Review: Shadowlands
I forget how much of my news you and your mother know. It is
wonderful. Last year I married, at her bedside in hospital, a woman who seemed
to be dying: so you can imagine it was a sad wedding. But Aslan has done great
things for us, and she is now walking about again, showing the doctors how
wrong they were and making us very happy....
C.S Lewis: Letters to Children
I'd been building up to Shadowlands with some trepidation. Richard
Attenborough has made a career out of sentimentalising the lives of well known
historical figures. (Don't you think that Ghandi would have been improved if
we'd been allowed to hear about what he liked to do with naked women...?) The
thought of him getting to work on one of my personal heroes was not an
inspiring prospect. The Hollywoodized publicity campaign didn't make me very
hopeful. 'He thought that magic only existed in books.... then he met her.' Oh
dear.
So I was relieved to find that what we had was a pretty good movie, with
Hopkins almost managing to be convincing as Lewis although he looked nothing
like him, and Deborah Winger pulling off a very nearly perfect Joy Gresham.
When you've read practically every that's been written about a pair of people,
you get a very fixed idea of what they were like, and its impressive when
actors manage to personify that idea. And the visuals, full of mists and
sunrises and scenery and churches and crowds of undergraduates could hardly
have been better.
In fact if Mr Attenborough hadn't removed the point of the story and twisted
its meaning, I would be in a position to recommend it.
Shadowlands, in its three versions—TV, stage and now screen—is unashamedly a
work of a hagiography rather than biography. It is selective about what it
tells us about Lewis. The TV version didn't mention that C.S Lewis's brother,
Warren, was an alcoholic, or that Joy Gresham's American abrasiveness made her
very unpopular with Lewis's friends. Both of these were incorporated into the
stage play, improving it enormously. Other awkward themes were ignored. We
learned nothing of Lewis's alleged sado-masochism, nothing of his quarrel with
Tolkien, and nothing of the mysterious Mrs Moore, who may or may not have been
the lover of this 'confirmed bachelor'.. Nevertheless, it seemed to me to be a
valid account of this part of Lewis's life: partial, yes, somewhat idealised,
yes, but capturing some of the spirit of the man (or at any rate, that part of
it which we know from his books.) Douglas Gresham (Lewis's stepson) told
Lewis's biographer A.N Wilson 'how authentic it all felt, apart from the fact
that so many of the details were untrue.'
Bill Nicholson, playwright of all three versions, said that in some
biographies you have to work quite hard to find the patterns, the connections
that can make the facts of someone's life into a story. In C.S Lewis's case, he
found the work done already. Certainly, it seems as if Lewis was forced, at the
end of his life, to live out a parable of everything that he had ever written—about
Christianity, about children, about love, about death, about suffering.
Doubtless over-simplistic biographies have made it all seem more clear cut than
it actually was, but the bare bones of the story seem to be entirely true. A
crusty old bachelor has a purely platonic friendship with an outrageous
American; he enters into a marriage of convenience so she can stay in the
country; she turns out to be suffering from cancer; their friendship turns into
sexual love; there is a death-bed marriage, a three year remission: they are
happy, she dies. Alone again, the Christian scholar has to re-assess everything
he ever believed.
Is there a more painful book in the English language than A Grief Observed,
Lewis's diary of the month's following Joy's death? It has been said that in
those months he lost his faith: what actually happened seems to have been
rather worse. In the TV version of Shadowlands, Nicholson has him say 'I still
believe in God, but what kind of God?'. His beliefs still seemed intellectually
valid to him: but he doubted that God was good, or feared that a truly good God
might be more dreadful, more terrifying than a malevolent deity. He rebuilt his
faith, and his final books (Prayer: Letters to Malcolm and The Great Divorce)
are probably his best: less smug, more considered, more pious, more concerned
with searching for the truth, less with winning the argument.
The BBC's play concentrated on what might be termed this theological plot.
