Shadowlands. - movie reviews

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

Lewis did not lecture to large crowds of dowdy ladies in London nor to sleepy undergraduates in his Oxford rooms. His group of pub-friends called the Inklings consisted of hardarguing intellectuals, not the academic pretenders we meet in the film. Nor can Lewis's theology be epitomized in phrases such as "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world." (Neither a cynical criminal such as Charles Colson nor a convinced communist like Joy Davidman would have been converted to the gospel by reading such an author. ) Nor was Lewis made to learn from a mere student that "we read in order to know we are not alone." This was a truth Lewis had learned by the time he was seven or eight.

Winger does reveal something of the fire and passion of the authentic Davidman, but the film would have been more realistic if it had shown that she was also abrasive, bad-tempered, domineering and foulmouthed. The film conveniently fails to reveal that the actual Davidman had two sons, one of whom rebelled bitterly against his life in England, and both of whom were in their middle teens at her death--not nine, as little Douglas is made to be for the sake of a nice parallelism with Lewis's own age when his mother died.

Shadowlands does its greatest disservice to Joy Davidman. It turns her into a winsome sufferer whose concerns are almost entirely nonreligious. She was, in truth, a God-obsessed woman to whom Lewis was drawn because of her ardent faith and keen intellect. "Her mind was lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard," he wrote. "It scented the first whiff of cant or slush; then sprang, and knocked you over before you knew what was happening." Rather than putting down skeptics with a wisecrack, as she does in the film, Davidman would have replied with a finely honed argument. There is nothing in the movie to suggest that Davidman possessed the ability to write Smoke on the Mountain, to assist Lewis's brother Warnie in his books on 17th-century France, to lecture at Oxford on the work of Charles Williams, or to collaborate with Lewis in the writing of Till We Have Faces, his most accomplished work of art.

The real trouble with Shadowlands is made most evident in its treatment of Davidman's death and Lewis's response to it. Joy dies here, as in life, amid the anguish of both physical pain and spiritual love. "You have made me happy" are her last words to Lewis. The movie is right to reveal that Jack is devastated at losing Joy. He rails, Joblike, against the God who is not a master sculptor chiseling us into shape, but a crude smith hammering us into pieces. His old theodicy shattered, Lewis abandons all Christian claims in favor of the secular truth that happiness includes pain, even as sunshine is made real by shadows. God being thus dispatched, Lewis and Douglas are at last united in a purely human communion of shared grief and love, as they saunter down the earthly valley which we must presume to be the only paradise. This is genuine sentiment, but not the theological sentiment that animated the lives of Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis.