SHADOWLANDS
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1994 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Debra Winger, Edward Hardwicke, Joseph Mazzello. Screenplay: William Nicholson. Director: Richard Attenborough.
If Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger aren't careful, they're likely to knock themselves out of contention for Academy Award nominations by doing too much excellent work in one year. Hopkins has received much-deserved accolades and several critics' awards for his role in THE REMAINS OF THE DAY, while Winger has been nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance in A DANGEROUS WOMAN. Now the two talented actors are paired in Richard Attenborough's SHADOWLANDS, and the result is stunning. This moving, intelligent love story provides Winger with her best role in a decade, and Hopkins with a chance to add the second best male performance of 1993 to a resume which already includes the best.
SHADOWLANDS, adapted by William Nicholson from his own fact-based stage play, focuses on renowned English author and scholar C. S. Lewis (Hopkins), known by his friends as Jack. It is 1952, and Jack is living an orderly, sheltered life as an Oxford don and sharing a house with his brother Warnie (Edward Hardwicke). Into this life walks Joy Davidman Gresham (Winger), a brash American poet who has been corresponding with Jack. Her honesty immediately captures Jack's fancy, and the two strike up a close friendship. When Joy and her son (Joseph Mazzello) relocate to London after Joy's divorce, that friendship becomes a marriage of convenience, which in turn becomes a chance for Jack to experience a love which his fears had always denied him.
This is the second time SHADOWLANDS has been committed to film (the first in 1985 with Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom in the leads), but this version is certain to become definitive. Nicholson's play is a winner, and he has written a sparkling adaptation. The verbal sparring between Lewis and Joy is wonderful, the best this year not written by William Shakespeare. It's the kind of love story Hollywood just doesn't turn out all that often, a simple but affecting examination of the ability of love to transform, and to make life's pain bearable. Lewis himself wrote about the experience in the philosophical work A GRIEF OBSERVED, and that is the tone SHADOWLANDS adopts: introspective and restrained, yet still deeply felt. The score by John Fenton is non-intrusive, and some of the film's most potent emotional moments are almost completely silent. It's an extremely deft piece of filmmaking by Attenborough, a director best known for epics like GANDHI but equally skilled at personal moments.
And it doesn't hurt that his two leads give Oscar-worthy performances. Anthony Hopkins' Jack Lewis begins much like his Stevens the butler from REMAINS, a reserved and guarded man blind to his own feelings; this time, however, he gets to undergo a real transformation. He laughs, he cries, he even finds himself completely flustered by room service. Once again Hopkins demonstrates the rare ability to act with his entire body, turning an aborted wave to a departing cab into a rich visual text. However, SHADOWLANDS would have come up short if Joy had not been equally well-handled, and Debra Winger proves well up to the challenge. Winger sparkles as she prods and tests Jack, refusing to let him rest in his self-imposed cocoon. There is strength, intelligence, savage wit and deep emotion in her performance, and she somehow manages to steal scenes from one of the finest screen actors in the world. Winger has been seen far too infrequently in recent years, but it would appear SHADOWLANDS is likely to correct that oversight.
SHADOWLANDS was well on its way to being a "10" before it lost steam in the last half hour. The third act drags on some, and a late scene in which a glycerine teardrop dangles in physics-defying fashion from Joseph Mazzello's eye pushed by cynic button. Still, SHADOWLANDS ranks among the best films of 1993, artistic and profoundly emotional.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 shadowlands: 9.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University Office of the General Counsel
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