Last night, having watched the episode of Sir Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, which was the subject of my previous post, I also watched the BBC adaptation of Shadowlands, starring Joss Ackland and Clare Bloom, as C. S. Lewis and Joy Gresham respectively. This version is so much the superior of the later Hollywood version, starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, that the two do not even warrant serious comparison.
Although based on real-life events, Shadowlands is nonetheless a dramatic fiction that romanticizes the relationship of Jack and Joy as much as it dramatizes it. Joy gets many of the best lines and is seen as being not only smarter than the incomparable Lewis but stronger in courage and faith also. In the Hollywood version, this discrepancy is accentuated to such an absurd degree in the service of a propagandized feminist agenda that it is almost laughable. Hopkins’ Lewis is little more than a buffoon beside the quipping wit of Winger’s thoroughly modern Joy. In the BBC version, the acting is not only much better but the relationship between Jack and Joy is treated with much more subtlety and panache. In consequence, we are not particularly irritated by Joy’s evident superiority because it is subsumed within the wider story and the problem of pain with which it grapples. Even if we know that Lewis is being treated somewhat unjustly, we are willing to suspend our disbelief in order to enjoy the story and the lessons it teaches.
Shadowlands brings to idealized life one of the great love stories of the twentieth century and shows us faith and reason struggling with the problem of pain. In order to understand it on a deeper level, we need to familiarize ourselves with Lewis’ two great works, The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed. The first discusses the problem in the abstract and in the light of pure reason; the latter looks at the same problem through the personal experience of great grief and suffering. The two complement each other superbly. The objectivity of the first is confirmed by the subjectivity of the second. The first uses reason to show suffering in the light of faith; the second shows the experience of great suffering leading ultimately, via an agony in the garden of bereavement, to the same conclusion about the truth of faith to which reason had led.
I didn’t see either version of the film. I have no doubt that William Nicholson, the author of the American film adaptation as well as the original play itself, handled the story with great sensitivity, and I’ve no doubt that the British version is superior, with Claire Bloom, and with Richard Attenborough directing.
But it is just that–it’s a story he wrote–a fiction. Why could it not have been about fictional characters instead of real persons? There’s just something about fictionalized biography that I can’t support. You use the words “romanticized” and “dramatized”–yes, because it would have to be. But the whole concept of fictional biography does an injustice, it seems to me, to the very real persons whose lives are treated this way.
Lewis himself tells us the real story in A Grief Observed, a book that is as personally revealing as any ever written, I think. Autobiographical, it’s an astonishing–and true–love story. I rather suspect that neither Lewis nor Joy would like Shadowlands, but since they’re both deceased, I suppose people can do what they like with their lives, even their very private lives, and have impunity.
Actually Dean, Richard Attenborough directed the hollywood version, not the BBC version.
I would very much like to see both versions. While I will be able to see the bbc version, the hollywood production is impossible to get anymore, not available to rent or buy. Not sure why, but no one seems to be making any more copies of the film.
Dena, even Shakespeare’s History Plays fictionalize history to some extent. This is something a playwright or screen writer can’t avoid, as the demands of a two-hour story and the dictates of the nature of Drama call for some artistic license.
In the case of the BBC “Shadowlands”, however, the dramatized story remains true to the characters and the main themes of their lives. It’s also quite a charming and artistic film.
What strikes me about all of this is the odd element in Lewis’ character. There was something about his affinity for fantasy worlds from childhood on, his decision to marry only when the marriage was a kind of pretend-marriage, and even his life-long predilection for the half-way house of the Anglican Church that is evident in this story and that strikes me as perhaps his most noteworthy character trait.
I say all of this with some reluctance, as Lewis led me to Chesterton and Belloc, who led me to the Church. But there is an element of the dilettante about Lewis, brilliant and humble as he was – a dilettante approach not to art but to life. There is a squeamishness that runs through much of his story. Perhaps it’s just a great sensitivity that never fully engaged the truth he loved so dearly.
I wonder if others see this or what you all may think about it.
I know that all you say here is true, Kevin, and your description of the film’s characterization is more than compelling. About Shakespeare’s history plays–well, this may sound blasphemous. I guess since it’s Shakespeare, since no claim to historical accuracy was asserted or even expected (mostly, there was simply the need to please Elizabeth in his interpretation), and maybe for no other good reason, I don’t choose the history plays as my favorite, especially since things were discovered about Richard III that show him to be probably innocent of the child-murders which both Shakespeare and history charge him with.
Dramatization is potent stuff–no more than fiction, maybe, or even poetry, but to choose a real person and to fictionalize or dramatize via imagination those moments in his life most profoundly personal and intimate seems to me to be a little bit excessive literary hubris. To write non-fiction on the same subject is not the same thing at all. Remember the disclaimer: “Any resemblance to any person now living or dead is purely coincidental…” (or words like that)? They are there for a reason. Dead people can’t sue you. Unless hey have lawyers guarding a literary estate (as Tolkien does), you can do with them as you will. you?
But
A few years ago, Anne Rice wrote a novel about the childhood of Jesus. It was supposed to be pretty good, but I didn’t read it. The fact of it bothered me. And when she later renounced the re-version she’d made to the Church prior to writing that novel, I was not completely surprised, though I think the connection to Out of Egypt is indirect, at best. I’d been more than a little bothered by her fictional biography of the Lord.
About Lewis–I don’t know what ignited the passion he had for his wife. Maybe it was his connection with fantasy, as you mentioned, but who knows? I’d be more inclined to think it was traceable to the youthful affair he had with a friend’s mother–and maybe that is traceable to the agonizing death of his mother–which he was “protected” from witnessing. But who knows? One thing, though: I wouldn’t write a novel asserting any such connection, even though both of those life events are true.
Actually Kevin, those are some very interesting observations on Lewis. Maybe you could expand your thoughts further in a future post? I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like to read it.