Shadowlands. - movie reviews

Christian Century, Feb 23, 1994 by Ralph C. Wood

FOR A WATERY soul like mine, Richard Attenborough's film version of William Nicholson's drama about the marriage of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman Gresham demands a whole packet of tissues. With Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom as its stars, Shadowlands won large audiences in the 1980s as a BBC film and then as a play in London and New York. With Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger in the lead roles, the movie is garnering popular acclaim. Our local theater was sold out, and at the end we all emerged red-eyed, blinking back the tears.

The question, theologically and aesthetically, is whether these tears are well earned or cheaply evoked, whether Shadowlands is rooted in sentiment or sentimentalism. Sentimentalism is an excess of emotion that lacks a true estimate of its object. True sentiment, by contrast, esteems things properly. Great art teaches us, Lewis himself argued. "to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful."

Shadowlands evokes true sentiment. In a culture that normalizes what Davidman (in Smoke on the Mountain) called "slack divorce laws and casual adulteries," this film exalts the virtue of enduring wedded love. It explores the mystery of the human affection that grows first into friendship and then gradually into marriage, only to find a yet higher fulfillment in pain and loss.

Debra Winger's Joy Davidman possesses few qualities except fetching good looks that would seem to attract a donnish bachelor such as C.S. Lewis. Having corresponded with Lewis, this American poet, an excommunist and a Jew who recently converted to Christianity, shows up in Oxford with a child in tow, a tart tongue and a combative spirit. Anthony Hopkins gives us a Jack Lewis who, as the most renowned Christian apologist in the English-speaking world, is determined to keep this foolish American from upsetting his comfortable life.

The Lewis who appears in Shadowlands teaches a single theological lesson: God hammers us into perfection on the anvil of woe. Using a celebrated line from The Problem of Pain, the movie Lewis calls suffering "God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." It is a neat answer to an ancient conundrum. God permits suffering because without it we would bask idly in earthly happiness. God does not want us to be satisfied, Lewis argues, but to have us struggle for the supernal fulfillment that always exceeds our grasp. What else, as Browning asked, is heaven for? The film suggests that Lewis's theodicy comes from books rather than experience; it is a clever device for answering intellectual doubters and assuring pious believers. Lewis has never lost an argument, we learn, and he thus attracts a large following.

In Winger's version, Davidman is no stoic Christian who believes that we are meant to suffer. On the contrary she yearns for happiness not in some putative afterlife but here and now, in the messy and passionate love that issues in marriage. Jack wants only to befriend a needy woman, fearing any deeper love would lead to tumult. Hence his decision to marry Joy in a civil, not religious, ceremony: it prevents her deportation, and keeps their relationship strictly a legal matter.

Joy will not let Jack dwell in such dishonesty. She makes him see that, far from being unselfish, his acts of kindness are a screen against a more radical kind of charity. His love like his faith, is too small. Lewis finally admits that he has made friendship a substitute for marriage. Unfettered happiness, he discovers, is what we are indeed made for. At last confessing his love, he asks for Joy's hand as she lies deathly ill with cancer.

Davidman undergoes an unexpected, even miraculous, remission from cancer, which allows the couple a brief moment of married bliss. The fate of such joy is cinematically figured in their visit to the Herefordshire countryside, where a gorgeous sun-filled valley is soon shadowed by clouds and then soaked by rain. The sentimental power of these scenes is excelled only by the movie's romantic rendering of Oxford. From serene and exalting worship in the chapel of Magdalen College to stately academic exercises in the Sheldonian Theatre, from hightable talk and pubfest argument to the social snobbery of upper-class men barely acknowledging serving-class Women, this film is a visual feast for Anglophiles.

The proposal scene in the hospital is the most tearfully affecting moment I have ever witnessed on the screen. It captures the movie's deepest insight--the paradoxical truth that, while Lewis was unable to surrender himself when Davidman was well and could have made him happy, he gives himself to her utterly in her dying, when she has nothing to offer but total need and care. That a popular film should exalt such suffering love is an astonishing thing. Amid all our culture's saccharine sentimentalism, Shadowlands demonstrates that life is a vale of soul-making, bathed in the tears of things.

VIEWERS inspired by the film to learn more about Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis are in for a stark surprise, however. The film is not only a highly romanticized treatment, but one that fails to get at the couple's real theological core. Thoughhe acts his script superbly, Hopkins is far too much the dapper don to resemble Lewis. Far from being elegant in manners or dress, Lewis wore shabby tweeds, a baggy coat and a crumpled porkpie hat. He described himself during these years as "tall, fat, bald, redfaced, double-chinned." And so far as I know he never drove a car.