Director Norman Stone (Shadowlands) tributes Clive Staples Lewis with a new biopic, this time treating “the shape of [his] early years” until his fully-conscious re-conversion to Christianity past his teenager atheism. Originally a theatrical play, the film benefits from the outstanding performance of Max McLean, who manages to occupy the screen for almost the entirety of the 73 minutes without a moment of boredom or disquiet, as he even joins his younger counterparts (Nicholas Ralph and Eddie Ray Martin) from his memory on scene and still pulls it off.
The result is an enjoyable cinematic walk-through into CS Lewis’s own recollections as exposed by himself in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, in an interpretation that is quite loyal to the author and the text, apart perhaps in overshadowing Lewis’s own Romantic nature, better evident from his own writing than in the motion picture.
While the crescendo to the final revelation that true Joy is only found in God is well-built and effective on screen, my perplexity is that, in delineating Lewis’s trajectory of life, after recognizing the occurrence of his first sexual feelings and thoughts after his first turning away from God, the only other comment on the subject is, years later, that Joy should not be confused with sex. While both remarks indeed are made by Lewis in Surprised by Joy, I suspect they might give the wrong impression of a misogynist, puritanical Lewis, especially in a film where the feminine presence is scarce and subsidiary, contrarily both to the recent Tolkien biopic and to Stone’s own earlier Shadowlands on the older Lewis and his marriage with Joy Davidman.
The issue might have easily been avoided, for example, by also transposing from the same book by Lewis his comparison between Joy and Romantic love for a woman, when he states: “a love for one woman differs from a love for another woman in the very same way and the very same degree as the two women differ from one another” (220). Or when he compares the appreciation for an author to the same sort of sentiment: “Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love” (190). Just a little mitigation the like would avoid the awkwardness of only picturing Lewis’s relations with the other sex in terms of him reading while his roommate and a nurse “make noises” at the Military Hospital, however the latter episode is still taken from Lewis’s written memories.
Another small issue is that I felt as though the film slightly downplayed Tolkien’s impact on Lewis and their conversation of 19-20 September 1931. I would have liked the latter to have taken more time on screen, and, generally speaking, the material on which the motion picture is based would grant at least twenty more minutes, which I would have gladly enjoyed. Even so, though, bravo to Norman Stone and all the crew, you managed once more to get us the present of bringing Lewis’s mind on screen, and it is a wonderful scene to behold!