The verdict: thumbs enthusiastically up from all the SWNIDs. All the actors are most excellent. Special hat tips for the portrayals of Lucy, the White Witch and Mr. Tumnus.
Now, some pickiness:
- It was totally wrong that Mrs. Beaver served the children unappetizing food. As all readers with half an eye to the development of the story have realized, the rustic lusciousness of the beavers' larder stands in stark contrast to the sinister allure of the White Witch's Turkish delight. The good-food-versus-bad-food motif was lost, and to the detriment of the filmmaking. A brief pan of the food available in the beaver household would have been a visual treat, especially as the sugary messiness of the Turkish delight was so nicely portrayed earlier (Edmund looked like a pig, and the candy looked disgustingly saccharine).
- The added scene at the river just didn't work. It was an exercise in film cliche, with Lucy's deliverance right out of the Disney playbook, according to which every movie must have the fake death of the hero. (This started with Snow White. Come to think of it, Disney made LWW. Hmm!)
- Since the beavers' exquisite exposition of the character of Aslan was not included in the screenplay, SWNID is very glad that the crucial contrast between Aslan as tame and Aslan as good was retained in the epilogue at Cair Paravel. However, we found Liam Neeson's voicing of Aslan a little too close to the tame. Nevertheless, we are glad that on moral and artistic principle we didn't see Kinsey, or we would be haunted by hearing the depraved doctor's voice coming from the messianic lion's mouth.
Now, the real comment: while LWW the movie is most excellent, as good as we could expect it to be, it does not attain the artistic quality of the book. Lewis's wondrously simple prose cannot be represented on the big screen, no matter how well the special effects are rendered. (Incidentally, this is why the Christian imagery, wrongly labeled "allegory" in the press, is less obvious in the movie even than in the book: we aren't reading Lewis's words, so the connections and allusions are less apparent.)
In this, LWW is not alone. Is there a great book that has been rendered with equal greatness on the screen? Is there a great movie that is based on a great book?
SWNID believes not. We therefore opine that the best movies are based on original screenplays or mediocre books. Predictably, we cite The Godfather, a popular but grossly flawed book made into a nearly perfect movie and followed by a nearly perfect sequel based not on a book but on an original screenplay.
1 comment:
I haven't seen the movie, but here are a couple of predictions/criticisms.
The first is that Lewis is clearly a storyteller in the books. He often directly addresses the reader, and provides editorial comments about the characters' behavior (see "He almost deserved it.") One way to address this in film is to provide a similar narrator. This was done to great effect in "The Shawshank Redemption" and "Trainspotting."
I've also heard several critics say that they found the final battle very anticlimactic. Lewis agreed. In the book, the battle is merely an afterthought, and not described in great detail. Obviously, the story is over when Aslan rises from the dead, and everyone knows it. Many critics have said that the director seemed to be attempting a "Lord of the Rings" style epic and failed.
Post a Comment