Chapter Two: Prince Caspian
By Brett Beach
July 22, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
There is a lot to be said about The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian in relation to its predecessor, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in matters both internal (the film itself, content and theme-wise) and external (its worldwide reception as measured in terms of strictly financial success). Those will be examined in greater detail shortly. What I find noteworthy and most enjoyable about it is how it comes towards the tail end of Swinton's decade-long swing through higher-profile independent pictures (The Deep End, for which she received a Golden Globe nom), offbeat star projects (Vanilla Sky, Michael Clayton) ensemble dark comedies (Broken Flowers, Burn After Reading) and big-budget special effects-driven projects of wildly differing genres (the Narnia films, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Constantine).
I recall my first encounter with Swinton on-screen during the late summer of 1993, catching Orlando at the Koin Center, a six-screen independent/art-house venue in downtown Portland, Oregon. It was one of the first films I viewed after becoming a more or less permanent denizen of the town and freshman at one of the finer local liberal arts college. Even before seeing Orlando, I was intrigued with the subject matter of the film and Swinton's features – fiery hair, pale skin, Rubenesque shape — and eager for it to finally wend its way to my part of the country. What I carried away from the film was an appreciation for what Sally Potter had achieved with her direction and screen adaptation and a deep impression with how effortlessly Swinton straddled lines and issues of gender, finding the uncertainty and sexiness commingled in androgyny and keeping an offbeat tale grounded and unencumbered from veering into becoming simply a feminist or political or sexual tract. And of course, there was the uninhibited, unashamed, quite breathtaking full frontal nude shot halfway through (don't let's ask the MPAA how that stayed in and the film kept a PG-13 rating.) My mother and godmother accompanied me to the screening. Orlando made its mark felt deeply on the latter, as she still brings the film up apropos of nothing, in casual conversation, all these years later.
Swinton is a chameleon of sorts, as all the best actors are, but her modus operandi is to seem enchanting while remaining willful (or vice/versa.) She has the ability to shift her eyes from warm to steely in an instant, almost imperceptibly and fix them on you, as if daring you to challenge her. My argument for her winning the Oscar for Michael Clayton is a) she is immensely respected and envied by her peers and they rightly figured this might be their best and last chance to honor her this way and b) everyone was stunned to see that she could convincingly play a character who was (to an absurd degree) not in control, in quite over her head, in fact. Panic and desperation seemed new to her repertoire.
The return in Prince Caspian of the White Witch, the character Swinton also portrayed in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, lasts all of three minutes, but its inclusion speaks to Andrew Adamson's shrewdness as returning director. Swinton was a perfect fit for the White Witch, with features as pure as the driven snow, and a mask of kindness barely draped over her lust for power. The image of Swinton as the White Witch trapped magically behind a block of ice, beckoning with an outstretched hand towards Prince Caspian, softly imploring him for just a single drop of his blood to allow her back into the physical world, carries the film a lot farther along than perhaps it deserves.
Without speaking to Prince Caspian's fidelity to the C.S. Lewis novel, as a film it suffers from sequel-itis in both familiar and not-so-familiar ways. Financially speaking, on the domestic front, it performed in the manner of how sequels were once expected to behave. If they could capture 50% or more of the gross of the predecessor, they were deemed a success. Mega budgets and the ever-burgeoning global economy (many Hollywood productions now derive, on average, 60 to 66 percent of the total gross from overseas, as opposed to 34 to 40 percent domestically) have now produced the baseline expectation that sequels need to match or exceed their forebear, in terms of final gross. With overseas revenues accounting for so much, the domestic tally only tells a small portion of the tale.
By any measure, Prince Caspian's final numbers of $141 million domestic and $278 million foreign ($419 million total) are a bracing corrective from the $291 million/$453 million ($745 million total) figures of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. This is especially confounding in light of BOP's oft-expressed (and very rational theory) of how a really good installment in a series buys a line of credit and credibility for the next one, whether it's part two, a sequel to a reboot, or what have you. By all accounts, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was critically well-received and beloved by audiences, so why the disdain for further adventures of the Pevensie clan? Multiple theories abound as to the reasons why, with two key ones being the stature of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe over other volumes in the Narnia series and the more overtly Christian elements and themes of the predecessor leading to - on these shores at least - church groups and congregations buying large blocks of tickets en masse (a family-friendly The Passion of the Christ, if you will.)
