Silly Reviews
Narnia Rules, but Brings Out Bizarre Reviews
The Washington Post review is typical. It has to admit that Narnia is a great film, but it can hardly stand to do so. It after all is Christian, which somehow now means “controversial.” One will note that this adjective is not applied to a tedious film about gay cowboys playing to insular audiences in major media centers.
My comments are in italics as usual.
A Winter WonderlandThose Who Don't Believe in Fantasy Will Thaw at 'Chronicles of Narnia'
By Stephen HunterWashington Post Staff WriterFriday, December 9, 2005; C01
Rule, "Narnia," "Narnia" rule the waves -- and it certainly will, or at least the waves of over stimulated children and grateful parents whose tidal rush breaks upon the nation's multiplexes during the holidays. As a destination, it should please members of both generations.
So far so good, though this is not just a children’s movie it is good for children.
Andrew Adamson's sterling version of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," the perdurable C.S. Lewis classic of children's fantasy, is well told, handsome, stirring and loads of fun.
It's also, for mordant ironists, a rich vein of psychological ore revelatory of the beloved "Jack" Lewis, as he nicknamed himself, who wrote children's classics by night, taught and lectured on medieval English lit at Oxford and Cambridge by day and, by very late of night, dreamed of spanking various ladies of his acquaintance.
Lewis himself hated the intellectual posturing that assumes, without argument, that one could tell a great deal about the psychology of a person from their writings. Such guesses have the benefit of (usually) being incapable of falsification so operate as the perfect foil for the intellectualism that passes for education in modern times. Our sexually obsessed and dysfunctional era loves to make this sort of airy speculation about sex. Why is the factoid in the review? What does it tell us about the movie? Out of the thousands of facts about Lewis’ life, including the fact that all of his books are still in print, that he married happily late in life, and that he had a long friendship with Tolkien somehow what was most important to the reviewer was the sexual temptations of the young Lewis.
Let’s be clear. The young Lewis was no saint and neither was the older Lewis. He wrote frankly about his failings in his private writings which he viewed as failings. As he grew older he grew in grace and his failings and temptations also grew less. The only imaginable point of this “revelation” about Lewis is to try to “pull him down” and show him to be no better than the rest of us. Well, yes, if by that one means that he was a sinner, but not if one means that he was content to wallow in his sin or to publish private information in a major newspaper in the sort of review likely to be read by children.
Well, we shall speak no more of that little quirk. Taken at face value, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" decodes into a kind of dashing view of colonialism for the pre-pubescent set, an empire-and-faith fable set in a fantasy world whose relation to the real one will be, for adults, its most fascinating element.
“Taken at face value” the film is nothing of the sort. Lewis was no fan of colonialism and this “decoding” (a word indicating that even the reviewer knows that one cannot find colonialism in the film if one takes it at “face value”) is absurd. Later Narnia books deal with an imperial power which is utterly evil, and argue for the freedom of little nations over against this expansionist empire.
For kids, the pleasure will be in some of the best special effects of the year. And for both, the overarching endearment will be a narrative that speeds through its two-hour-plus running time.
At last actual comments on the film.
The movie has attracted some pre-release pub because it is famously a "Christian allegory."
Well, no it is not an allegory, famously or otherwise. An allegory is a book like Pilgrim’s Progress where the faithful character is called Faithful. Narnia is an exercise in what-ifery. What if God created a world like Narnia? What would it be like? Lewis dislike allegories for the most part and always denied he wrote one. Our film reviewer has moved from cheap psychoanalysis to literary analysis while managing to say almost nothing about the film.
And yes, it's true, Lewis was a well-known adult convert to Anglicanism (from the intellectual's fashionable atheism) who wrote much about his faith in God. Maybe too much; some find him a bully on the subject.
Let’s guess the reviewers opinion. Who finds him a “bully?” How does writing a book arguing for a topic count as being a bully? Are atheists so sensitive that they cannot abide losing arguments?
Of course, that is true if internet atheism is any indication. Google atheism and take a look at the sights. Humorless and dour they assume that all Christians are stupid and that all smart people are atheists. Christians know by experience, as Lewis surely did, that many clever folk are atheists and that there are good arguments against Christian theism. Such Christians, Lewis included, simply prefer the arguments for Christianity which they think better.
