Always Winter But Never Christmas

Rating: 8/10 (22 January 2014)

As a child, I was never a great lover of C. S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia". The books were always too preachy in tone for my liking, and if there was one thing that was guaranteed to kill a book stone dead for me it was the suspicion that the adult world were using it to put forward some morally improving message. My suspicions were confirmed when a classmate of mine, a boy whose great ambition, even at the age of ten, was to be Archbishop of Canterbury when he grew up, explained to me that the whole series was essentially one long extended Christian allegory. (And yes, he probably did use the word "allegory" even at that tender age).
I have never been tempted to revisit the books in adult life, so was surprised that I enjoyed the film version of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" so much. The story opens in London during the Second World War. Four siblings, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie, are evacuated during the Blitz to a large house in the countryside, owned by an eccentric professor. While playing hide-and-seek one day they discover a wardrobe which acts as a gateway into the fantasy land of Narnia. Once there, they get caught up in a power-struggle between Aslan the Lion and Jadis, the evil White Witch. White witches, of course, are normally portrayed as being on the side of good, as opposed to the evil black witches, but in the case of Jadis the adjective relates not to her moral character but to her love of dressing in that colour and to the fact that under her rule Narnia is an icy wilderness, a land "where it is always winter but never Christmas".
From what I can recall, the film follows Lewis's plot fairly closely, so for those who like that sort of thing the religious symbolism is still there. Aslan clearly represents Christ and Jadis the Devil. There are parallels to the Fall of Man, with a bowl of Turkish Delight standing in for the apple, and to the Crucifixion and Resurrection. This symbolism is, however, applied lightly enough to enable the film to be enjoyed as a family fantasy adventure rather than as a beginner's guide to the Christian religion. Lewis was a colleague and close friend of J R R Tolkien, so it is perhaps appropriate that "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" has something in common with Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, which was also shot in New Zealand, especially during the battle scenes near the end. It is, however, somewhat lighter in tone than Jackson's mighty epic.
On the acting side, the one really outstanding contribution comes from an icily seductive Tilda Swinton as the White Witch. Aslan comes across as a bit one-dimensional, noble and heroic and not much else, but that is less the fault of Liam Neeson, who provided the voice, as of Lewis, who wrote him like that.
Lewis's mythology was essentially a hodge-podge of various other mythologies, especially Greek, so the film features such creatures as fauns, centaurs, griffins, minotaurs, dwarfs and various talking beasts, and the computer-generated imagery is able to bring all of these vividly to life. One thing which did not strike me as a child was just how surreal Lewis's world can be, possibly because surrealism was not a concept with which I was really acquainted at the age of ten. This is, however, something brought out in the film version, particularly in the early scenes where the children enter that eerie snow-covered world, a world where Victorian lamp-posts mysteriously sprout in the middle of a dense coniferous forest, where rather camp fauns invite you back to their homes for tea and cakes and where beavers talk with cockney accents and eat fish-and-chips. Who could fail to enjoy a world like that? Perhaps Lewis, the staid, conservative, devoutly religious Oxford don, had more in common with Salvador Dali than he might have liked to admit. 8/10