Prince Caspian is most definitely Biblical, but more in line with the Old Testament's an eye-for-an-eye style of thinking. In the nearly two and a half hour running time, a good three-fifths of the film is given over to preparations for battle, battle, and the aftermath of battle (all very exciting) and familial treachery as an uncle seeks to murder his orphaned nephew and ascend to the throne (not as exciting.) The PG rating for "Epic Battle Action and Violence" is both spot-on and laughably understated and seems to have filtered down from the MPAA's awarding of PG-13 ratings to films that are all kinds of R in terms of tone and content.
The battle scenes are viscerally impressive and uniformly well staged (on a budget upswing from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe's $165 million to $225 million) and suggest to me one of the more convincing uses of CGI-intensive filmmaking this decade. The merging of actors with characters and backdrops that aren't there seems definitely real and convincing (as opposed to almost so lifelike that they end up seeming, ironically, patently fake and unconvincing, of which Peter Jackson's King Kong is a recent criminal perpetrator that springs to mind.) And the sword fighting, armor clanging and bow thwacking are very intense indeed. There is no visible blood (which seems to be the MPAA's baseline for how to approach violent content) but necks are snapped, arrows fell scores of soldiers and it is strongly implied that throats are slit, repeatedly, especially by the valiant though tiny mouse, Reepicheep.
By the end of Prince Caspian, even Aslan the lion has returned briefly (though he is more respective of a figurehead here than his more nuanced character the first time around) to mete out watery retribution by calling on the forces of water and drowning the evil king's remaining forces in a devastating flood. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had its share of battles and loss but it also had a more captivating villain in the White Witch and more time devoted to the actual wonder and awe of discovery of a new world by the Pevensie children, the means to return to that land via a magic portal and a sense of destiny fulfilled as Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy took their rightful places as rulers of Narnia.
But inherent in Lewis' first two Narnia novels is an absence that the films can't quite grapple with: the fact that the children have already grown old here once before, at the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, before making their way home and resuming their original ages, and have now returned from England a year older from their first adventures, whereas 1,300 years have passed in Narnia. This passage of time is the crux of the story, but it is never really dealt with. The return appearances of Aslan and the White Witch provide some much-needed heft. An image of the faun Tumnus is glimpsed rendered on a wall. Links to the past abound, but since the focus is on Prince Caspian this time around (his name is in the title), the Pevensies seem like window dressing in the continuation of their own adventures. The script deals with this by making the battle sequences the star of the film and it works, up to a point. But the attachment to the characters (and the actors portraying them) isn't there like it is with the Harry Potter series, for example. The one performer truly allowed to shine by virtue of having a well-written role and an original take on how to play it is Peter Dinklage and his embodiment of the dwarf Trumpkin. Standing every cliché about dwarves, trolls,and the like on their collective heads, he has a gravitas, a wit and a wounded sense of self-worth all boiled together that make him the greatest special effect in the film most of the running time.
The Harry Potter series also does a better job in how it deals with aging and maturing as a teen, with all that that entails, added on top of a backdrop of a dark evil rising that threatens to destroy the world. Peter, Susan, and the others are now skilled warriors fighting battles in far off lands, and while this more adult vibe is appropriate, it comes at the expense of the sense of discovery that made The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe special. When I speak of an absence in dealing with the fact that the Pevensies have already aged once and how this needs to be represented, I think (oddly enough) of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard winds up living an alternate life on a dying alien planet and living it in real time, for decades, up to almost his dying breath, before returning to the Enterprise and finding barely an hour has passed from his departure. The weight of that experience and the psychic scars are immense, I imagine, and The Next Generation managed to at least invoke that. This is the absence at the heart of the second Narnia film (and book too, I would argue) and this air of something missing ultimately weighs the narrative down.
Since the Narnia stories take place in different epochs, with recurring characters in some and all-new ones in others, perhaps they aren't all meant to make the leap to the big screen. Not that this will prevent them from being adapted, of course (a certain level of diminishing box office returns needs to be reached for that to happen.) It will become obvious with future Chapter Two columns - if not already - that science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction are quite my favorite genres. On a case by case basis, I can appreciate and evaluate (although to offer the exception that proves the rule, my favorite TV show of all time is about a certain vampire slayer, so go figure) and Prince Caspian is an enjoyable and exhausting epic, with the hundreds of millions, as they say, up on the screen.
If it winds up as just slightly more than that, it's not a blasphemy against the filmmakers or the source material (Lewis had little concern, as I recall, with devoting the lion's share of his prose to extended metal clanging.) What will stand out for me in the end, what I hold on to with a pang of melancholic regret at what Prince Caspian might have been, is the White Queen's plaintive hand, outstretched and grasping towards the unleashing of unimaginable horrors, and of the actress behind the hand, a spy hidden in plain sight, embedded in the middle of a billion dollar franchise. I will take my subversive pleasures wherever I can.