© 1994 Don W. King

A version of this review first appeared in World 8 (January 15, 1994): 21.

Shadowlands, directed by Richard Attenborough, Savoy Pictures

Richard Attenborough's Shadowlands is a stunning film about C. S. Lewis' relationship with Joy Gresham. Anthony Hopkins as Lewis gives an academy award winning performance, particularly capturing Lewis' awkwardness with women and reticence in showing emotion. Indeed a motif returned to time and again is Lewis' suppressed feeling. When Joy chides him for his bookishness touting instead the importance of experience, he quietly asserts that "personal experience is not everything." The rest of the film challenges this belief.

Debra Winger, a unexpected choice to play Joy, is equally effective. From the first her faint New York accent shocks and serves to remind how totally foreign she was to the closed academic milieu of Lewis' Oxford. As an American Jew, former member of the communist party, and divorcee, Joy was the last woman Lewis might have fallen for. Yet as Winger so aptly plays it, Joy's wit, sharp mind, verbal swordplay, openness, and frank invasion of Lewis' world overwhelms him. He is surprised by love.

Counterpoised to their relationship is the theme of pain. On several occasions Lewis is shown speaking to large groups of admirers about the way in which God uses pain as a tool to "chisel human character." Utilizing passages almost verbatim from The Problem of Pain, he confidently asserts that pain is "God's megaphone to arouse a deaf world." However, once Lewis begins to feel for Joy and watches her terrible suffering with bone cancer, his bookish self-confidence is shattered; her pain forces him to face both his awakened emotions and his heretofore unchallenged faith. In a poem almost certainly written during this time, Lewis writes: "Thus, what old poets told me about love / (Tristram's obedience, Isoud's sovereignty...) / Turns true in a dread mode I dreamed not of, / --What I once studied, now I learn to be." As Lewis helplessly observes Joy's suffering, the film poignantly plumbs the depth of human pain and the capacity of Christian faith to endure.

Perhaps the film's greatest weakness is its failure to demonstrate the vitality of Lewis' faith. While not completely slighted, his faith is given only token recognition. For instance, the film fails to show that immediately after marrying Joy in the hopital, the Anglican priest, at Lewis' specific request, performed a service of healing; subsequent to that Joy's cancer went into remission. In addition, although prayer is mentioned several times, only once do we see Lewis in prayer, and even this is relegated to Joy's death bed scene. Equally disturbing is the way Joy's faith is muted. This is especially ironic since Lewis' books on Christian apologetics had been so instrumental in her faith development; moreover, their common faith in Jesus Christ had been the original source of their friendship.

In spite of this, the film is must seeing. The cinematography is beautiful, the supporting cast is excellent (especially Edward Hardwicke as Warren Lewis and Joseph Mazzello as Douglas Gresham), and the screenplay by William Nicholson is powerful. The film illustrates the essence of Lewis' love; in a letter he says his feelings for Joy "began in Agape, proceeded to Philia, then pity, and only after that became Eros."

Joy's suffering was the catalyst that broke the floodgate of Lewis' passion. When Lewis and Douglas huddle together in the attic to weep bitterly over their loss, we see Lewis the man no longer hiding in the shadows of his books. This experience purges him, focusing for all of us that this world is only shadowlands. Real life, as he and Joy knew so well, comes after, in the golden valley of heaven. As Lewis put it at the end of the last Narnia story, "the term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning." Shadowlands affirms both the value of human love and to a lesser extent the sustaining power of faith.