Third and final NARNIA post ~ read all three in any order
~ Part 3: “Narnia Nonsense”
Picking Apart the Narnia Nit Pickers and Pevensie Purists
Before the first-ever public screening of a much-anticipated film--based on a very popular book--the producer felt moved to make a few comments to those of us in attendance. Thanks for coming and thanks for being willing to fill out a comment card after the screening. Then an unexpected boast with a warning.
“We believe this is a faithful and accurate version of the original text. Though not a word-for-word retelling, it is an exacting and careful film of this great story. I need to warn you, though, that there are no wisemen in our Christmas story--as we have based this film on the Book of Luke, and Luke never mentions wisemen.”
“What?!” I said, out loud. It stopped the proceedings.
“The Gospel of Luke does not mention the Wisemen and we wanted to make the most Biblically accurate film on the life of Christ ever produced.”
”Where did you get a Bible that only has one Gospel in it?” I asked.
“We decided - - ”
“To create a big gaping whole in the beginning of the film that will distract every audience member. Or will you be there to give your "most Biblically accurate" speech at every screening?”
The movie was called simply, Jesus. Maybe they should have called it Jesus Without the Wisemen or, Jesus Lite, but with or with out wisemen it was a muddled, confusing and not very engaging story retelling. The producers will tell you it’s been seen by millions and changed lives. So, I guess it’s okay if it isn’t very good film making--and incomplete storytelling.
What is accuracy? At a conference on Imagination and Faith at Oxford University (Oxford ‘91) I heard Madeleine L’Engle read from the Oxford Dictionary, “Perfect, to do thoroughly, to complete.” Looking up from her notes she smirked, “I have written over forty books, I must pretty damn perfect.”
When a story is transferred from the page to the screen, or the stage, I do not want accuracy, but I am very interested in the film makers being thorough. I want them to find the heart and soul of the author and his story and let it breath life through flesh and blood characters. I want to share the anguish of their struggle, cry at their collapse, and bellow at their triumphs. If screenwriter and director have done their homework--read the book--if they have found the heart of the work, the stories objective, the film has more than a fighting chance. The objective tells us why the author is telling this story. What are we to carry away, to do, consider, change, make complete in our lives as a result of sitting in the dark, staring at 24 images per second for two hours. How might this story complete us?
With the announcement that The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was coming to wide screen cinemas (and not-so-wide mall-plexes) Narnia fans the world over sat up and paid attention. At the center of the pack the nit-picking Narnia purists—self-appointed “wardrobe monitors.” Would the Disney/Walden team get Narnia “right”—exactly, or not?
Does their need for perfection and accuracy include C.S. Lewis’s outdated language with the Pevensie children saying “rah-ther” and “splendid”? Lewis was a master storyteller, but he never expected to be writing for the whole world and several generations. He wrote to British children in the middle of the twentieth century. Fifty years later we have new ways of telling stories and, at the same time, preserving Narnia’s story. Some moviegoers on this side of the Atlantic divide will be put off by the mere hint of the British accents of the four siblings at the heart of the journey. Trust me on this, as I just spent a week in London and Oxford, that’s really the way all children in England sound. They can’t help themselves, they’re British.
So, changes were made in the story-moved-to-screen through the fourteen complete drafts of a screenplay. Co-writer and director Andrew Adamson (Shrek I & II), a big Narnia fan as a kid, estimates that some scenes had nearly a hundred versions. This was a task not entered into lightly. But stories are told visually on film where a book has all that narrative, adverb, and adjective stuff.
Everyone who reads fiction imagines the look, and feel, and sounds of the story’s places and people. With our favorite stories—Narnia—we hope for a film version and set about to create our version of that film in our minds. Thus even the Narniaholics would not agree amongst themselves on an accurate film version. “Where two or more (Narniacs) are gathered...there will be”... a discussion group, an argument, and a helping of tea and cakes.
A friend of mine wrote one of the earliest and best Narnia companions and had to spend not a few pages correcting some of the folklore that had grown up around Lewis’s motivations and intentions. I suspect if there were a film of C.S. Lewis himself reading Narnia to a group of children, there would be many who would not be satisfied with his interpretation.
