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C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were friends and colleagues at Oxford, so it’s apt that The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the new film version of the first of Lewis’s seven Narnia volumes, plays like The Lord of the Rings with training wheels. Andrew Adamson, director of the Shrek films, has hardly put the auteurist stamp on the material that Peter Jackson did with Tolkien’s trilogy; in fact, the nicest thing one might say of Adamson’s adaptation is that he didn’t screw it up. That’s no small thing, and as a result, there’s no reason the film shouldn’t delight a broad swath of children and grown-ups, including those who haven’t read the books. I hadn’t read Lion in 30 years, and I’d forgotten how slight the initial tale is. Four London children — siblings Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy — are taking refuge from the Blitz in a musty English country house when they discover in an antique wardrobe a portal to another world, Narnia. There, thanks to Jadis, the White Witch (Tilda Swinton), there’s been 100 years of winter but no Christmas. The children’s arrival, however, heralds the return of spring and of Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson), the talking lion who is Narnia’s savior. What follows is a Judas-like betrayal, several examples of death and resurrection, and an apocalyptic battle that owes more to Jackson’s Ring cycle than to Lewis. Much has been made of the Narnia series’s Christian allegorical subtext, but it’s no more obtrusive than that of, say, the Matrix trilogy — it’s obviously there, but you can also ignore it and enjoy the story as a rousing adventure tale. Just as prominent, at least in Adamson’s Narnia, is the allegorical take on totalitarianism. The director opens the picture with the real-life terror of a London air raid. It seems unlikely that there could be anything as scary in Narnia, but Adamson finds echoes in a Narnia battle scene in which giant birds flying in formation drop boulders on enemy forces below. (Both of these sequences expand on events that are only implied in the book.) There’s also a frightening sacrificial ritual that’s part pagan blood rite and part Nuremberg rally. Jadis maintains power through fear, overseeing a secret police whose agents are everywhere and forcing citizens to inform on one another. What’s obvious and overdetermined here isn’t the subtext but the characterizations. Black sheep Edmund’s selfishness is blatant from the beginning, as is pragmatic Susan’s literal-mindedness. The sole character who seems to have a rich inner life, thanks to the impossibly adorable Georgie Henley, is youngest child Lucy, whose mischievous smile and wide eyes suggest boundless playfulness and curiosity. If the characters have subtler traits and additional dimensions, the filmmakers seem to be saving such revelations for the sequels, as Lewis did. That’s not an altogether sloppy strategy. Most fantasy films (including the Shrek movies) seem to explain away all their quirks without leaving enough mystery to keep your imagination piqued and intrigued after the movie ends. But in Narnia there are enough strange creatures, ancient mysteries, and glittering vistas on the horizon to justify return visits to the wardrobe.
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