New Film: Brokeback Mountain & The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Over the past two days, Ang Lee's gay-themed western, Brokeback Mountain, has been named the year's best picture and Lee best director by both the New York and the Los Angeles film critics circles. Add to these honors record-setting box office (per-screen for a live action film) and the only thing that appears to stand between 'Brokeback and an Academy 'best picture' statuette seems to be a giant ape. If Lee's film therefore seems to represent the latest blue-state victory in America's on-going culture wars, it is a success predicated upon the [well-groomed] middle-brow sensibilities of America's urban tastemakers. Not so much a film for the masses, Ang Lee sets his sights on the mass of elites for whom prohibitions on gay marriage smack of being today's equivalent of Jim Crow.

This is to neither praise nor damn Brokeback Mountain, even if much of Lee's support would seem commensurate with the film's political stance. The quality (or lack, as in this instance) of Lee's film rests in its negotiation of the terms of its generic origins. This is to say that Brokeback Mountain's ultimate failures can be traced to its inadequate engagements with the western and queer cinema. To the first, in particular, it is worth observing that Brokeback Mountain fails to employ landscape in any fashion other than for its ability to give two lovers cover for their illicit affair. In this way, Lee eschews the pictorial and iconographic values of the western landscape in exchange for narrative expedience. While this alone does not preclude 'Brokeback from taking its place among the canon of westerns -- Rio Bravo (1959, Howard Hawks) for instance uses a similarly indescript space as per the director's programmatic artlessness -- Lee combines this visual imperviousness with a glibness towards the geographic West manifesting itself in Anne Hathaway's teased hair and her Texas farm implement magnate father's insistences that a young boy must watch football if he is going to ever grow up to become a man. All of this is to say that Mr. Lee shows no affection for the setting of his film.

However, lest it be said that Brokeback Mountain is not fundamentally a western, as apparently the director has claimed, Lee does hold to the basic homo-social structure of the genre (at least for the film's first half). Indeed, 'Brokeback proceeds according to the suggestion that the ties of fraternity which play such a defining role in the history of the genre are irreducibly possessed of a latent homosexuality. In so doing, Lee does not so much revise his genre of choice as underscore its political deficiencies (just as Far From Heaven [Todd Haynes, 2002] indicates a need to revise Sirk which frankly I don't see). Ultimately, it is easy to see why Lee decided to make a film in a genre for which he has little regard in a geographical location he likes even less: because it allows him to score easy points with his middle-brow crowd; this is a film made to make those that agree with it feel morally superior.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Andrew Adamson's The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe offers red-state safe, mass entertainment in a richly sketched, lovingly-crafted space which is already well-known to millions of young readers. As a former reader of the 'Chronicles myself, let me attest to the justice that Adamson has done to Lewis' children's classic. Indeed, I would use that last word, "classic," or better yet instant children's classic, to describe the results of Adamson's adaptation. One can imagine that this version of the beloved first volume will introduce future generations to Lewis' stories, while giving its many readers the satisfaction of seeing Lewis' world come to CGI life.

Of course, The Chronicles of Narnia are no less imbued with a perspective than is Lee's film; nevertheless, Lewis' (and now Adamson's) Christian allegory allows its viewer a space that is absent in Brokeback Mountain. Surely there is Aslan, the Christ-figure, who dies for the sins of the young Edmund (in betraying his siblings for the fleeting pleasures of Turkish Delight) before rising again to liberate the people of Narnia from eternal winter; and certainly there is the faith of young Lucy which offers a prototype for Christian faith. Yet, there is also the pagan iconography of Lewis' and Adamson's world and its unmistakable critique of fascism (its World War II setting, Narnia's secret police force) which allow for separate readings -- quite unlike Lee's propagandic denunciation of society.

Yes, those with a penchant for the Christian faith will see Aslan's suffering servant as a propitiation for the children's and possibly their own sins, while those without will encounter a narrative filled with wonder and magic -- quite literally. Part of this magic, to be sure, rests in the performances that Adamson summons from Tilda Swinton (there will never be a more perfect White Witch) and the children, particularly Georgie Henley as Lucy Pevensie. Indeed, it is the wonder and the pathos of her performance that truly sustains Adamson's Narnia -- a wonder shared by anyone who has fancied themselves to be Lucy or Susan or Peter or even Edmund.

It is curious then that it is in Lewis' tale that we find characters who are flawed but whom ultimately attain redemption, and not in Lee's very grown up piece of Oscar-baiting, where no enlightened member of the audience is to blame. It is society itself, and one which is comfortably distant (in time and space) from its New York and Los Angeles advocates, which is at fault; would that they would have just allow these two men to be happy together -- and would that we might do the same today. To take my cue from Lewis and not Lee, let me just ask which is closer to the truth: is everyone else to blame or sometimes are we ourselves at fault? And if society was as we would like it, would the attainment of happiness be a simple matter of knowing ourselves?