Whatever, it is true that the plot he engineered for the first of his seven "Chronicles of Narnia" reenacts the march to Golgotha, the ugliness enacted thereupon, and the good news three days hence, when someone powerful arises and gives hope to a death-haunted world. However, in the role of Jesus Christ is a lion named Aslan who, no matter how holy he may be, is still a lion, and when he paws an enemy to the ground, he then bites its head off. That's pure big carnivore and a long way from Christ's admonition to turn the other cheek.
Just as secularists produce what-if stories for their world view (“What if aging, bald white men from France could go around the universe in a star ship making it so?”), so Christians ask what-if questions assuming their views are true. That may be hard for the reviewer to imagine as he has an oddly stunted view of Jesus and of Christianity.
There is a left wing version of Christianity, light years from historical Christianity, that has somehow become the only version in the minds of writers at the Post. In this version, the Christian God is much like a senile Santa patting everyone on the head and handing out presents.
The Bible describes our God as a God of war. The Christian God employees archangels like Michael whose only job seems to be creating havoc amongst the forces of darkness. Jesus Christ cleared the temple of his day with a whip and called his enemies “old fox” and “white washed tombs full of dead men’s bones.” He was “the Lion of Judah” as well as the Lamb of God. In fact, it is the very power of the Man that made his sacrifice so great. He could have called legions of Angels to His defense, but did not. He was a strong man who chose to die for the sins of mankind.
Christ advocated “turning the other cheek.” In context, most Christians at most places at most times (leaving aside an odd pacifist fringe) have understood this to mean that personal vendettas and revenge are out, but that a robust defense of others is a positive good. We invented chivalry and knighthood after all! As a Christian, I cannot hate my enemy nor seek personal retribution. I must forgive. On the other hand, the government “does not bear the sword in vain” and can act to defend the powerless and weak.
The fantasy seems just as, if not more, plumped up with symbols of that other modern religion, the state. You can feel Lewis the professional writer cleverly pandering to his readership of patriotic, well-educated middle-class English adolescents of the '50s.
Where? How?
It's a veddy British Isles kind of thing, with a lord of all being the majestic lion, symbol of Britain on the royal shield, along with the unicorn, the heraldic symbol of Scotland, and then the unicorn shows up as a steed upon which a valiant young knight charges into battle.
If the film had been set in an African land, then the film’s use of cultural symbols of that place would be applauded as good. Why is the fact that a British author wrote a book set in Britain using British culture worth comment? Is Anglo-Saxon culture now so evil that parent’s must be warned of its existence?
Second, the reviewer gets the book and films symbolism wrong in any case. He confuses symbols added by the movie makers (Peter’s steed) with those found in the book which he shows no signs of having read.
Lewis was a classically trained scholar with a fascination with the symbols of the Middle Ages. He uses the language of heraldry all through the book. The reviewer apparently once saw the British coat of arms on a whirl wind tour of England and assumes that Lewis, the Oxford don, must have drawn his sources from the same simplistic set of images that seem to exist in the reviewer’s mind. Orthodox Christians beware! If he sees the Eagle on a Saint John the Divine icon, he will think you are pushing the Bush war agenda! (“Plainly the use by Saint Michael Church of the icon of Saint John the Divine with its plain imperialistic symbols, including a very American eagle, in this era of war is meant to reinforce the not-so-subtle pro-Republican message of the liturgy.”)
But even a moment’s thought suggests many different possibilities more in tune with the message of the book than “lion as England.” We might begin with Lewis’ friend Charles Williams and his image of the lion. We could quickly move on to basic fairy tale conventions. The lion is the king of the beasts. What other animal could be king of the talking beasts of Narnia . . . a lemming, a hedgehog, a fox? We could then think about the Biblical image of Christ as the “lion of Judah.” Both these ideas seem more plausible than the simplistic “colonialism” image when we remember that Lewis’ was not doing British what-ifery, but Anglican what-ifery.
Lions and unicorns, oh my! There are so many other Britishisms it's almost unsporting (and certainly dull) to list them all, from landscape to culture to gear to weather. It climaxes in a giant, linchpin-of-history battle so familiar to the Brits, as they rarely lost one (the Spanish Armada, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Battle of Britain). But more important, there's a kind of empire assumption underlying it all.
No. There is not. The Queen of Narnia, statist to the max, is overthrown. The government that replaces hers is almost not a government at all. People are left alone and justice is done. The state becomes smaller not larger in Narnia. I would assume (if anyone cares) that taxes go down under High King Peter, who can lay off all the wolves.
