SHADOWLANDS
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
The greater astonishment in Richard Attenborough's SHADOWLANDS isn't that Anthony Hopkins, as C.S. Lewis, the triple threat writer of highly admired Christian apologetics, Christian-based science fiction and children's fantasy, could deliver the kind of performance he does, but that he did. As a recovering alcoholic, Hopkins has been able to support his growing repertoire in the last several years because, like his characters in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, HOWARDS END, the megabore REMAINS OF THE DAY, he's been checking in his inner-most feelings at the door; he hasn't been called upon by his sponsor to feel his way through his internal conflicts. These meticulous examples of repression hint he's pent-up by the huge reserves of boozeless energy, that it's inevitable he'd finally burst, as he does so movingly here in SHAOWLANDS. This is a performance long coming -- the kind of self-exposure of an actor as real person connecting with the audience that often the bottle (or drug) keeps from us, the unmasking American William Hurt has yet to achieve, even though he's been sober for more than a few years. Ex-lushes and ex-addicts can go on to become better actors, as we've seen with Dennis Hopper, Richard Dreyfuss, and now Hopkins. (Or better songwriters and singers, as with Elton John and Bonnie Raitt.) But sometimes they don't; there's that "edge" they lose, and Hurt, at this writing, seems to be unable to regain it. Naturally, a boozing actor has edge pouring into him, his potency based on his bottle's proof. Whatever it was he was on during CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD, and he was a holy terror on the set, he got closer to the audience than he ever had, and as something he probably isn't much of -- a romantic. (At core is that he may have felt he needed the bottle to reach us.) On the wagon in ROADCAST NEWS and THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST, he's lulled out, a member of the "Living Dead." Maybe he's been hobbling as a sober actor, in much the same way Richard Pryor did as comic, because they're looking back for the old, sloshed verge that they can no longer find in themselves. With Hopper, Dreyfuss, and assuredly with Hopkins, they've managed to overcome their long, wasted agitation, they've gotten back on track by moving ahead in their art -- surrendering to it as their fix. (In A.A., there's a rather dramatic pretense in looking for a "higher power" to help overcome one's addiction, but once he quietly finds it, and it's usually within one's self, he discovers that he's replaced the bad addiction with a healthier one.) Even in the plodding REMAINS OF THE DAY, Hopkins is on the high of acting: in his adroit rigidity, you can see that he's flying. The problem is that only he's enjoying himself, while many of us are languishing through the one-note boredom.
This sort of monotony is nowhere to be found in Hopkins' C.S. Lewis, a role which could easily become sanctimonious, sticky. Or worse, it could have been a Malcolm Muggeridge bliss-out. Born in Belfast, educated at Oxford University, accepted there as a fellow after graduating with degrees in Greek and Latin literature, philosophy and ancient history (even conquered the Greek language), Lewis was only 38 when his "Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition," about love as a central theme in the literature of the Middle Ages, established his reputation within the intelligentsia. His career as an author actually began a bit earlier, when his two books of poetry, "Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics" and "Dymer" were published under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. It wasn't until Lewis turned Christian science fiction writer, with the classic "Out of the Silent Planet" in 1938, that he reached a larger audience: eventually to be known as the Perelandra Trilogy ("Perelandra" and "That Hideous Strength" the other two), the initial story is about a planet -- our own -- that is silent because it has fallen from the grace of God. Critics called it "a fusion of science fiction, fantasy and allegory. Unprecedented." Early into Lewis's youthful rebellion, he was a practicing non-believer, brought on by the premature death of his mother from cancer when he was a little boy, and reinforced by an atheist Scottish schoolmaster and Lewis's own formidable education at Oxford. While details of his conversion are discussed in his poignantly titled autobiography "Surprised by Joy," the most important also seems the most simple: through logic and reasoning, he believed common sense dictated a fourth dimension -- God. It made sense to believe in the comfort of hope that something or someone awaits us after death than conceding to the sterility, the nothingness of disbelief. By 1944, in "Beyond Personality," he was penning embracing defenses of Christianity -- to his own surprise, admired by agnostics and atheists alike -- and he became so popular that the BBC gave him time to lecture over the radio during World War II. Two more collections of his essays followed: "Miracles" in 1947, and "Mere Christianity" in 1952. Considered by some his best novel, 1942's "The Screwtape Letters" is a sardonic tale set in W.W.II about a devil -- an Undersecretary of the Infernal Lowerarchy -- teaching his nephew the ways and means of temptation. Lewis wasn't particularly