Review

The life of Clive-Staples “Jack” Lewis was one of great tragedy and loneliness. He had a very long walk to faith following the death of his mother as a child, his service in World War I, and eventually the loss of his wife, Joy Gresham. His life in-between these moments of tragedy was one of great banality and hard work. He was an Oxford University Academic at Magdalen College, and when he wasn’t doing his day job he wrote literary criticism and books on Christian Apologetics.

Lewis’s faith has inspired generations of Christians with his immense talent for understanding Christianity and contextualizing it for the modern world. As such, he’s seen as a somewhat tragic and melancholy figure. In his 1947 Time Magazine interview, he was famously quoted as saying, “I like monotony.” He was a simple man with a complex ideology and a taste for the simpler pleasures of life. The most famously tumultuous period of his life following his difficult upbringing ended up being his late romance with his wife. From 1952 to 1960, the two endured a long period of deep emotional chemistry before Joy’s slow decline into cancer. Lewis would die just three years after her.

In 1985, writer William Nicholason adapted this tumultuous romance into a TV movie for the BBC called Shadowlands. The story immortalized Lewis’s tragic romance with Joy. After being adapted for the stage in multiple productions, it was subsequently adapted again for film by Sir Richard Attenborough (Gandhi, A Bridge Too Far) with the great Anthony Hopkins (Silence of the Lambs, Thor, Westworld, etc.) in the role of Jack Lewis. The movie won multiple awards and was nominated for the 1994 Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, losing to Schindler’s List.

Shadowlands picks up in the early 1950s, just as Lewis and Joy were beginning their correspondence. The film ends shortly after her death with Jack and his stepson, Douglas, coming to acceptance of their shared loss. The story condenses much of the actual history out of the narrative. For one, both of Joy’s sons are bizarrely combined into a single person. Much of the history is condensed to keep the narrative moving and to focus on the fundamental question of the play.

At the core of Shadowlands is a thoroughly challenging question; what is the relationship of love and pain? What is the cost of allowing yourself to love another person?

Anyone who’s read C.S. Lewis’s book, A Grief Observed, can tell you what the cost was. Following the death of his mother as a child, Joy Gresham was one of the few people in his life he truly opened up his heart to, with her death from cancer sending him into a brief tailspin of despondency and rage. He poured that frustration into his writing and came away from it with an honest depiction of lived suffering from the Christian perspective.

Shadowlands is less interested in the religious perspective on pain. To the degree it is interested, it’s merely keen in contrasting the difference between saying that God allows suffering the world and feeling that suffering for yourself. The movie simply comes to the conclusion that a life worth living is one in which you can honestly feel and process the extremes of life.

The screenplay can be fairly brutal on Lewis at times. It’s clear he’s the one that’s central to the story’s lesson. Joy all but spells it out in one scene, where she castigates him for building a safe life where he can’t be wounded or seriously challenged. Despite the comfortable existence he’s built where he’s able to spar on theological issues with his fellow Oxford professors, he’s living an otherwise quite cozy and boring life where he’s allowed to focus on his reading, his teaching, and his creature comforts. It’s clear in the narrative that this was an effect of losing his mother at such an early age that clearly hurt his brother just as dearly. The movie affirms that his brother and secretary, Warner Lewis, was an alcoholic.

Thus is the challenge of actually opening his heart to love and suffering, regardless of the consequences. Joy turns his world upside down and dredges the depths of joy, intellectual challenge, and pain he’d previously closed himself off to for his entire adult life.