The movie is really another in a long line of unquestioning colonial morale-raisers, so necessary for the maintenance of empire, circa 1950, when the book was published: It's about the arrival in a troubled land (Narnia, in whose syllables may be heard a faint echo of "Britannia") of white Britons of noble visage, pale beauty and steely bearing in the middle of a war of darker creatures. Our boys and girls immediately move to center stage -- indeed, it turns out that their coming has been foretold -- and they are quickly appointed to leadership positions.
Of course, this just may have more to do with Fairy Tale conventions than with British colonialism. Is Jack the hero of Jack and the Beanstalk to support the British empire? Could it be that children like reading books about, well children?
The absurd comparison of the sound of “Narnia” to “Britannia” could be extended endlessly to fit almost any thesis the reviewer had proposed. For comparison imagine a reviewer who decided Lewis was attacking colonialism by writing his book. Then the same sort of facts could be used to support this thesis. (Narnia is small. Narnia sounds like Britannia.)Here is a novel thought: Narnia is more likely to have gotten into the classically trained Lewis’ mind through the Roman town of that name than through vague associations with Britannia. Such speculation is endless and proves nothing.
As to the “whiteness” of the children, it seems to escape the notice of the reviewer that in 1950 most children in Britain were white. Is this bad?
The boys get to be knights, the girls princesses, every British boy and girl's fantasy.
Has the reviewer been to Disneyland lately? There are a great many princesses and sword bearing young men there. Are they all British? Was the reviewer ever a child?
Thus elevated, they lead the darker masses in battle to victory, and stay behind to rule magnificently and justly. Talk about Kipling's White Man's burden!
Of course, at this point the reviewer forgets that they achieve their “white man’s” victory over the White Witch. Her reign of snow and winter and bland whiteness is ended and Narnia begins a springtime of color.
Of course, the race of beavers has long escaped me, but fortunately for me the Post reviewer has told me the truth. Now I know that beavers are actually people of color. But wait, hasn’t this Washington Post reviewer just compared “dark masses” to the talking animals that make up the bulk of Peter’s army? This seems a bit racist to me. I have to admit that I never think of people of color when I see animals, talking or otherwise, but I guess the reviewer does.
But Lewis gets his little redcoats into Narnia by the most lamely imagined conduit. It's a simple wardrobe, a storage cabinet for out-of-season clothes. He couldn't take the kids through a looking glass, a wishing well, a magic door, a diamond facet? Nah. When Lucy Pevensie (adorable Georgie Henley) finds refuge in the big box on the upper floor of an ornate mansion where she and her three siblings are waiting out the Blitz, she finds herself suddenly in Narnia. No explanation given, no explanation needed.
That is why it is called a fairy tale. The reviewer might note that a “magic door” is in fact a door. That a looking glass is just as workman-like as a wardrobe in most houses. In fact, it is making magic the common place that is so wonderful in the best fairy tales.
Jack gets to the cloud land by a bean stalk. Now this is never explained and in fact it is impossible to climb to the clouds on a bean stalk! However, the story is likely to survive this revelation.
Lucy wanders about, running into the faun Mr. Tumnus (part James McAvoy, part computer illustration) and learning it's eternally snowy in Narnia because the White Witch Jadis (the fabulous Tilda Swinton) has taken over, declared eternal winter and outlawed Christmas. Only the legendary lion king Aslan can stop her, with a little help from Santa Claus. The last touch may be a bit much (Lewis's Oxford buddy J.R.R. Tolkien thought so) and you may wonder, where where where is Tiny Tim?
Of course it is Father Christmas and not Santa Claus, but the reviewer has already indicated that though he may have the right prejudices about British colonialism he knows nothing about fairy tales and mythic literature.
Lucy returns to reality, and after some hemming and hawing gets her three siblings -- treacherous Edmund (Skandar Keynes), noble Peter (William Moseley) and timid Susan (Anna Popplewell) to join her. The first thing they notice -- after the gas lamp in the forest -- is the talking beaver. And that is the signal technical excellence of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe": the beaver.
