If you were a beaver and four humans showed up on your
doorstep wearing fur coats, would you let them in? I certainly would have
second thoughts. Funny how that idea never occurred to me before, even though
I’ve read about the Pevensie children’s first encounter with the talking
beavers of Narnia countless times. It just serves to illustrate the difference
between experiencing a work of literature in your imagination and viewing it on
the big screen. Suddenly things look a whole lot different—some better, some
worse. It also raises the question as to whether such stories are best left to
the imagination. I’m still trying to decide in terms of The Lion, the Witch,
and the Wardrobe. Perhaps the choice would have been easier if I had
enjoyed the film more than I did…
It’s difficult to put my finger on exactly why I failed to
connect with this movie. It certainly wasn’t for lack of solid visual effects.
They were everything a Narnia fan could hope for—centaurs, fauns, Cyclops,
minotaurs, talking beavers and horses—all looking as real as the humans with
whom they interacted. Aslan, in particular, exceeded expectations, as well he
should have. With more than five million individually rendered hairs and up to
fifty animators working exclusively on him alone, anything less than virtual
realism would have been a tragic disappointment. But as stunning as Aslan and a
number of the other creatures were, most of them were really nothing more than
beautifully rendered extras—fodder for the battle sequences, background actors
with one or two lines or a brief close-up to add a sense of realism. They
looked great, but we never really got a chance to connect with them
emotionally, and so I found it difficult to care what happened to them in the
end.
The same could be said for most of the human characters. For
the most part, the acting was serviceable, but at times it felt like the
performers were struggling within the confines of a mediocre script.
Surprisingly, Tilda Swinton, who plays the White Witch, seemed to have the most
trouble. After seeing Swinton’s scintillating performance as the quasi-evil
half-angel Gabriel in Constantine, I was eager to see her go all the way over
to the dark side in her portrayal of the White Witch. While she definitely
looked the part, whenever she spoke, it seemed like she was reaching for a
sense of significance that the lines just couldn’t give. The one exception is
the scene where she kills Aslan. This was one of the rare moments when she came
close to realizing the full potential of her character. Even then, however, the
scene lacked the sense of cosmic significance that undergirded nearly every
moment of Narnia’s literary and cinematic cousin, The Lord of the Rings.
I think that is the real problem with this film: It lacks
gravitas. Even at 132 minutes, it just didn’t seem long enough for us to really
get to know the main characters or the underlying mythology of Narnia. The best
it can do is tell us that four human children are needed to fill the thrones at
Cair Paravel, but it never tells us why. We’re left wondering why four children
are required, who sat in the thrones before the children arrived, who built
Cair Paravel, and how the White Witch gained control of Narnia in the first
place. I fully realize that these same answers are missing from the novel. But
couldn’t the filmmakers have taken a few liberties with the text to clarify
things, much like Peter Jackson did by inserting some of the background
material into The Lord of the Rings to flesh out Aragorn’s identity? Surely
Lewis addressed these questions elsewhere in his writings, and I don’t think
too many people would have objected if his explanations were introduced into
the film.
As it stands, without these answers on screen, it’s
difficult to become caught up in events like the epic battle sequence that
forms the climax of this film. We know the good guys are going to win, and we
know that will be a positive thing for Narnia. But it would mean a lot more if,
as with The Lord of the Rings, we knew what was at stake if they failed—and that
there was a good chance they might do just that. I realize that some people may
think that such comparisons to Tolkien’s epic are unfair, seeing as Tolkien
wrote for adults and Lewis wrote Narnia for children. However, I see no reason
why children’s literature or movies should be held to a lesser standard. Good
storytelling is good storytelling no matter who your target audience is. If
anything, books and films aimed at children should be held to a higher
standard, because they become a child’s primal reading/viewing experience.
Despite my overall disappointment with this film, one aspect
of my past reading experience that it did manage to tap into, at least
momentarily, was the sense of wonder and excitement I felt about the
possibility that there might be more to the world than I originally assumed—far
more, in fact. Not only that, this story was one of the first to make me hope
that there might also be more to me than I originally thought. Like Lucy,
Edmund, Peter, and Susan, I may have a sense of purpose and destiny far beyond
anything I had ever imagined. That is the true power of stories like Narnia or
Harry Potter, I think. While we all sense there’s more to life than meets the
eye, the characters in these stories actually get to witness this deeper
reality firsthand, and that fills us with a sense of hope and excitement that
we can make the same sort of discovery one day. And I definitely believe that
we can.
That said, when adapting such a universally renowned
book—probably the best piece of children’s literature ever written—you can’t be
content to make a good film. It has to be a great film, or not at all.
Unfortunately, the makers of this film didn’t seem to be aware of that fact. I
have no doubt that someone could have made a cinematic masterpiece out of The
Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. However, that someone just happened to
be too busy adapting another work about a fifty-foot ape. Too bad, because I
doubt we will get this chance again. Perhaps it’s for the best though, because
rather than letting some filmmaker do the imagining for us, if we want to
experience the true magic of Narnia, we will just have to read the books for
ourselves.