Sometimes the film, or parts of it, can be better than the book. Narnia:LWW is such an experience, for me. First example:
That wonderful moment, in the book, when young Lucy, only a minute after arriving in Narnia, for the first time, encounters her first resident of this magical be-Wintered land. Both she and Mt. Tumnus are startled. He drops his packages and almost right away begins picking them up again. It is a great moment--in the book. Ah, but in the film, director, screenwriters, actors, editor, and the director of cinematography all conspire to create an even richer scene. Both characters are surprised and driven to hiding behind lamp post and tree. Lucy, ever-curious approaches the stranger and along the way she picks up the packages and delivers them to her new friend. What is a brief and delightful moment in the book becomes, in the film, a series of playful peeks and tentative false starts towards a great moment of discovery. And having Lucy retrieve the packages brings more meaning and depth to the story than even Lewis himself found in the original NArnia-on-the-page.
Like filming the life of Christ, or any other story that we have first encountered as written word, there is going to be a clash of the places and people that our imaginations have built, painted, decorated and populated with all the images devised by the hundreds of artisans who have crafted a filmic retelling of the story.
How then, or whom, shall we judge a popular work like LWW? Who decides?
No one. And everyone. It is not your place to tell me it wasn’t accurate, therefore wrong, nor is it my place to pronounce it correctly done. What I am hoping to do in these paragraphs is assist those who are worried with a bit a understanding about the process of moving a story from one medium to another. Also, I wanted to share the bits and pieces of info that I have found from the production team and the love they had for the story and their understanding that carefulness was needed. And they had help, expert help form someone close to old “Jack” Lewis himself.
All along the way, lending his life-long (and first-hand) knowledge of C.S. Lewis was Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s stepson. He was there in Alsan’s camp with the centaurs and the Beavers. He was in on world-wide “auditions” for real lions to portray Aslan. He had script approval. That is nothing short of the keys to the kingdom of Narnia. Mr. Gresham was in on early planning and was there for the world premiere at the Royal Albert Hall to greet HRH Prince Charles.
There was early speculation by the film community and worry by church folk as to whether Narnia, the film, would be as big as Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, or King Kong. I for one don’t care. If it’s not, if the current episode of Harry Potter halls in more cash at the box office does God lose? Well, that’s what you’d think was at stake here. Harry and Aslan, apples and Kiwi. Two very different target audiences with a good bit of overlap. But your average Hogwart’s kid is likely to be old enough for a drop off viewing, while many younger Narnia visitors will need a parent in toe. Fear not, Ma and Pa, you will have a good time in Narnia. I sat next to three young Brits and a middle-age rock star and we all loved it. For now, opening weekend was the second best December opener ever at just north of $62 million. According to the website Box Office Mojo, Narnia has earned more than $247 million, to date (cf. $192 million for King Kong.) Are you happy now?
That’s enough for Disney/Walden to have already announced Narnia II, Prince Caspian, for a December 2007 release.
Hollywood and some who think you earn your salvation (your worth) by good deeds and good box office receipts, will need to keep score. But we “wrestle not against flesh and blood’’ or movie special effects—and Narnia has loads of them—all thanks to George Lucas’s ILM (Industrial Light and Magic.)
I am already weary of the online chat rooms, blogs, radio and TV debates among Christians who want to improve God’s image through box office ratings, best seller book lists, and “Christian musicians” appearing on the popular variety shows (Jay Leno et al.) None of that is supposed to matter in God’s calculus. The one visit Jesus made to a mega church (the Temple in Jerusalem) was an embarrassing disaster. He trashed the DVD, t-shirt, and gospel gadget booth in the lobby and thrashed the senior pastors with reptilian name calling. He was not rebooked.
If Narnia has anything to say it is a message of God’s grace. No other belief system offers this ridiculous, unreasonable, remarkably elegant, and foolishly illogical distinction. God’s Grace creates a seamlessness where once there were scars.