Director Andrew Adamson came up through special-effects discipline, reaching the apotheosis of that craft in movies that were all effects all the time: the "Shrek" films. In "Narnia" he has brilliantly supervised the nearly impossible: supple, expressive animal faces. That is, actual performances from the masses of hard-drive-accumulated electrons (or whatever the hell they are) that represent the creatures: It's all here, the whole human spectrum, from the sparkle in an eye to the heft of a jowl or the twitch of a nostril, the lick of a lip, all those little nuances of expression that are completely beyond the reach of actual animals. Even Aslan himself (voiced by Liam Neeson) isn't just an MGM or a royal lion or even, really, a Lion King: He's more, a subtly hued study of wisdom, courage and fire undercut with Christ's most appealing human characteristic, his doubt. He knows where he's going to end up.
We note that when the reviewer writes about film, his area of specialization, he writes interesting and thoughtful commentary.
The human performers are not far behind the animated ones. The four children are convincing, particularly the young Henley, and Keynes is close behind as Edmund, tormented by his attraction to the witch, willing at first to sell out siblings and beavers all. And you believe it, too, because of Swinton's cruel, chilly witch, with frosted hair and the demeanor of a Vogue editor accidentally abandoned in a fish market who then becomes a superb warrior queen in the battle sequence, almost carrying the field with her steel chariot and samurai sword moves. Her evil disdain and high style are perfect, and she makes you feel the charisma of evil and why it could attract the troubled odd-boy-out Edmund. At the same time, Jadis is not as comically overwrought, as, say, Glenn Close's Cruella De Vil in the Disney live-action variants on "101 Dalmatians." Her Jadis is just thoroughly mean and unpleasant, every schoolchild's sneering, domineering, perfect teacher.
I should say that the movie rides its PG rating right to the very edge; its evocation of animal death and battlefield mayhem and jeopardy to children is extremely powerful, and some kids may find it disturbing. Parents should be warned that the movie is far more explicit than the book and consider carefully before taking their younger children. Most disturbing of all is the scene that replicates the Crucifixion, the actual death of a Christ-figure before his Resurrection. There's no blood, but in all these sequences there are spasms of pain, the plain view of piercing and stabbing, and the final surrender to stillness. Finally, a fleet of wolves serves as the White Witch's secret police, and they too are disturbing creatures, full of menace and intensity.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (140 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG and contains intense, if bloodless, violence and death.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
So here we see a review that is good when talking about the film, but a mix of prejudice and ignorance when not doing so. How did the reviewer get away with this analysis? It is about conservative Christianity, which most of his fellow employees cannot help him with.
The Washington Post review is typical. It has to admit that Narnia is a great film, but it can hardly stand to do so. It after all is Christian, which somehow now means “controversial.” One will note that this adjective is not applied to a tedious film about gay cowboys playing to insular audiences in major media centers.
My comments are in italics as usual.
A Winter WonderlandThose Who Don't Believe in Fantasy Will Thaw at 'Chronicles of Narnia'
By Stephen HunterWashington Post Staff WriterFriday, December 9, 2005; C01
Rule, "Narnia," "Narnia" rule the waves -- and it certainly will, or at least the waves of over stimulated children and grateful parents whose tidal rush breaks upon the nation's multiplexes during the holidays. As a destination, it should please members of both generations.
So far so good, though this is not just a children’s movie it is good for children.
Andrew Adamson's sterling version of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," the perdurable C.S. Lewis classic of children's fantasy, is well told, handsome, stirring and loads of fun.
It's also, for mordant ironists, a rich vein of psychological ore revelatory of the beloved "Jack" Lewis, as he nicknamed himself, who wrote children's classics by night, taught and lectured on medieval English lit at Oxford and Cambridge by day and, by very late of night, dreamed of spanking various ladies of his acquaintance.
Lewis himself hated the intellectual posturing that assumes, without argument, that one could tell a great deal about the psychology of a person from their writings. Such guesses have the benefit of (usually) being incapable of falsification so operate as the perfect foil for the intellectualism that passes for education in modern times. Our sexually obsessed and dysfunctional era loves to make this sort of airy speculation about sex. Why is the factoid in the review? What does it tell us about the movie? Out of the thousands of facts about Lewis’ life, including the fact that all of his books are still in print, that he married happily late in life, and that he had a long friendship with Tolkien somehow what was most important to the reviewer was the sexual temptations of the young Lewis.
Let’s be clear. The young Lewis was no saint and neither was the older Lewis. He wrote frankly about his failings in his private writings which he viewed as failings. As he grew older he grew in grace and his failings and temptations also grew less. The only imaginable point of this “revelation” about Lewis is to try to “pull him down” and show him to be no better than the rest of us. Well, yes, if by that one means that he was a sinner, but not if one means that he was content to wallow in his sin or to publish private information in a major newspaper in the sort of review likely to be read by children.