Despite its omissions, it was full of convincing, pointed scenes. We are shown
that David and Douglas Gresham were the same ages that Lewis and his brother
were when their mother died. We see Douglas reading the passage from the
Magicians Nephew about Aslan bringing the magic apple back from Narnia to save
a mother's life; and Lewis realising the absurd naiveté of the stories he had
been feeding children. The play shows us Lewis's loss of faith—overstates it,
according to some who knew Lewis—but culminates with his mystical experience,
quoted directly from A Grief Observed—in which he realises that God is still
there, unchanged.
The stage version improved the characterisation of Joy Gresham—we could
finally see why Lewis's friends at Oxford might have disliked her. It
incorporated a series of long monologues from Lewis, derived from the Problem
of Pain, about the nature of suffering in the world. It removed David Gresham
from the story altogether (ostensibly for reasons of dramatic economy, but one
wonders if this was at the request of the adult David, who seems not to have
shared his brother's hero-worship of Lewis.) It foolishly spends a lot of the
second act on a series of rather inept tableaux of Joy and Jack being happily
married, and incorporates their 'honeymoon' in Greece. Not good theatrical
material, I'm afraid. It also made a lot more of the psychological element,
arguing that Lewis was a screwed up kid, who never got over the death of his
mother, and had been emotionally frozen by the experience.
The film manages to cut much of what was interesting in the two plays.
Warren Lewis's alcoholism is touched on, but to nothing like the extent that it
was in the stage play. Strangely, the off-stage character of Bill Gresham
(Joy's first husband) is whitewashed. In both plays, we are told that he used
to fire loaded guns to work off his anger, and once broke a bottle over Douglas
head. On the screen, Douglas briefly complains that his dad shouts too much.
Viewers who are not very familiar with Lewis's life and work are likely to miss
entirely the symbolism of the attic, so nicely brought out on the TV. Lewis's
emotional coldness since his mother's death is reduced to a single conversation
between him and Joy. His antipathy to women vanishes altogether: the common
room bore who explains that men have the intellect where women have souls (and
is demolished by Joy) is expressing a view that Lewis himself might well have
put forward. 'Why on earth marry a woman' he was supposed to have said 'All the
topics of conversation would be used up in a fortnight.' But Lewis the (very
chivalrous) misogynist wouldn't fit Shadowlands according to Attenborough, so
out it goes.
But the films greatest sin is the way in which Attenborough marginalises all
the specifically Christian ideas in the story. We lose a conversation between Lewis
and his friends about the meaning of Christmas, and gain an explanation of the
symbolism of the Wardrobe. (Is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe really the
only Lewis book that anyone has heard of?) Later, he asks another bachelor
friend if he feels a sense of waste. 'Of course.' replies the friend, and the
scene ends. In the play, he was allowed to add 'I don't have your faith in
divine recycling.' To be fare, we keep the Problem of Pain monologue from the
stage play, which presents something not a million miles from what Lewis's
beliefs actually were. 'I'm not sure God particularly wants us to be happy . .
.Pain is God's megaphone for shouting at a callous world.' He says that we all
long to take each others pain on ourselves but does not add, as the real Lewis
undoubtedly would have done, that we can't do so, whereas God can, and did.
These are fairly trivial points. The loss of Joy's account of her conversion
from communism to Christianity, and Lewis's account of his own conversion from
paganism seems more serious. A longish talk drawn directly from the couple's
correspondence becomes a single gag about them both being 'lapsed atheists'. A
very nice scene, created specially for the film, in which the embarrassed Lewis
shares a bed with Joy for the first time, has him commenting that each night he
kneels at the end of the bed and says his prayers. 'Like a little boy' comments
Joy. Lewis might have said that as a little boy he was a humanistic atheist
with leanings towards paganism and the occult. He doesn't. The film makes his
Christianity something childlike and Anglican, which it wasn't.
