Lion Tamers

Bravehearts: Susan (Anna Popplewell), Peter (William Moseley) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Photo Phil Bray. Courtesy Walt Disney Pictures.

Adapting a beloved children’s book to the screen is never an easy proposition. The nostalgic tug of one’s favourite childhood story turns every viewer into the fiercest critic, protective of cherished details that might be missed or misinterpreted. Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of Rings was a career-making gamble that paid off handsomely: the franchise earned several Academy Awards and billions of dollars, pleasing even the most die-hard of Middle Earth geeks.

C.S. Lewis’s beloved and best-selling The Chronicles of Narnia (85 million copies and counting) is an even tougher series to bring to the screen. Lewis, himself, was opposed to the idea of a live action version of his books, imagining it to be a “blasphemy.” A fellow Oxford don and friend of Tolkien, Lewis also created an intricate mythical world, but unlike Tolkien’s novels, Lewis’s Narnia books are unabashed Christian allegories, from the creation story (The Magician’s Nephew) to the apocalypse (The Last Battle). (Ironically, it was Tolkien’s influence that brought the lapsed Lewis back into the Christian fold, but Tolkien reportedly disliked the Narnia books, feeling them too preachy and too hastily thrown together.)

Even before the release of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the film was divisive. While some consider it the worst kind of Christian propaganda, others believe it to be a powerful tale of religious uplift: namely, that good triumphs spectacularly over evil in a fairy tale that bears no small resemblance to the Christ story. In their hope of seeing Narnia become the next blockbuster franchise, producers Disney and Walden Media are placating both sides of the debate, with dual marketing campaigns for both secular and Christian audiences and even two separate CDs of the soundtrack, one religiously themed and one pure pop.

For the uninitiated: the four Pevensie children are sent away from London during the Blitz to live at the lavish country estate of the eccentric, but kindly, Professor Kirke (Jim Broadbent). During a game of hide and seek, Lucy, the youngest (played by winsome 10-year-old newcomer Georgie Henley), finds her way into a mysterious wardrobe, and there behind several fur coats discovers a doorway into the snow-cursed land of Narnia, where it is always winter, “but never Christmas.”

For many long years, Narnia — a magic land populated by fauns, giants, minotaurs, unicorns, naiads, dwarfs, centaurs and a menagerie of talking animals — has been under the rule of the White Witch, a grinchy, joy-killer who turns her enemies to stone and keeps company with ogres and wolves. But change is afoot. The arrival of Lucy and her siblings is the fulfillment of an ancient prophesy that four humans — two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve — would vanquish the White Witch, and they are aided in their quest by a golden-maned lion named Aslan, who is Narnia’s creator and its long absent king.

Cold comfort: White Witch (Tilda Swinton), ensnares Edmund Pevensie (Skandar Keynes). Photo Phil Bray. Courtesy Walt Disney Pictures.

The adaptation of director Andrew Adamson (Shrek, Shrek 2) is largely faithful to its source. As in the book, Lucy and her siblings, Susan (Anna Popplewell) and Peter (William Moseley), are initially betrayed by their brother Edmund (a nicely brooding Skandar Keynes), a priggish boy who sells out his family for a box of Turkish Delight. Bossed around by his older siblings, Edmund in turn bullies Lucy and takes the side of the White Witch, who promises to make him a king. It’s a ruse, of course. Edmund is just bait in the Witch’s plan to kill all four children, and in order to rescue him, Aslan must sacrifice his own life to pay for the boy’s transgressions.

It’s to Lewis’s credit as a writer that so obvious a religious parable was cherished by so many children — my younger self included — who were unaware of its Christian overtones. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe casts its spell as both a ripping fantasy tale and, as Lewis hoped it would, a celebration of the crucifixion story.

For his part, Adamson cleans up some of Lewis’s regrettable biases — the Narnia books, a product of their time and place, tend to relegate girls to the margins (the intrepid Lucy is one exception) and make the bad guys swarthy, rice-eating Indo-Arab types. Adamson also casts the central battle of good against evil in political terms, rather than spiritual ones (perhaps as a way to avoid alienating secular audiences). The film opens impressively with a German pilot’s eye view of London, as he drops bombs on the city below and then cuts to the terrified Pevensie children and their mother (their father is off in battle) scrambling to their backyard shelter. It’s a gorgeously terrifying scene, with the imposing, shadowy cityscape looking like something out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Adamson then dispatches the children in a more ominous fashion than Lewis did in the book. The scene of the departure of hundreds of evacuees at the London train station offers a little known, if sanitized, piece of Second World War history. Watching war-traumatized parents — unsure if they themselves will survive the Blitz — sending their children to live with strangers is wrenching, making the Pevensies’ ensuing adventure all the more valorous. They are, like many of literature’s child heroes, essentially orphaned.

The war theme is ultimately realized in Tilda Swinton’s embodiment of the White Witch. Swinton’s ethereal, moonbeam beauty never quite works in contemporary settings like in The Deep End, or Thumbsucker; it’s like bumping into the Faerie Queene at the Gap. She’s at her best in the art house offerings of the late Derek Jarman (Caravaggio, Edward II), and she’s an equally inspired choice as the White Witch, hurling herself into the role, made-up like a furious, dreadlocked Valkyrie. As Lewis wrote the Witch, she is “half giantess and half Jinn” (the supernatural, invisible trickster figure of Islamic lore ) and the “ancestor of Lilith,” the first woman, according to Jewish mythology, an uppity proto-feminist who was banished from Eden when she refused to be subservient to Adam. Swinton interprets her as an archetypal Aryan, complete with a Nazi salute; the striking vision of her on the battlefield in a chariot pulled by polar bears is one of Adamson’s virtuoso moments.

Those moments, however, are far too few. Despite the charm of the child actors and for all its visual pageantry — shot in New Zealand, the film owes much of its design and effects to The Lord of the Rings — the film’s an emotional clunker. It’s the antiseptic Disney effect: the Witch’s castle, the beasts, even the sacrifice of Aslan and the climactic battle scene are immaculately, digitally clean. And what feeling there is in this computerized perfection is manipulated by an overbearing soundtrack that swells under every mood change.

This is particularly the case with Aslan. As a Jesus figure, he is an extraordinary creation, coming out of a uniquely English Protestant brand of muscular Christianity. As Mr. Beaver describes him in the book, “he isn’t safe. But he’s good.” And when the Pevensie children first hear of the lion, here’s their reaction: “At the name of Aslan each one of the children felt something jump in its inside. Edmund felt a sensation of mysterious horror. Peter felt suddenly brave and adventurous. Susan felt as if some delicious smell or delightful strain of music had just floated by her. And Lucy got the feeling you have when you wake up in the morning and realize that it is the beginning of the holidays or the beginning of summer.”

That dichotomy of terrible goodness, that power of divine love, is not easy to convey in a computer-generated lion, even one voiced by the stentorian tones of Liam Neeson. And despite Aslan’s ultimate triumph, he’s outmatched at every turn by Swinton’s White Witch in power and emotional range. In the end, it’s not the delicate treading between pleasing both Christian and secular viewers that trips up the film, but its lack of messy humanity. Adamson’s film is a wizardly technical achievement, but it’s too long on spectacle and too short on soul.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens across Canada on Dec. 9.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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