Well, we shall speak no more of that little quirk. Taken at face value, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" decodes into a kind of dashing view of colonialism for the pre-pubescent set, an empire-and-faith fable set in a fantasy world whose relation to the real one will be, for adults, its most fascinating element.
“Taken at face value” the film is nothing of the sort. Lewis was no fan of colonialism and this “decoding” (a word indicating that even the reviewer knows that one cannot find colonialism in the film if one takes it at “face value”) is absurd. Later Narnia books deal with an imperial power which is utterly evil, and argue for the freedom of little nations over against this expansionist empire.
For kids, the pleasure will be in some of the best special effects of the year. And for both, the overarching endearment will be a narrative that speeds through its two-hour-plus running time.
At last actual comments on the film.
The movie has attracted some pre-release pub because it is famously a "Christian allegory."
Well, no it is not an allegory, famously or otherwise. An allegory is a book like Pilgrim’s Progress where the faithful character is called Faithful. Narnia is an exercise in what-ifery. What if God created a world like Narnia? What would it be like? Lewis dislike allegories for the most part and always denied he wrote one. Our film reviewer has moved from cheap psychoanalysis to literary analysis while managing to say almost nothing about the film.
And yes, it's true, Lewis was a well-known adult convert to Anglicanism (from the intellectual's fashionable atheism) who wrote much about his faith in God. Maybe too much; some find him a bully on the subject.
Let’s guess the reviewers opinion. Who finds him a “bully?” How does writing a book arguing for a topic count as being a bully? Are atheists so sensitive that they cannot abide losing arguments?
Of course, that is true if internet atheism is any indication. Google atheism and take a look at the sights. Humorless and dour they assume that all Christians are stupid and that all smart people are atheists. Christians know by experience, as Lewis surely did, that many clever folk are atheists and that there are good arguments against Christian theism. Such Christians, Lewis included, simply prefer the arguments for Christianity which they think better.
Whatever, it is true that the plot he engineered for the first of his seven "Chronicles of Narnia" reenacts the march to Golgotha, the ugliness enacted thereupon, and the good news three days hence, when someone powerful arises and gives hope to a death-haunted world. However, in the role of Jesus Christ is a lion named Aslan who, no matter how holy he may be, is still a lion, and when he paws an enemy to the ground, he then bites its head off. That's pure big carnivore and a long way from Christ's admonition to turn the other cheek.
Just as secularists produce what-if stories for their world view (“What if aging, bald white men from France could go around the universe in a star ship making it so?”), so Christians ask what-if questions assuming their views are true. That may be hard for the reviewer to imagine as he has an oddly stunted view of Jesus and of Christianity.
There is a left wing version of Christianity, light years from historical Christianity, that has somehow become the only version in the minds of writers at the Post. In this version, the Christian God is much like a senile Santa patting everyone on the head and handing out presents.
The Bible describes our God as a God of war. The Christian God employees archangels like Michael whose only job seems to be creating havoc amongst the forces of darkness. Jesus Christ cleared the temple of his day with a whip and called his enemies “old fox” and “white washed tombs full of dead men’s bones.” He was “the Lion of Judah” as well as the Lamb of God. In fact, it is the very power of the Man that made his sacrifice so great. He could have called legions of Angels to His defense, but did not. He was a strong man who chose to die for the sins of mankind.
Christ advocated “turning the other cheek.” In context, most Christians at most places at most times (leaving aside an odd pacifist fringe) have understood this to mean that personal vendettas and revenge are out, but that a robust defense of others is a positive good. We invented chivalry and knighthood after all! As a Christian, I cannot hate my enemy nor seek personal retribution. I must forgive. On the other hand, the government “does not bear the sword in vain” and can act to defend the powerless and weak.
The fantasy seems just as, if not more, plumped up with symbols of that other modern religion, the state. You can feel Lewis the professional writer cleverly pandering to his readership of patriotic, well-educated middle-class English adolescents of the '50s.
Where? How?
It's a veddy British Isles kind of thing, with a lord of all being the majestic lion, symbol of Britain on the royal shield, along with the unicorn, the heraldic symbol of Scotland, and then the unicorn shows up as a steed upon which a valiant young knight charges into battle.