happy that he became famous after the book's publication because he thought some of his other books were more worthy. But the public was much impressed by his fluency with the language and, most of all, his unbounded imagination -- given encouragement by the Inklings, a group he formed with J.R.R. Tolkien who would gather to read manuscripts in progress. To Lewis's chagrin, only "Allegory" had the captivating, if not show-off effects of creative word play, while his other scholarly, syncretic nonfiction works, of which there are close to three dozen, were staid, formal, lacking no shortage of his customary erudition but stylish mode. His most loved and widely-read work is of course his series of children's books known as The Chronicles of Narnia, the first entitled "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," and printed in 1950, and six more that followed at yearly intervals. (The attics so prevalent in these writings come right out of Lewis's and his brother's childhood. And regardless of their long friendship, and his own devotion to Roman Catholicism, Tolkien found the "Narnia" books too simple, too Christian.) Throughout these years, Lewis remained single, and with less than a handful of encounters that may or may not have resulted in sexual activity, voluntarily celibate. He would have most likely remained a bachelor had not one day an American poet-fan asked to meet him. Lewis died from a heart attack (after a long bout with heart and kidney problems) in 1963, on the very day John Kennedy was assassinated and Aldous Huxley succumbed to a drug overdose.
Despite the briefest of ipse dixit -- "Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world" -- that suggests screenwriter William Nicholson is deficient in selecting the more appealing of Lewis' championship of Christianity, Hopkins gets us to respond to him quickly: we admire that in his mild case of fear of the sensuous, he manages to wear his slight superiority, exasperation and wariness not on his sleeve but his Oxford-Cambridge robe, or more fitting, his vestment. This difference is integral to our acceptance: while he's fully capable of slicing away his opponents' arguments or snobbishness or his students' indifference, because this Lewis carries the aura of the presumptively profound, his own life looks to be filled with tentativeness, not sure he can commit himself to anything or anyone other than Godly verbiage. And not exactly sure why: he recognizes, perhaps even regrets, that he's explored the dogma of Christianity more fervently than living his own life. This is set up for us as Hopkins' Lewis is awaiting, anxiously, to meet this fan, played by Debra Winger: when she calls out his name, the look on his face is priceless; it's not just Winger's lack of protocol that gets his butterflies a'flying. Others have written that this is what makes Hopkins' performance something like a mirror image of his butler in REMAINS. Maybe, if one believes there's something meaningful underneath the butler's devotion to servitude. Accidental, REMAINS is like a George Bush movie, in which a servant can't empathize with or respond to the social fabric, while SHAOWLANDS, minus the sexsations, is Clintonesque in its healthy male largesse.
More in HOWARDS ENDS than in REMAINS and SHAWDOWLANDS, Hopkins draws forth the late Richard Burton, his fellow and deeply missed Welshman. (Burton was born in Pontrhydfen, Hopkins in Port Talbot.) In HOWARDS ENDS and SHADOWLANDS he at times unerringly sounds like Burton, and there's a fraction of physical resemblance, though not quite as dislocating as how Hopkins can sometimes bring to mind William F. Buckley. (Should please Buckley, in that, when he would have to come to frequent bailout of his own and his friends' often inexcusable public behavior -- like his against Gore Vidal, like Patricia Bozell's assault on feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson at Catholic University in 1970 -- he'd cite Lewis as defense: "The higher the stakes, the greater the temptation to lose your temper.") There's talk that Hopkins is the long-sought heir to the throne Olivier built, the one Burton might have ascended to had he not given in to the bottle and his ruinous relationship with Elizabeth Taylor. Such high glory excludes Sir John Gielgud, who's no slouch. Since THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, there's evidence that Hopkins is the heir-apparent. As Hannibal Lecter, Hopkins is in but a handful of scenes, yet he dominates the movie. His star performance is a model of minimalist actions but he achieves near-maximum effects: he chills the hell out of you while giving you the movie's the best laughs. Though LAMBS isn't much more than a supremely efficient TIGHTROPE from a woman's point of view, we're always thinking about Hopkins: when he too cleverly escapes, we just know that he's going to pop up for some munchies. When the climax fades, all we can think about it is Where's Hannibal? Then Jodie Foster gets a call, and, for some sick reason best left unexplored, we're happy to hear from him. Hopkins tells her to forget tracing the call, he won't be on the line long enough because "I'm having an old friend for dinner." Serenely horrifying as it is, it's nevertheless a spectacular moment of recovery: when was the last time we left a theatre doubled up over a cannibal? It's highly immoral, it unhinges our sensibilities, at least what's left of them these days.
