Movie Reviews for Writers — Shadowlands

There’s this one scene in Shadowlands that always grabs me. Young Douglas, after meeting THE writer of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, is exploring the C.S. Lewis’ house and discovers a wardrobe in an apparently unused room. You can almost feel the sense of wonder and longing (or Sehnsucht as Lewis wrote about it in his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy) Douglas is feeling in the film as he walks to the doors and opens the wardrobe. He reaches inside to feel the emptiness that will allow him to make his own journey to Narnia — only to be disappointed when he touches the back. As a viewer, particularly if you remember the Narnia books strongly and through the eyes of nostalgia, you feel that same let down. 

But here’s the rub. To be honest, both you and Douglas knew fact from fiction (even at his age), but the power of Lewis’ fiction made the longing for fantasy to be a real, actual experiential something. The adventures of the Pevensies made readers all over the world (I’m willing to bet) check on their own wardrobes or closets and hope for the best even though they knew it just couldn’t be true. 

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