Shadowlands.

I reviewed the stage play, Shadowlands, three years ago (Crisis, February 1991), praised it, but issued a warning that I now repeat re Richard Attenborough's film adaptation. "Let devotees of the life and works of Clive Staples 'Jack' Lewis go to...Shadowlands...forewarned though not necessarily forearmed. If they go to sniff out omissions and distortions of facts, they will have a field day. But they won't have as good a time as those who attend the play to discover what idea, what compelling image the playwright William Nicholson perceived in...Lewis's marriage to Joy Davidman, and how close Nicholson comes to realizing that image theatrically."

The stage version is made of sterner stuff than the new film. In the play's first scene, Jack Lewis, delivering a lecture, addresses the question of why God makes or lets us suffer. His answer, "the blows of God's chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect," is something that Lewis believes intellectually but doesn't feel with his entire being. By the final curtain, because of the suffering he has undergone, Lewis faces the audience as a transfigured man, prepared, even longing to undergo his own death because only death can release him from the "shadowlands" of earthly life into the higher reality of heaven where he will be reunited with Joy. Head knowledge has become heart knowledge. The stage play, when well performed (as it certainly was on Broadway with Jane Alexander and Nigel Hawthorne), provides a deeply spiritual experience.

Not so the movie. Artfully directed, photographed, and played, it is a poignant, funny-sad movie which can provoke an instant nostalgia for the dreaming spires of Oxford even in the breasts of those who have never been anywhere near Oxford. But it is also about as untranscendent as any film about C.S. Lewis could possibly be. Quite a feat, that. How did Attenborough and Nicholson bring it off?

The lineaments of the plot are the same. Jack, self-trapped in the forlorn bachelorhood he shares with his brother, Warnie, and in the academic routine he shares with a bunch of academic stiffs (no Tolkein, no Owen Barfield, no Hugo Dyson on view in this movie, since any suggestion of bracing intellectual companionship would queer Nicholson's dramaturgical pitch), encounters an American, Jewish, ex-Communist, soon-to-be-divorcee Joy Davidman Gresham, marries her to give her British citizenship, then marries her before God when her first bout with cancer makes him realize how much he loves her. Joy has a seemingly miraculous remission, then succumbs. Lewis is left to spend the rest of his life...how?

The answer given by this movie indicates how a spiritual experience has been yanked sharply down to earth. In the early scenes, Lewis is still seen delivering his lectures about pain being the chisel-blows of God, and this statement is still perceived as an untested, purely cerebral concept. But, at the conclusion, Lewis does not affirm his belief as now verified by his experience. Instead, he quotes a remark of Joy's, "the pain now is part of the happiness then." This Lewis isn't braced for the afterlife by the heartbreak of Joy's death. Rather, he has accepted suffering (as J.W.N. Sullivan said Beethoven did) "as one of the great structural lines of human life." Earthly happiness is worth the suffering we undergo when we lose the bringer of happiness. I found this conclusion quite as poignant as that of the play's but not quite so grand. Oddly enough, it makes Lewis's fiercely held Christian beliefs quite inessential to the main dramatic action. After all, an atheist or agnostic can learn to accept earthly suffering in the same way that this movie's version of Lewis does. There is no wholehearted acceptance of the strokes of God's chisel at this movie's fade-out, no more talk of Shadowlands.

Another way Nicholson diminishes the spiritual aspect of his story is by deleting the scene in which Joy tells Jack Lewis of her first apprehension of God's existence. Though many of Joy's qualities attracted Lewis, he would obviously be especially drawn by her personal experience of the holy. And since Joy came to her conversion after a long period of Communist commitment, we may well wonder how this transformation came about. But the script never answers this question and Lewis never even raises it. A breathtaking omission in light of who Lewis and Davidman were in real life, yet a logical omission considering the kind of movie Attenborough and Nicholson want to make. For Shadowlands is no longer the story of the romantic union of two equally life-perplexed, God-seeking individuals, perfectly matched in intellect and mettlesome high spirits. It is now the story of an overgrown teddy bear, lovably bookish and unworldly, who is rescued from emotional suffocation and his own virginity by a warmhearted, tough-tender earth mother who shatters his routine, skewers his narrow-minded colleagues, and takes him on a motor tour of the English countryside. Let's face it: this Shadowlands is really the latest rendition of Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

And a nice rendition it is. Richard Attenborough's direction is the best work of hi s career. It's as if the intimacy of the story had reined in Attenborough's penchant for visual fustian and incoherent storytelling. Each directorial stroke makes its point succinctly.

Following his triumph in The Remains of the Day, Anthony Hopkins's Jack Lewis comes across as The Butler Escapes. For, like Stevens in The Remains, Nicholson's version of Lewis is a man who has fashioned his own leash and wears it with conviction. In researching this role, Hopkins must have read Lewis's confession that emotional safe-playing was his greatest temptation. Hopkins has zeroed in on that trait and amplified it. This Jack Lewis is an overgrown boy who keeps his eyes on the carpet in the presence of an attractive female. This virginal, flustered quality is the keynote of the first three quarters of the performance. Later, when Lewis is moved to passion, first by the love of Joy, then by anger at her death, Hopkins's specialty--staccato bursts of emotion issuing out of a seemingly passive exterior--comes into play and makes viewers sit up wide-awake in the knowledge that there is more to this man's character than they had suspected. And so another triumph is added to Hopkins's seemingly unbreakable chain of triumphs.

But Debra Winger's triumph is bigger. While Hopkins tailors Lewis to match his peculiar strengths as an actor, Winger extends the boundaries of her talent to encompass Joy. Though too pretty and still too young for the role, she bestows the best sort of amnesia on the viewer. She wipes out her own backlog of characterizations and makes you accept this woman as the only Debra Winger you have ever seen. Nicholson has given Joy a few too many wisecracks, but Winger never lets us forget the emotional neediness that deploys those wisecracks like SOS signals. When Jack casually asks his Yuletide guest if her husband is looking after himself for Christmas, Winger raps out "Yes!" with a speed and fierceness that bespeak a world of marital woe.

So, by all means, go see Shadowlands but be prepared to take it on its own terms. This is a C.S. Lewis biopic for secular humanists in search of a good cry. I believe they constitute a sizable audience.