Debra Winger, well, she's dying -- again. That would otherwise be enough to keep away from SHADOWLANDS. Early on, with an on again/off again urban New York accent, Winger's a bit of Streisand doing a lettered OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT, and Nicholson's screenplay provides her with some snap and crackle with Hopkins and another don but nothing quite pops. She's not likable physically at first, either: she has a sometimes near-Eleanor Roosevelt-Oxford-Shoes clop and an unnecessarily ugly, color-blind wardrobe, and if there's a straightforward charm somewhere that finds certain critics' weak spots, these two "attributes" come close to killing it, and, in what has become trademark, she seems to think it's okay for us to watch her trying to find her way into the character. I admit I'm rarely in Winger's corner, having always been cool towards her because I can't get passed the flashing signals that warn "Don't bother me." In AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN, she came close to turning into both Elizabeth Ashley and Lesley Ann Warren. Only the crazed would say anything about the childish URBAN COWBOY. She was most plainly annoyed during TERMS OF ENDURANCE and as consequence plagued herself with misplaced glances and gestures and only once does her very angry-busy work succeed -- her "Oh, brother!" contempt for the wireless phone someone hands her. (Who could play those New York restaurant and in-your-dying-honor party scenes?) She looked at the beginning of BLACK WIDOW the way she should have at the end of TERMS, and she's of fair interest in MIKE'S MURDER, a small movie somewhat like JACK'S BACK that went nowhere because the releasing company hadn't any faith in it. I still can't figure out EVERYBODY WINS: is the script as badly written as it exposes itself to be on screen? Winger's an intelligent enough of an actress to implicitly play the late Jane Bowles in THE SHELTERING SKY had director Bernardo Bertolucci let her. (Instead she had to play Florence Nightingale to a male Camille.) Winger manages more class in her dying moments here in SHADOWLANDS than in TERMS. Yet, something more is the matter with Winger's portrayal, and it's the scripter's fault: imagine an intelligent peoples' Fannie Hurst novel about a fan who, with a little boy in tow, hangers to and eventually does meet a famous author, even becomes enough of a friend that the author agrees, when needed, to a marriage of convenience. As if to make up for her invasion of his domain, and for the fact that she's soon to die of S.C. (sudden cancer), she leaves him with an unwanted child, whose father is conveniently a cold-hearted drunk. (Not seen, but perhaps the shadow of Vera Miles in BACK STREET?) On screen, it's rather the stuff of a Purex Afternoon Special but in reverse: it's not she who is being tested, but he, and his faith. It unwittingly becomes Harold Kushner's "When Bad Things Happen to Good People."