By contrast, there is an inelegance to the church trying to compete by the world’s standards. If people of faith who are also author’s, musicians and film makers create works that are critically acclaimed and commercially successful, great. But that does not make their work legitimate or better. So the new film, based on the “first” book in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series might be a big hit, or not. It does not change the film’s quality and impact. Of course when something grows in popularity, more folks are attracted to it. This is good, IF the boook/film/music is good. “Popular” does not equal good or valuable. We all have a favorite life-changing film or book that we can’t understand why everyone hasn’t read or seen.
The larger worry with this film is it’s so-called accuracy, as though we were discussing scripture. Narnia is, after all is said and done a completely made-up fantasy. It is an allegory devised for children to understand good vs. evil, God's grace and other grand, eternal themes. C.S. Lewis wrote it for children, not grown ups with tiny reading glasses, highlighter pens, and a check list of the exact words of Aslan. Just like Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny, Aslan, too, is make believe. Unlike those seasonal icons Aslan is rich, powerful, unsafe, and very good. Meanwhile, Santa Claus never died for anyone.
Example two of the film being better: Film is a hugely visual storytelling art form. As great a writer as C.S. Lewis was, he did not create battle scenes as exciting and vast as the film of his story.
As an actor I have preformed Shakespeare’s plays word for word, with audience members who sit in the dark following along in their well-worn copy of the text. Nowhere, in any of Shakespeare's plays did he pen either stage directions or clues as to how the words “should be said.” Yet thousands of performances of his plays will thrill audiences around the world this year and next. All those actors and directors will conspire to break open any and all meaning they can mine from the Bard’s rich and rewarding rhythmic writing. Many stage productions and all but one film interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays will leave out a scene here and there. Is this bad? No. There are many reasons for making “adjustments” in the structure and ordering of those scenes.
Narnia on film is as magical, if not more so, than the story that first leaped from the page into my mind more than forty years ago.
Was Aslan strong enough, LOUD enough, scary enough, theological, and wise enough?
“Magic.” There’s the hundred dollar word in this film. It is used prominently and it will bother some, or mostly persons of Christian Faith. But Narnia IS magic and magical. No one owns that word, not the New Age crowd, “the Force” folks, or even the children of God–and that group includes all of us. So when Aslan, the great lion of Narnia, confronts Jadis, the White Witch, they speak of the Magic of Narnia. Aslan reminds all that he was there when it all began—life, Narnia and all the Magic.
For now we have the first film of the seven books of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Magic has begun and begun well. Is it complete, flawless, exact. Audiences like it. Book shops can’t keep it in stock. Lots of folks are rediscovering—or reading for the first time—Lewis’s magical adventure. Many are reading other Lewis titles, beyond Narnia--that’s very good. Most importantly, Narnia is in the national conversation in schools, around the water cooler, everywhere. Sunday night, after attending the Narnia world premiere in London, I was riding the subway, in New York City, and a young man (early thirties) was reading a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Noticing he was just a few pages in, I asked, “Re-reading an old favorite or is this your first rip through the wardrobe?”
He looked up, smiled, and said, “It’s my first trip.”
“And...”
“It’s amazing.” He beamed. “I don’t know why I’d never read this. But I was at a party last night and everyone was talking about it ‘cause we’re all going to see the movie together and I was the only one there who had never read it. I didn’t want to be left out.”
“Stop reading.” I said
“What? Everyone else has already - - ”
“Good. So you read it now and every little moment will be fresh in your mind when you see the film and you will be expecting something and it won’t be there. At least it won’t be there exactly like you imagined it. You be the one kid in your group who sees the movie with fresh eyes. And you’ll help the others see the story in the film as it is there, exactly.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I promise. And then you can go back and read the story and enjoy it on it’s own terms.”
“Okay.”
He closed the book, put it in his coat pocket, and got off at the next stop.
Next stop, Narnia.
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There are some emotionally tense, high-adventure sequences that may be too powerful for very young kids. (I make it my policy to NEVER say any film is appropriate for your kids. Every kid is wired different, as any parent of two or more well knows.)
Marshall creates a steady emotional pace that would have been lost in less deft directoral hands. The near perfect score (by Mark Isham, one of our current masters) weaves effortlessly through a challenging piece of storytelling that must jog back-and-forth between two or three simultaneous plot lines.
