Director: Matthew Brown
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Goode, Liv Lisa Fries, Jodi Balfour
Have I Seen It Before: Never. I barely managed to catch the last screening here in town.
Did I Like It: There’s a challenge at the core of the movie, and at the risk of oversimplifying, it might be boiled down to this: Is the entirety of human experience governed by God or by sex?
What if you’re of the opinion—and maybe in fact live in a time that has nearly uniformly decided—that both conclusions are a little bit preposterous?
The pitch of letting these two titans of a differing worldview then falls flat, but what I was ultimately struck by how much I found Lewis (Goode) to be a likable chap, not unlike the Jesuits that people The Exorcist (1973)*. Religious, sure, but still existing in the world, acknowledging that doing so is to accept that doubt may be the thing which binds the universe together. In short, he’s someone you could still have a conversation with, and he might even have an ability to read the room and know when someone isn’t in the market for proselytism. In even shorter, he is not of the tedious, glassy-eyed variety.
I’ve got a couple more reasons to do it, but I’ve actually started to read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe after resolutely spending the better part of forty years avoiding it. It’s… fine.
And the more I think about the movie, it’s probably… fine, too. One would imagine that we would have largely moved on from the slavish adaptation of plays for the screen after we figured out how to move the camera around when its tied to sound equipment. Everything about this movie reeks of transcription over adaptation, working more as a conversation than a dramatized or visually interesting story.
Maybe I need to really break down and watch Shadowlands (1993). Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
*It’s entirely possible I am working overly hard to misunderstand the point of that novel, that movie, and for that matter, everything about C.S. Lewis.