Narnia brought to life

by Donovan Jacobs

SojoMail 12-07-2005

Ever since Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ reaped huge box-office rewards, in great part by bringing in Christian conservatives who don’t regularly attend movies, Hollywood studios have been looking for what might be called The Next Big Religious Thing – a film that appeals to Passion’s elusive core audience while attracting more families and less controversy than Gibson’s film.

Industry observers believe that Next Thing has arrived in the movie adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ revered children’s novel The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media – which reportedly spent roughly $150 million on the movie and plan to launch a series of movies based on Lewis’ seven Narnia books – certainly hope so.

Disney’s seeming ambivalence about the movie’s religious content (the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly reports that the studio has marketed the film to Christian groups while downplaying Lewis’ allegory of sacrifice and resurrection) might give people of faith cause to worry. But perhaps surprisingly, while The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe falls short in several ways cinematically, many of the movie’s spiritual themes come alive in a profound and moving fashion.

Director Andrew Adamson and his co-writers, Ann Peacock, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely, closely follow the novel’s narrative after a new opening where the four Pevensie children are seen surviving an air raid in 1940 London before moving into a secluded country estate. Youngest sister Lucy (played by Georgie Henley) enters the title piece of furniture during a game of hide-and-seek and is transported to Narnia, a world populated with mythical creatures but mired in a 100-year winter thanks to a spell cast by the despotic White Witch (Tilda Swinton).

Lucy lures her brothers Peter (William Moseley) and Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and sister Susan (Anna Popplewell) to Narnia, where a prophecy claims that the quartet will someday rule with the help of the formidable lion Aslan. But Edmund’s dalliance with the White Witch both forces Aslan to make a great sacrifice and sets up a climactic battle between good and evil.

The determination to hew so closely to the book will delight fans of Lewis but presents problems for the movie. Director Adamson embellishes the tale with unique visual touches and a few new action sequences. But for the most part he paces the movie just like the novel; this causes the story to drag at times, especially in the first hour.

LEWIS DIDN’T SPEND much time fleshing out the personalities of the Pevensies, and the screenwriters don’t develop them enough to take up the slack. Lucy’s plucky charm and Edmund’s transition from troubled would-be traitor to guilt-ridden warrior make the younger children compelling. But Susan is given little more to do than chide her siblings and look worried, while Peter’s transition from boy to adult hero seems too generic. (It doesn’t help that Moseley seems to be have been swallowed by his armor in the movie’s big battle sequence.) Kids and lovers of the book probably won’t mind, but teens and older audiences might find the characters and the story as a whole less involving.

Adamson does a better job weaving the computer-generated fantasy characters into the live action. In particular, Aslan comes across as a spectacularly convincing supernatural lion, embodying a challenging mix of wisdom, gentleness, and ferocity. Liam Neeson’s fine work voicing the character adds to Aslan’s believability and majesty.

Getting Aslan just right allows the movie’s allegory of sacrifice and renewal to resonate powerfully. The exotic-looking, intense scene where Aslan offers himself to the White Witch isn’t as starkly realistic as the crucifixion in Passion. But Aslan has an emotional depth that’s missing in Mel Gibson’s stoic version of Christ, making Aslan’s seeming doom more devastating and his eventual triumph more satisfying.

It’s possible that some (presumably unchurched) viewers will miss the parallels between Jesus and Aslan. But more insightful audiences (especially younger ones) may find in Aslan a Christ they can identify with and even ask questions that will bring their faith into sharper focus.

The film also forcefully suggests that we are required to fight for good against evil, even if, like the Pevensie children, we believe we are incapable of helping or if that fight occurs away from home. It will be interesting (if not aggravating for many of us) to see how strenuously political conservatives work to use the movie and this theme to further justify the war in Iraq.

The potential for this movie to not just entertain but to generate conversations among families and other viewers about subjects such as redemption and forgiveness – or even neo-con ideology – reminds us again how even a fantasy movie can reach us on so many vital levels. The more those conversations happen, the more The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe might qualify as a truly Big Thing.

Donovan Jacobs is a development executive and script consultant for motion picture production companies and television networks. He specializes in developing family movies for television.

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