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Film Review: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

By Hilary White

TORONTO, December 12, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The great English journalist and novelist, G.K. Chesterton said that myth speaks to the human heart by making a proposition about the nature of reality. It does not present a fantasy that merely distracts from the real, but offers an interpretation of the real that gives readers an opportunity to see reality in a different way. “True” myth articulates the deep plea of the human heart: “Why cannot these things be?!”

It is perhaps this great work of mythic articulation for which C.S. Lewis is most to be praised, possibly even more than for his recasting of the Christian story for children. His Narnia books opened the readers’ hearts and minds to the possibility that there is more to reality than that offered by the flat, unmagical, secular and material world to which we are exiled as modern grown-ups.

His story, or more properly, his myth offers the hope that this ultimate transcendent reality could be pursued by ordinary people without special magical abilities even in this world. The long-awaited film adaptation of the first of Lewis’ Narnia books, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, which opened on Friday, may have accomplished the same feat or articulation.

The film could only have succeeded by being true to the story. Those who worried that the forces of secularist political correctness were going to excise the Christian essence of Aslan, his kingship over the Narnia he created, his sacrificial death and his resurrection, have nothing to fear. All the elements that made Narnia an effective re-casting of the Christian story are there. The little details are present as well as the larger elements.

Aslan’s power and divine authority permeate the film as they do the book. It is clear from the beginning that without him, the children cannot save either their brother or Narnia, or even themselves, from the Witch’s evil. The Christological elements are well in place for those who can see and understand them, though, as Lewis refrained from making the allegorical connection explicit, so the filmmakers leave the connection to be made by the audience.

I was introduced to the books when I was nine years old and for me, the film was a risk. Would it capture the indefinable feel of the books? Would it be horribly Americanized, or expurgated as Disney had done to the Pooh stories of A.A. Milne? Was I going to recognize in this film the interior imaginative universe that I inhabited in those books as a child and have never forgotten in the intervening 30 years?

When the film’s Lucy opened the wardrobe door and found the magic kingdom of Aslan inside, the hair on the back of my neck stood up and chills ran down my spine as I realized that they had got it. It was as though I had been taken back into the Narnia of my own well-remembered childhood imaginings. Narnia had been visually created in every minute detail, so seamlessly that it was only the chattering of the children in the theatre that reminded me it was a film.

Childhood addicts of the book will rejoice in the film’s fidelity to the details that made the book so real. The iconic image of the faun with his red muffler, umbrella and paper-wrapped packages; the lamppost; his cozy – and very English – home and the other details are perfectly rendered with obvious devotion to the story and the author. We remember the sardines, Lucy’s handkerchief, the book on Mr. Tumnus’ bookshelf titled, “Is Man a Myth?” and Mrs. Beaver’s sewing machine. What additions and alterations there were can mostly be judged admissible to fill in Lewis’ sparse narrative style and the requirements of moviemaking.

All of which is not to say that the film is perfect. There is a subtle change in the children, whom Lewis wrote as well-brought-up English children of his time, with all the social reticence that went along with his milieu. The children in the film hug and show their feelings in a manner that an Edwardian Englishman would find shockingly demonstrative. But the formal manner that was once normal behavior for children of that class, a modern audience, even a modern English audience would have found shockingly, perhaps implausibly, reserved.

The scriptwriters also cannot resist the temptation to explain the children’s characters in modern, psychologized terms. Edmund’s betrayal is explained, in a very enlightened way, as the result of a Freudian father/sibling conflict and not in terms of Lewis’ more forthright acceptance of simple wicked selfishness.

The one real disappointment was in the strange reluctance of Peter to embrace his and his family’s destiny. The Peter of the book had never a moment of hesitation about fulfilling his role as the future High King. It was explained that, having read the right sort of adventure books the children were prepared for the real adventure that was before them as the fulfillment of the Narnian prophecies.

The modern world, however, has little room for or understanding of heroism and few modern children have read the right sort of books. The film’s Peter, Hamlet-like, hesitates almost to the end. In the midst of the climactic battle against the Witch, when things look bad, he insists that the other three “go home.” It is not until the final scenes that the children accept their destinies as the chosen sovereigns ruling over Narnia’s golden age.
 
The few noticeable differences, however, are perhaps forgivable considering the real limitations of a modern, culturally impoverished audience. The literate culture out of which Lewis was writing is all but extinct and the background assumptions – that an audience would know what the London Blitz was like, for instance – need to be filled in or left out to make the characters’ reactions intelligible.

The film may even have exceeded the powers of unassisted imagination in some places. The crucial scene of Aslan’s passion and death, although as in the book one is not shown the killing blow, brings home the horror of the Witch and her rabble of evil followers. The battle scenes, which had always been hazily glossed over in my memory, though largely bloodless, are huge and believably terrifying.

None of this would have been possible of course without the technical advances of the special effects, which deserve a separate mention. The director himself admitted that the film would not have been possible even five years ago. The special effects technology that created the utterly believable monsters, fauns, centaurs and talking animals, did not exist until it was developed for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. The effects are so perfect that the mind is able to forget its natural skepticism and accept that the mythic has become the real.

The film’s beauty – the sumptuousness of the red velvet and gold pavilions, the hand-made details of the weapons, armour and furnishings, the very gorgeousness of Aslan’s silky coat that tempts the viewer to reach out and stroke his mane – is itself a fitting tribute to the life-affirming qualities of Lewis’ magnanimous Christianity. The beauty of the film snaps its fingers in the cold face of what Malcolm Muggeridge called the Great Liberal Death Wish, the guiding principle of our times.

The modern inversion of morals is nowhere to be found; there is no falling into the relativist trap of calling evil good and good evil. The Witch, who wants to kill human children to maintain her political power in a manner that will be familiar to pro-lifers, is clearly and inhumanly, almost demonically, evil and it is the duty of good people, human and otherwise, to defeat her.

The film is a Christmas gift for those who are weary of the sneering ironies of our own hundred years of cultural winter. To those dismayed by the popular media’s anti-Christian biases that become so pronounced at this time of year, in the midst of the tedious culture war in which the bad guys insist we wish each other “happy holidays,” the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe literally shouts a defiant, “Merry Christmas!”

 

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