| | Prince Caspian movie: once again losing the best bits?My expectations for the 2005 movie adaptation of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe dropped considerably when I learned that it'd be directed by the guy who did Shrek. And while I found much to enjoy in the film (especially in its better paced extended edition), it boggled my mind that they screwed up particularly poignant lines from the book and left out the best scene in the book: Aslan's post-resurrection romp. Perhaps, I thought, they didn't have the budget for it (though why not film it and post-produce it later, like George Lucas did 20 years later with the Jabba the Hut scene in Star Wars: The Special Edition?). After Wardrobe did so spectacularly at the box office, I figured I could surely count on a great presentation of the restoration of Narnia in Prince Caspian, but--nope! No Bacchus dancing, Aslan liberating kids from school, boys turning into pigs, just--from everything I've read so far--a big focus on battles. I mean, Prince Caspian is quite likely the weakest of the canon, but it's got some terrific characters and incredible themes going on.
Steven Greydanus notes some of the ways the book and movie part company:
Thematically, the book follows up the Narnian passion and redemption
story with a vision of post-Enlightenment skepticism, in which the very
existence of the omnipotent Lion Aslan and of High King Peter and his
siblings has been largely forgotten, suppressed or dismissed as a fairy
tale. . . .
For better and for worse — and it’s quite a bit of both — the big-screen Prince Caspian takes far more creative license than its predecessor. There is definitely an up side: Not only is Caspian a better-made film, in some ways it manages to improve on Lewis’s plot without violating its spirit. . . .
The more serious problem is that while the essence of Lewis’s plot
is preserved, the themes and ideas behind the story are largely lost.
If the first Narnia film got perhaps two-thirds of Lewis’s intended
meaning, Caspian is lucky if it gets a quarter. That may not
directly detract from its merits as escapist fantasy, but Lewis fans
with regrets about the first film will feel betrayed by the second —
and not just because events have been changed.
Perhaps most damagingly, the filmmakers eviscerate the crucial
theme of skepticism about the existence of Aslan and the Kings and
Queens of Cair Paravel, as well as the whole world of Dwarfs, Talking
Beasts, and spirits of wood and water.
No longer do we see Caspian’s nurse dismissed for telling the
young prince stories of Old Narnia, or his tutor Dr. Cornelius daring
to instruct Caspian in these matters only in private. This might not
matter so much if the film had other ways of making the point — but it
doesn’t. The whole notion that stories of Old Narnia are anathema in
modern Narnia is simply omitted.
Worse, Trumpkin the dwarf (Peter Dinklage) — in Lewis an archetypal lovable skeptic (compare to MacPhee in That Hideous Strength)
whose heart knows better than his head — no longer shows any sign of
disbelieving the old stories. This Trumpkin appears to believe that
Aslan and the Pevensies were real in their day, but abandoned Narnia
long ago, leaving the Narnians to fend for themselves. This fatally
undercuts the theme of Enlightenment rationalism and skepticism which
is basic to the whole point of the book.
Almost as diminished is the theme of faith and sight, with faith
opening one’s eyes to the extent that one believes. We do get the scene
in which Lucy sees Aslan when no one else does — but not the rest of
the plotline, in which Aslan is at first invisible to the children
until one by one they begin to see him in proportion to their openness
and willingness to see him. The whole drama of the scene in which Lucy
disputes with the others about which way to go is passed over almost
incidentally, with none of the momentousness that it has in Lewis.
Here at least there is some effort to get at the point by an
alternate route, with brief moments of soul-searching by Peter and
Susan pondering Aslan’s hiddenness. Still, in a tale of this sort, to
replace a visual fairy-tale metaphor with introspective dialogue seems
an odd choice to say the least. Film is a visual medium, fantasy a
visual genre. A choice like this makes the story less cinematic, not more.
Hidden as Aslan might be in the book, he’s hardly in the film at
all. Visually, when he’s on the screen at all, Aslan is more impressive
than ever; even in closeup, with Lucy embracing him in the woods, he
looks utterly real and warm and solid. Yet the filmmakers turn this
crucial meeting into a dream sequence, deferring the dialogue and
Aslan’s active presence until the very end. In the book, he’s invisibly
present, leading the children; here he doesn’t seem to be around at
all. . . . Thematically, perhaps the most glaring omission is the absence of
Bacchus, Silenus, the Maenads and the whole mythological riot of the
final act. This is a much more serious omission here than in LW&W,
which similarly excised Tumnus’s stories of the revelry in the old days
when Bacchus came to Narnia. While Lewis’s inclusion of these pagan and
roisterous elements may be discomfiting to some of his pious
Evangelical admirers, and the filmmakers may be sincere in finding
rivers flowing with wine inappropriate for a family film, but the
romping and rioting represents the climax of the book’s theme of the
vindication of mythic imagination over Enlightenment rationalism, and
its omission severely undercuts the spirit of the book. . . .
Nor is there any mention of the curious effect, much noted in the book,
of Narnian air on the children, recalling to them the strength and
dignity of their previous adult lives in Narnia. . . .
That last plot point was the first thing to jump at me when I recently scanned the book looking for potential cinematic themes. The clip I saw of Peter whining about not having visited Narnia lately doesn't exactly inspire confidence. But maybe there's yet hope for what could be the greatest of the series: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. When I first saw 2001's The Fellowship of the Ring, an incredibly engrossing film despite its episodic, let's-go-on-a-journey-through-fantasyland nature, I thought, "Do the same thing with Dawn Treader and you've got one fantastic film." Greydanus comments:
Happily, Adamson and company are passing the torch to director
Michael Apted and screenwriter Steven Knight, who previously
collaborated on Walden’s Amazing Grace — not an amazing film, but more promising on several levels than Adamson’s prior work with the Shrek franchise. Given an adaptation rather than a biography to structure, Apted and
Knight might well rise to the occasion. Certainly I don’t even want to
think about how Adamson and company would dumb down Eustace Scrubb or
the Dufflepuds. The Narnia franchise desperately needs an immediate
infusion of new blood. We can only hope it is the right type. |
