Narnia
Carol is recovering from a bad case of bronchitis, so Pete and I went down to Tinseltown to see Narnia: TLTWATW last night. I've surprised a few people by not being wildly enthusiastic about the film, but that's simply because I consider Narnia the least compelling of all of Lewis' work. I've only read the entire saga once, back when I was 17, and didn't read any of it again until a month or so ago, to refresh my memory in anticipation of the film.
Much of the problem is just me being me: I never much liked King Arthur-style high fantasy as a boy or a younger man. I only read Tolkien after much arm-twisting from my friends in high school, and even then, the chivalric themes centering on Rohan and Minas Tirith bored me. Lewis was big on stories about anthropomorphic animals, and his childhood "animal land" fantasy universe of Boxen (for which he went so far as to draw up railway maps and timetables) morphed into Narnia. I went through my own talking animals stage in third grade and never really went back. The themes explored in Narnia are perhaps too mature and subtle for a background that young and innocent. By 17, that sort of magic was lost on me.
But there were other issues, ones that I couldn't frame well as a teenager. If Aslan was in fact Narnia's God, he seemed a rather indifferent sort of God. Here there was a witch drugging and kidnapping preteen children and putting his realm in a deep freeze ("always winter but never Christmas") and Aslan was inexplicably elsewhere for a hundred years. So much for God being everywhere and caring about His people. And in The Last Battle, Aslan just sort of decides to shut the whole universe down for no reason I could understand as a teenager, and understand now only because I understand Lewis' theology. It got weirder than that: At the end of the world (sheesh!) Aslan shuns poor Susan for suddenly favoring "nylons and lipstick and invitations" as though that were as bad as being a murderer. Even at 17, that was a serious WTF moment for me, and it put me off the rest of Lewis' writings for over a decade. Susan grew up, and God tossed her out on her butt for it. I was in the process of growing up when I first read that, and I figured she deserved a far better God than Aslan. (I was in the first throes of my own struggle with personal faith at that point. Narnia didn't help much.)
It comes down to this: It's dangerous to put God in fantasy stories. Really dangerous, to both the story and to the whole idea of God. Lewis did better with his Space Trilogy, though Perelandra continues to gall me for its contrived and mostly baffling exploration of the notion of Original Sin.
I'll come back to all that at some point.
The film version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is sumptuously beautiful, and so faithful to the book that as a film it suffers a little. No surprise in that, since Lewis' adopted son Douglas Gresham had complete veto power over every detail of the production. That's a mixed blessing, just as it was in the first Harry Potter films, which in my view suffered greatly from too much author meddling.
The child actors are dazzlingly good, particularly the very young Georgie Henley as Lucy. I was less impressed with the White Witch, who was neither hot enough nor cold enough to inspire much fear and loathing, and came off more like a burned-out fourth-grade teacher than a witch. Mr. Tumnus was just about perfect, as played by James MacEvoy. Most of the other characters were CGI animals or other fantasy creatures, and while they were all nicely done, I got a better sense for the animal characters in Babe.
I don't want to imply that I didn't like the film. It was far more moving than I expected, and the settings (again, most filmed in New Zealand) made me gasp. I guess I was hoping that a capable scriptwriter and director could evoke more passion from the story in the film medium than I could pry from it in textual form. The film narrative lacked tension (as it did in the book) and many of the questions that naturally arise were not answered. There is some backstory elsewhere in the Narnia saga, and it would have been helpful to include a little of that in the film. Film is an entirely different way of telling stories from text, and the great mistake (if there is one) in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe lies in its trying to transcribe a written narrative too literally to film.
By the way, the film is a little too intense (and parts of it too violent) for children younger than eight or nine. I think some kids may wonder why Edmund got such a bad rap; while brattier than his siblings, Edmund does little in the book and film that all of us haven't done as 11-year-olds. (Yes, I know: From the standpoint of the Christian allegory, that's the whole point.) The White Witch drugged him almost as soon as he met her, which always seemed unfair to me and will probably puzzle many children. The film actually makes it less clear than the book that Edmund did any significant betraying (he seems more like a victim of bad luck and a little too much trust to me) and in the absence of childhood familiarity with the Christian story, I think a lot of children will be scratching their heads over why Aslan dies.
It will be interesting to see how Disney makes the other books into films, which is now pretty much assured, given the millions that TLTWATW is raking in.