What hurts Winger's characterization of Joy Davidman Gresham is that it's shaped out of insignificance -- there just isn't much there to make her more than a device to loosen Hopkins' buttoned-up Lewis. For example, maybe the audience would have wanted to know that Joy, although only a minor American poet (she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets contest for a book of verse), was married to American novelist William Gresham, who wrote NIGHTMARE ALLEY, which was later turned into the 1947 movie starring, in possibly their most entertaining performances, Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell. (James Agee wrote in Time: "NIGHTMARE ALLEY is a hair-rasing carnival side show. At the dead end of the alley lives the Geek, as is-he-man-or-is-he-beast carnival exhibit that tears up and eats live chickens. He is able to stomach his job because he is in the last stages of dipsomania. [Power as] Stan is one of the most wholehearted and resourceful heels yet to leave a print of the U.S. screen. He climbs a ladder made of ladies.") And why the audience is given only one child when in fact Joy dragged both her sons to England is not explained -- though maybe to lessen the audience's taxation fatigue. Reviewers and feature writers are quoting one son, Douglas Gresham, that though SHAOWLANDS is "fiction and makes no pretenses about that, the emotional values are absolutely spot-on accurate." Actually, the movie's not much of a fiction: Joy, a Jewess who converted to Christianity, a 30s Communist turned 40s staunch conservative, did travel to meet her idol, the man most responsible for her conversion. Joy was indeed running away from a bad marriage to Gresham, who was a womanizer and alcoholic. And she did become ill -- originally and inaccurately diagnosed with acute rheumatism. Those who knew both Lewis and Joy saw that a relationship beyond correspondence and before marriage was already building, though painfully slowly. When England's Home Office did not want to renew her permit of residence, Lewis, perhaps more out of genuine charity as opposed to budding love, agreed to a civil marriage in order to automatically grant citizenship to her and her two sons. Joy's illness turned grave shortly afterwards, and the bonds between her and Lewis strengthened considerably, to the point that Lewis decided to offer his hand in a religious ceremony of marriage. Abundant love, positive thinking and radiation provided Joy with a remission, and for a few years the marriage had a "honeymoon" flavor to it. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't give us a real extent of time. What we get are transitions: first, a fall, second, radiation, third, wheelchairs, and fourth, stretchers, putting the audience into a get-ready-with-the-hankies mood. It's gonna be LOVE STORY -- Oxford Style. There's also an inconsideration of Joy's kiss off -- when the tears come, all eyes are on Hopkins. However, when he and little Douglas (played by Joseph Mazzello, who recalls Nicholas Gledhill in CAREFUL, HE MIGHT HEAR YOU) embrace and release their grief, memories of our own similar experiences flood in. These scenes takes us where Lewis would never quite allow us to go; instead, as a gentleman of culture, propriety and unimpeachable decency, when he did grant a peek into his private anguish, in "A Grief Observed," he could only do it under a pseudonym: N.W. Clerk.
Richard Attenborough is a dependable craftsman as movie maker and he's dignified, making sure we maintain our own dignity as well. I wish that he were more like Fred Zinnemann, the master who recognized a good story when he read one and knew how to make it into a better movie. Referring not only to FROM HERE TO ETERNITY but also to THE NUN'S STORY, in which Audrey Hepburn's a triumph, to the almost forgotten THE SUNDOWNERS, with Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr doing what Mitchum fantasized about doing in HEAVEN KNOWS, MR. ALLISON and to the smooth-as-glass THE DAY OF THE JACKAL. Attenborough could use Zinnemann's talents to plug his stories' gaps and holes; for example, in GANDHI he needed an audience decoder -- a Lord Mountbatten, say -- to help sort out all the complex political actions. (Luckily he had Ben Kingsley as his one asset, and Oh, what an asset. We watch in complete amazement this wafer-thin bronze elf and believe in the magic he wields against a very traditional piece of epic movie-making; he's the biggest little exhibition of the 80s.) Attenborough's intentions in CRY FREEDOM seem to be that he's against apartheid, yet the movie isn't so much about blacks attempting to free themselves from the oppressive South African white rule as it is about a South African white fleeing from what he might have inadvertently helped sanction. (Though it was fun to listen to Kevin Kline fake the Britishspeak.) Recently, I think in an interview with Larry King, Barbra Streisand said she was offered SHADOWLANDS to direct, and how one regrets she didn't: like Zinnemann, she'd have insisted on fleshing out details and make steady the wobbling of Winger's Joy, as well as discipline the actress's needless, perpetual choler, misplaced here but used terrifically for TNT's concert version of THE WIZARD OF OZ, in which she plays the wicked witch. SHADOWLANDS might have been "The Fan Who Would Be Joy" -- if only Winger had shown any.
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