If the film had been set in an African land, then the film’s use of cultural symbols of that place would be applauded as good. Why is the fact that a British author wrote a book set in Britain using British culture worth comment? Is Anglo-Saxon culture now so evil that parent’s must be warned of its existence?
Second, the reviewer gets the book and films symbolism wrong in any case. He confuses symbols added by the movie makers (Peter’s steed) with those found in the book which he shows no signs of having read.
Lewis was a classically trained scholar with a fascination with the symbols of the Middle Ages. He uses the language of heraldry all through the book. The reviewer apparently once saw the British coat of arms on a whirl wind tour of England and assumes that Lewis, the Oxford don, must have drawn his sources from the same simplistic set of images that seem to exist in the reviewer’s mind. Orthodox Christians beware! If he sees the Eagle on a Saint John the Divine icon, he will think you are pushing the Bush war agenda! (“Plainly the use by Saint Michael Church of the icon of Saint John the Divine with its plain imperialistic symbols, including a very American eagle, in this era of war is meant to reinforce the not-so-subtle pro-Republican message of the liturgy.”)
But even a moment’s thought suggests many different possibilities more in tune with the message of the book than “lion as England.” We might begin with Lewis’ friend Charles Williams and his image of the lion. We could quickly move on to basic fairy tale conventions. The lion is the king of the beasts. What other animal could be king of the talking beasts of Narnia . . . a lemming, a hedgehog, a fox? We could then think about the Biblical image of Christ as the “lion of Judah.” Both these ideas seem more plausible than the simplistic “colonialism” image when we remember that Lewis’ was not doing British what-ifery, but Anglican what-ifery.
Lions and unicorns, oh my! There are so many other Britishisms it's almost unsporting (and certainly dull) to list them all, from landscape to culture to gear to weather. It climaxes in a giant, linchpin-of-history battle so familiar to the Brits, as they rarely lost one (the Spanish Armada, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Battle of Britain). But more important, there's a kind of empire assumption underlying it all.
No. There is not. The Queen of Narnia, statist to the max, is overthrown. The government that replaces hers is almost not a government at all. People are left alone and justice is done. The state becomes smaller not larger in Narnia. I would assume (if anyone cares) that taxes go down under High King Peter, who can lay off all the wolves.
The movie is really another in a long line of unquestioning colonial morale-raisers, so necessary for the maintenance of empire, circa 1950, when the book was published: It's about the arrival in a troubled land (Narnia, in whose syllables may be heard a faint echo of "Britannia") of white Britons of noble visage, pale beauty and steely bearing in the middle of a war of darker creatures. Our boys and girls immediately move to center stage -- indeed, it turns out that their coming has been foretold -- and they are quickly appointed to leadership positions.
Of course, this just may have more to do with Fairy Tale conventions than with British colonialism. Is Jack the hero of Jack and the Beanstalk to support the British empire? Could it be that children like reading books about, well children?
The absurd comparison of the sound of “Narnia” to “Britannia” could be extended endlessly to fit almost any thesis the reviewer had proposed. For comparison imagine a reviewer who decided Lewis was attacking colonialism by writing his book. Then the same sort of facts could be used to support this thesis. (Narnia is small. Narnia sounds like Britannia.)Here is a novel thought: Narnia is more likely to have gotten into the classically trained Lewis’ mind through the Roman town of that name than through vague associations with Britannia. Such speculation is endless and proves nothing.
As to the “whiteness” of the children, it seems to escape the notice of the reviewer that in 1950 most children in Britain were white. Is this bad?
The boys get to be knights, the girls princesses, every British boy and girl's fantasy.
Has the reviewer been to Disneyland lately? There are a great many princesses and sword bearing young men there. Are they all British? Was the reviewer ever a child?
Thus elevated, they lead the darker masses in battle to victory, and stay behind to rule magnificently and justly. Talk about Kipling's White Man's burden!
Of course, at this point the reviewer forgets that they achieve their “white man’s” victory over the White Witch. Her reign of snow and winter and bland whiteness is ended and Narnia begins a springtime of color.
Of course, the race of beavers has long escaped me, but fortunately for me the Post reviewer has told me the truth. Now I know that beavers are actually people of color. But wait, hasn’t this Washington Post reviewer just compared “dark masses” to the talking animals that make up the bulk of Peter’s army? This seems a bit racist to me. I have to admit that I never think of people of color when I see animals, talking or otherwise, but I guess the reviewer does.
