The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

Jim Broadbent rules. What a fantastic actor. He's in approximately two scenes of The Chronicles of Narnia, and they are the only ones that actually make sense, the only ones with real humanity and the only occasion in which the movie ceases to feel like a bad special effects promo reel designed for young children.

Now, I should say that I completely and totally disagree with the sentiment expressed in Broadbent's scenes. As the wise but eccentric professor who takes in four children displaced by the horrors of WWII, Broadbent makes an open and outright case for the nobility of faith. Young Lucy Pevensie (Georgia Henley) claims to have found a passageway to the enchanted realm of Narnia in the back of a wardrobe, and of course her siblings don't believe her.

"But why wouldn't you believe her? Is she a liar?" asks Professor Kirke. "She is your sister!"

The analogy shouldn't be too difficult, even for the kids in the audience. Faith is about letting go of your narrow skepticism and embracing an ideology because it feels right, and because you are part of a community of believers. As an atheist, I find this kind of groupthink fairly repugnant. The other Pevensie children are absolutely correct in thinking that Lucy is crazy. She says she's found a trail in the back of a goddamn closet that leads to a magical forest inhabated by goat men! If the other children had said, "Oh, Lucy, sounds like you 'ad a merry old time! Let's all go have a look!," that wouldn't bode well for the Pevensie gene pool.

But my point (I do have one) is that the scene works because it has something to say, and because Broadbent brings a mysterious but warm affability to his scenes with the children. The rest of the film feels rote in comparison. Andrew Adamson, like Chris Columbus in his Harry Potter adaptations, seems excruciatingly terrified of upsetting fans of his source material, so he lumbers along, content to "recreate" memorable scenes from the first book of C.S. Lewis' Narnia series rather than turn the series into anything engaging, provocative or cinematic.

I've heard conservative religious types claim the film as their own, as the ideological and social follow-up to Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. But, honestly, the film's far too dispassionate to make this case. You have to be about something in order to represent a political or ideological viewpoint, and the only thing Chronicles of Narnia seems to express is a desire to have a big opening weekend so that the suits at Disney will greenlight some sequels. Lewis' stories work not only as rather clunky religious metaphors, but as entertaining (if sometimes rambling) fantasy/adventure novels in their own right. You'd never know that from the movie, which consists of three equally-obnoxious modes: shrill kiddie fare, poorly-shot spectacle and creepy Christian allegory.



Back to the story...

Lucy goes through the wardrobe and meets a faun named Tumnus (James McAvoy, mostly forgettable) who is very friendly and invites her for tea. He's terrified of the White Witch (Tilda Swinton in an embarrassing, self-conscious turn), who has kept Narnia locked in Winter for 10 years. When Lucy's siblings stumble through the closet themselves, Peter (William Moseley) and Susan (Anna Popplewell) meet up with their rogue sister and a friendly beaver (voiced by Ray Winstone), while Edmund (Skandar Keyes) comes under the spell of the White Witch. The stage is set for a showdown.

These sequences (well, everything up to the CG talking beaver) start things off sufficiently, even if it takes a bit too long to explore any of Narnia beyond Tumnus' modest cottage. The actual enchanted woods set looks terrific, blanketed by powdery snow, but also kind of plain for a big Hollywood fantasy film.

Coming off of the craggy New Zealand landscapes and epic proportions of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, the Land of Narnia feels like a letdown. Pretty woodland scenes and rolling green hills are no match for the mines of Moria or Minas Tirith, and we never even get to see a real Narnian city. In fact, Narnia doesn't really seem very big in the film, and it's not big on elaborate natural wonders or bustling urban centers. We're told the land extends from a random lamppost in the woods to the Witch's castle in the mountains, but what lies beyond the limits of Narnia? And shouldn't there be more citizens of Narnia around? Pretty much every character we meet along the way already knows one another and lives alone and isolated in a small, modesty-appointed home.

Once the story kicks into high gear, with the introduction of titular feline King Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson) and the Christ allegory, Narnia pretty much collapses under its own weight. Adamson has the unenviable task of opening with very childish sort of material - games of hide and seek and tea with Mr. Tumnus - and closing with, seriously, an exact recreation of the story of Christ's crucifiction and resurrection featuring talking animals. It doesn't even come remotely close to gelling together as a film. Not by a long shot. I've come closer to sinking a shot from half court at the Staples Center than Adamson comes to hitting the Narnia mark.

I haven't read Lewis' original books since I was maybe 10 years old, so it's hard for me to pin down whether the whole Narnia thing is silly in and of itself or whether Adamson's adaptation has made it seem silly. Most likely, the books hold together because Lewis had a vision and a conception of this place that comes through in his prose. He understood not only the mechanics of Narnia, but its native spirit. And he should know why a place like Narnia needed to exist! He invented it!

Director Adamson fails to demonstrate any sort of real vision for the material. His Narnia has no personality or life of its own (in addition to its apparent underpopulation problem). Not only isn't it a place I'd like to go, but it's a place that I still don't really have a feel for one way or the other. I can't imagine what life might really be like there at all, as events seem to merely unfold in front of our heroes.

I think part of the problem is that Lewis' story relies so heavily on the animal kingdom and by-now cliched mythological beasts for characters to fill up his world. Reading about centaurs and lions and minotaurs and badgers and unicorns fighting a huge battle for the fate of the world is one thing. Seeing that concept rendered using computer-generated effects and shot as an action sequence is something else entirely. And that thing is ridiculous

A word about those special effects. They're terrible. I noticed the crappy effects technology early on, when Swinton's White Witch magics up some delicious Turkish Delights to seduce young Edmund into evil. She takes out a vial of liquid and gingerly sprinkles it on the ground, where magically Turkish Delights then appear! Using the same technique used to animate the Fairy Godmother's magic in the ABC-Family Channel original production of Cinderella. I mean, the snow whips around into some kind of blurry swirl and then suddenly there's a platter of Turkish Delights? That's the best an entire squad of effects artists could produce in 2006? Didn't some of the WETA Lord of the Rings team work on this bitch?

I mean, at the end of the movie, we're talking about large-scale action scenes featuring warrior Minotaurs. That should look kind of cool, right? Instead, the minotaurs look like College Basketball mascots. The entire final battle sequence, which by the way has no real repercussions for either side and thus makes no logical sense, lacks for clairty and intensity, for substance and consequence. It's just storybook characters running into one another at high speed, like an explosion at Scholastic headquarters.

Once all this noise and flash was finally over, I realized I'd have been much happier overall watching a film about Professor Kirke and his several months spent as acting guardian of the Pevensie children. Broadbent's performance, the ominously large mansion, the sassy head servant woman...it would be an exploration of the meaning of faith and family, and a cool WWII-era period film to boot. Sounds alright. Instead, we get Tilda Swinton dressed as an Ugg boot, horse-men with axes and bad facial hair, and a martyred fox that sounds like Rupert Everett. If it's all the same to you guys, I think I'll skip Prince Caspian.