying to keep their on fingerprints off the film, trying to keep the directorial presence invisible. It’s safe. Safe, but also slightly dull.
Now, I can entirely understand this approach—particularly with material as potential sensitive as the Narnia books. In one sense, it’s a very savvy move—if you get the surfaces right, if you’re “faithful” to the book, the viewer can construct hir own subtexts. All the elements are there, like scattered jigsaw pieces, and the viewer is free to put them together even if Andrew Adamson does not.
But if Adamson (and I only now just realized what a perfect name that is for a director of Narnia films) is giving us nothing in the movie that isn’t there in Lewis, then those like me who’ve already read Lewis may begin to wonder, as events unfold predictably onscreen, just why we’ve gone out in the cold and spent seven-fifty a ticket (matinee price) to watch them with our eyes open when we could be sitting at home with our feet up, a glass of port by our side and paperback in our lap, watching it with our eyes closed. Yeah, it’s all there on film, but now, six days on, there is nothing, no image that will live in my heart the way that our first view of Hobbiton did, or the sight of Boromir, riddled with arrows, lurching around vainly trying to swing his sword one last time.
There is, I think, a case to be made for directorial boldness. I know I bitched plenty about long stretches of the Rings movies, when Peter Jackson visibly lost faith in his source material, but there were other long stretches where his pumped-up, operatic approach produced thrilling results, augmenting and even improving on Tokien’s vision. While Jackson’s auteur approach creates plenty of opportunities for things to go spectacularly wrong, it conversely leaves more room for things to go spectacularly right—for filmmaking that transcends and enriches its source material.
Adamson manages this only rarely, but, not surprisingly, this is where the film succeeds best—where it hews least closely to Lewis. The subtle alteration in viewpoint, for instance: The book belongs mostly to Lucy, with nods to Edmund; the movie reverses that equation which is as it should be, since Edmund’s cycle of alienation, sin and redemption is the central drama around which the events of the story revolve.
But all the kids had their moment to shine—admittedly, Susan less than the others, although I did think Mother Pevensie’s parting words to her—“Be a big girl”: not a good girl, but a big girl, as if they were the same thing—nicely foreshadowed Susan’s hamartia and her eventual sad end.
Peter, though, was a revelation. With him, Adamson’s decision to foreground the War came together with his sense of character. By making explicit the terror of the Blitz and Father Pevensie gone for a soldier, and by making Peter slightly older than I usually imagined him—almost old enough to enlist, in fact—and then presenting him with a hugely worthy cause and an army just waiting for him to command it, leaving him to sort out his conflicted feelings about war, which has, of course, just torn his family apart... I felt the ache, there. And when he loosed the gryphons with their rocks in Blitzkrieg style against the White Witch’s army, I shuddered. That, for me, came as close to a genuine Christian moment as anything in the film: I send you out as sheep among wolves. You must be as innocent as doves, but as cunning as snakes.
That’s my read on it, anyway. Here’s a question: In the scene at the London railroad station, there’s a slow-motion moment of Peter gazing intently at disembarking trainload of soldiers. It’s a brief scene, but fraught with significance—but what significance, exactly? D interpreted it as Peter scanning the faces of the soldiers, hoping against all reason that his father is among them: all their miseries spring from the absence of their father, Peter has been thrust unwillingly into the father role, and he’s hoping that somehow their father will appear, relieve him of his burden, and make everything okay again. I read it rather differently: Peter, a boy on the verge of young manhood, seeing the soldiers in their smart uniforms, off to fight an unambiguous evil, and longing himself to Do His Part For King And Country, to become a man, to achieve adulthood by swearing himself to a noble cause (setting him up in opposition, again, to Susan, whose own eventual reach for “adulthood” is spiritually disastrous because she confuses mere “sophistication” for actual growth). It may be both: it may be neither. But it was a lovely moment, nonetheless.
And the moments are what stood out, for good or ill, rather than the great sweeping panorama. The discovery of the wardrobe is, as I feared, blown out to heroic proportions, complete with ill-advised slow-mo—so that when the real big reveal comes, and Lucy finds snow crunching beneath her feet, it falls a little flat. On the other hand, when Beaver says, “Further in,” and the camera pulls back to a huge sweeping landscape, I shivered to my toes. The line is a total sop to the Narnia fans, yeah, but lovely nonetheless. I actually misted up, one of only two times I wept.
(The other? Well, I don’t really...)
(Okay, okay, okay okay okay okay: I cried buckets when Father Christmas came around, all right? SHUT UP.) |
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