But Lewis gets his little redcoats into Narnia by the most lamely imagined conduit. It's a simple wardrobe, a storage cabinet for out-of-season clothes. He couldn't take the kids through a looking glass, a wishing well, a magic door, a diamond facet? Nah. When Lucy Pevensie (adorable Georgie Henley) finds refuge in the big box on the upper floor of an ornate mansion where she and her three siblings are waiting out the Blitz, she finds herself suddenly in Narnia. No explanation given, no explanation needed.
That is why it is called a fairy tale. The reviewer might note that a “magic door” is in fact a door. That a looking glass is just as workman-like as a wardrobe in most houses. In fact, it is making magic the common place that is so wonderful in the best fairy tales.
Jack gets to the cloud land by a bean stalk. Now this is never explained and in fact it is impossible to climb to the clouds on a bean stalk! However, the story is likely to survive this revelation.
Lucy wanders about, running into the faun Mr. Tumnus (part James McAvoy, part computer illustration) and learning it's eternally snowy in Narnia because the White Witch Jadis (the fabulous Tilda Swinton) has taken over, declared eternal winter and outlawed Christmas. Only the legendary lion king Aslan can stop her, with a little help from Santa Claus. The last touch may be a bit much (Lewis's Oxford buddy J.R.R. Tolkien thought so) and you may wonder, where where where is Tiny Tim?
Of course it is Father Christmas and not Santa Claus, but the reviewer has already indicated that though he may have the right prejudices about British colonialism he knows nothing about fairy tales and mythic literature.
Lucy returns to reality, and after some hemming and hawing gets her three siblings -- treacherous Edmund (Skandar Keynes), noble Peter (William Moseley) and timid Susan (Anna Popplewell) to join her. The first thing they notice -- after the gas lamp in the forest -- is the talking beaver. And that is the signal technical excellence of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe": the beaver.
Director Andrew Adamson came up through special-effects discipline, reaching the apotheosis of that craft in movies that were all effects all the time: the "Shrek" films. In "Narnia" he has brilliantly supervised the nearly impossible: supple, expressive animal faces. That is, actual performances from the masses of hard-drive-accumulated electrons (or whatever the hell they are) that represent the creatures: It's all here, the whole human spectrum, from the sparkle in an eye to the heft of a jowl or the twitch of a nostril, the lick of a lip, all those little nuances of expression that are completely beyond the reach of actual animals. Even Aslan himself (voiced by Liam Neeson) isn't just an MGM or a royal lion or even, really, a Lion King: He's more, a subtly hued study of wisdom, courage and fire undercut with Christ's most appealing human characteristic, his doubt. He knows where he's going to end up.
We note that when the reviewer writes about film, his area of specialization, he writes interesting and thoughtful commentary.
The human performers are not far behind the animated ones. The four children are convincing, particularly the young Henley, and Keynes is close behind as Edmund, tormented by his attraction to the witch, willing at first to sell out siblings and beavers all. And you believe it, too, because of Swinton's cruel, chilly witch, with frosted hair and the demeanor of a Vogue editor accidentally abandoned in a fish market who then becomes a superb warrior queen in the battle sequence, almost carrying the field with her steel chariot and samurai sword moves. Her evil disdain and high style are perfect, and she makes you feel the charisma of evil and why it could attract the troubled odd-boy-out Edmund. At the same time, Jadis is not as comically overwrought, as, say, Glenn Close's Cruella De Vil in the Disney live-action variants on "101 Dalmatians." Her Jadis is just thoroughly mean and unpleasant, every schoolchild's sneering, domineering, perfect teacher.
I should say that the movie rides its PG rating right to the very edge; its evocation of animal death and battlefield mayhem and jeopardy to children is extremely powerful, and some kids may find it disturbing. Parents should be warned that the movie is far more explicit than the book and consider carefully before taking their younger children. Most disturbing of all is the scene that replicates the Crucifixion, the actual death of a Christ-figure before his Resurrection. There's no blood, but in all these sequences there are spasms of pain, the plain view of piercing and stabbing, and the final surrender to stillness. Finally, a fleet of wolves serves as the White Witch's secret police, and they too are disturbing creatures, full of menace and intensity.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (140 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG and contains intense, if bloodless, violence and death.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
So here we see a review that is good when talking about the film, but a mix of prejudice and ignorance when not doing so. How did the reviewer get away with this analysis? It is about conservative Christianity, which most of his fellow employees cannot help him with.
posted by The Shark at
2:09 PM
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