Beautifil visuals, charismatic acting, mawkish propaganda

Rating: 8/10 (24 August 2007)

OK the CGI and visual continuity was flawed, but not enough to detract while in the suspension of disbelief mode necessary to enjoy storytelling.
Watching a book, reading a film, tasting a song.. all are enjoyed from a different critical perspective than that of dealing with everyday life. If you can't switch off your pragmatic uberself, you can't be entertained by fantasy because you'll be too busy looking for the cracks in the pavement to find anywhere to walk. SO - watching with my sceptical criticism chip bypassed - this is a hugely enjoyable film. The White Witch is one of THE most marvellous creations in the history of cinema. Gorgeous fantasy. Even the cutesy goat-boy living in the closet was superbly portrayed.
I perversely enjoyed the terribly, terribly stiff upper lip Britishness of the kids and the shiny-armoured pre-raphaelite England. Victorian fairy tales and heroic bronze statues evoking a golden age better-times period that never actually existed but which inhabits a world of alternative nostalgia that we all find ourselves wanting to believe in but which is no more real than the world behind any wardrobe.
Why perversely? The real downfall of the film is not in the continuity, the special effects, casting, acting or (ahem) wardrobe but is something so fundamental that while it IS all the pre-raphaelite imagery and ideology that stirs the emotions so positively, it also is that very pre-raphaelite imagery and ideology that blinds us. Ideology is elevated to undeserved importance. Ideology becomes everything. The criticism harks right back to the original book. The flip-side of the whole Elgar and William Blake Englishmess that I confess to enjoying in my suspended-disbelief world of an entertained film-watcher is a terrible mawkishness that betrays the pleasantry of fantasy in the real world outside of the entertainment medium.
The overwhelming Christian agenda which the film manages to amplify and throw into very sharp relief is utterly cloying. so much so that my 10yr old daughter pointed it out, unbidden and unprompted. It dominates and manipulates and is so-in-yer-face as to be embarrassing in its audacity.
The central problem to Lewis's type of Christian world-view is that it glorifies the nobility of sacrifice as the ultimate spiritual achievement while missing something extremely important. A self sacrifice, undergone in the absolute knowledge of resurrection is not a sacrifice at all. A real sacrifice is one where the outcome is hopeless and unknown. There is no bravery in a suicide-bomber's death or a crusader's riding into certain death if he KNOWS he will obtain eternal life as a consequence of passing through that particular, painful door.
The film, meanwhile, hard-sells us redemption and cosy - in fact smug - Christianity disguised as a fairy tale with a thin veneer of talking animals and sparkliness. The big lion knows he has a trump card up his sleeve so he can afford to string everyone along and get them all upset and bereaved right up to the point of rolling away the metaphorical stone, and this is spiritual dishonesty. This kind of emotional manipulation ( I'm talking about the character as written, not the cinematic direction) is seen as commendable by the writer, and yet it is morally bankrupt. It is the kind of brainwashing that prepares us to know our place and go to war to fight for the ideals of our "betters."
There is a lot of talk about destiny, and accepting it without question as a pont of faith. Whenever Christians run up against something which makes absolutely no sense, it is explained away as a "mystery" which meed not be looked at too closely by anyone who has enough faith. Having faith is the ultimate virtue. You do not need proof of anything, you need no evidence other than hearsay. Someone else says they had proof, told someone else who told someone else and eventually someone else wrote about it and that is proof enough for YOU. You are then told that you have to accept this apocryphal proof with none of your own and eventually you are conditioned to see your emotional reaction as all the proof you need. yes, this is faith. If the subject matter is different, it is superstition. Same thing.
Faith, of course, is the root of all human misery. This is not how lewis's generation tended to see things.
The protagonists, being of good Christian stock as all middle class British school children of their period would have been, have been schooled to believe in things which cannot be scrutinized on the say-so of someone else's claim to a better understanding than ours, and the story reeks of it. Lewis is careful to keep the "real" religious truth out of the story and relies on the allegorical setting to punch the associated values home. Just dial in new names at your convenience.
Duty. Destiny. Faith. Heroism. Sacrifice. Redemption. By Jingo, this sis the stuff that makes our Empire what it is today!
The theme is hammered home so unsubtly that, as I said, my 10yr old daughter was beginning to cringe after about the fifth or tenth biblical allusion. We did, however, really enjoy watching the film together and will certainly watch it again and recommend it to others to watch, albeit with the slight caveat about the heavy-handed theme.