Most seriously of all, the meaning of Joy's remission is changed beyond all
recognition. In the two plays, the clergyman, having pronounced them man and
wife and stumbled touchingly over expressions like 'in sickness and in health'
and ''till death do you part' says 'I thought I might say a brief prayer of
healing. Would you object if I laid hands on you?' This happened in real life:
Lewis wrote in 1959—
I have stood by the beside of a woman whose thigh bone was eaten
through with cancer and who had thriving colonies of the disease in many other
bones as well...The doctors predicted a few months of life: the nurses, who
often know better, a few weeks. A good man laid hands on her and prayed. A year
later the patient was walking (uphill, too, though rough woodland) and the man
who took the last X-ray photos was saying 'These bones are as solid as rock.
It's miraculous.'
Lewis believed that Joy's remission was a miraculous act of God. In stage
and TV, as in life, this was the point of the story.
In the movie, no prayer-of-healing is given by the clergyman, and we jump
straight from the wedding to scenes of Joy undergoing chemotherapy. The
chemotherapy replaces the prayer. Attenborough could hardly have put it more
strongly than that. True, we hear Lewis's own parish priest saying that he
knows how hard he has been praying. However the film has Lewis say that he does
not pray to change God, but for the effect it has on him. This would not have
been the real Lewis's view. I don't say that Attenborough, who is not, I think,
a Christian, should have turned the movie into a piece of religious evangelism.
You may not believe that Joy's remission was miraculous. Peter Bide, the clergyman
in question, doubted that it was. What is important is that Lewis thought so.
If Attenborough was worried about the film turning into a piece of polemic, he
could have introduce a sensible atheist for Lewis to talk to. He could have had
Lewis meet Bertrand Russel or A.J Ayer, who were both around at the right time.
He could have re-staged the famous debate about miracles in which G.E.M
Anscombe ripped holes in Lewis's argument, to the extent that he never wrote
another book of theological argument. But instead, he simply shunts any
specifically Christian,—or Lewisian—God off to the sidelines.
I didn't see Chaplin. Maybe they played down the fact that he was a
comedian.
I could go on, and on. TV left Joy's final moments to our imagination;
screen shows it to us. In real life, Lewis reports Joy's last words were 'I am
at peace with God'. The screen gives us 'You have to let go, Jack.' TV let us
hear the dreadful, poignant conversation that Lewis reports in A Grief Observed
('If it is allowed, will you come to me when I too am on my deathbed?'
'Allowed? Heaven would have a job to stop me, and as for Hell, I'd smash it to
pieces.') Film cuts it.
As in all previous versions of the story, we end with Lewis talking to
Douglas Gresham, and the old man and the little boy crying together. Lewis, on
this view, was emotionally frozen, and, in particular, couldn't bare to show
emotion in front of other men. Hence, in the play, being able to embrace his
stepson and weep was the culmination of a process which started when he met
Joy. Douglas is represented as being in the same position that Lewis was in at
his age: not believing in heaven, but wanting his mother back. It is an
extraordinarily affecting scene. In the play, it pulled the two themes of the
story—Lewis's childhood, Lewis's faith—together. In the film, it loses its
point (though not its emotional punch) since the themes of motherhood and
Christianity have been so played down. It is no big thing for Lewis to hug
Douglas when we have already seen him kissing him goodnight; no big thing for
him to cry when we have already seen him do so. And no big thing for him to say
'I believe in heaven' when we haven't been shown any significant loss of faith.
So what are we left with? A film about a man who wrote children's books (and
little else, apparently) and gave lectures to old ladies; who married late and
lost but was pleased he had done so. It has genuinely moving moments: the death
bed marriage; Jack and Douglas crying in the attic; Jack haranguing the priest.
Genuinely moving moments: but do they carry their power because of my memories
of other, better version and of my reading of the works of the man himself? I
don't know.
I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from seeing what is in the final analysis
a good movie: Hopkins really is phenomenal, particularly given some of the
lines he has to work with. But I do hope that the BBC take the opportunity to
repeat the original: and that when audiences have put their hankies away they
read A Grief Observed, maybe the best Christian book written this century.
Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hope that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.
C.S Lewis, 'Epitaph for Helen Joy Davidman'