Saturday, September 16, 2023

WEEKEND MOVIE TIP: SHADOWLANDS.

Starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, Shadowlands is an intimate portrait of an unlikely couple, lifelong batchelor C.S. Lewis, best known for his Narnia series of children's books but also the author of many more fiction and non-fiction tomes, and Joy Davidman, herself a literary prodigy who won several poetry awards.





Shadowlands is one of those movies for which the term Britishness seems to have been invented, as it offers many glimpses into a bygone era of stiff upper lip and frequently saying sorry England. The story is set in the 50s, when Lewis was an Oxford, and later, Cambridge don. One of the most memorable scenes is when Davidman, of US stock, enters the bar of the hotel where she has a rendez-vous with Lewis for the first time and, upon finding no one willing to point her to the famous writer, calls out loud 'Anybody called Lewis here??!' Priceless, the clash between hypothermic British mores and American flamboyance!


Shadowlands is delicate, it is elegant, and it will make you ponder the fragility of human happiness, because the time together allotted to Jack and Joy was limited, she dying of cancer in 1960 already, barely eight years after they had met, and four years after they married. Notice, also, a young Joseph Mazzello as Davidman's son Douglas - years later he played Eugene Sledge in the HBO miniseries The Pacific.



MFBB.

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