Historical Accuracy of CS Lewis Film Shadowlands
How True to CS Lewis' Life and Character Was the 1993 Biopic?
Feb 12, 2009
The film chronicles only a short period of Lewis' life - his relationship with American divorcee Joy Gresham. Lewis met Joy and married her for convenience before the couple learned she had cancer; the bulk of the film follows their love story, Joy's remission and decline, and Lewis' grief and crisis of faith following her death.
Criticisms of CS Lewis' Character Portrayal
While critical acclaim for Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of a grieving man was near-universal, it was widely noted that Hopkins' Lewis was a very different personality from the real Jack Lewis. The film presents Lewis as a reclusive, introverted, tongue-tied man who stammered around women and surrounded himself with lesser minds in order to maintain an emotionally detached position of intellectual superiority. In reality, Lewis was famous for his ebullience, jocosity and love of a rich verbal sparring-match.
His inner circle included such intellectual giants as JRR Tolkien and Owen Barfield, and he was always ready to eloquently defend his position on anything from literature to theology. Critics of the film also pointed out that the real Jack Lewis dressed very shabbily (one famous description is “a successful pig farmer”), in sharp contrast to the neatly-attired Lewis in Shadowlands. The film's portrayal is altogether of a milder, chastened, less lively Jack, which enhances his dramatic arc after meeting the “liberating” Joy, but does not correspond well to the historical Lewis.
Historical Accuracy of Events in Shadowlands
A number of historical errors, made for pacing and dramatic reasons, occur in the film:
- Joy had two sons, David and Douglas, but only Douglas was portrayed in the film.
- CS Lewis never learned to drive, as he did during Jack and Joy's honeymoon in Shadowlands
- Joy's remission was telescoped in the film, and omitted the trip to Greece which Lewis and Joy made in 1960.
- Joy's leg actually snapped at the Kilns, Jack's home.
- The film omits Jack's transfer of allegiance from Oxford to Cambridge in 1954.
Criticisms of the Spiritual Tone of Shadowlands
Following Joy's death, CS Lewis found his faith in a good God shaken. His crisis of faith and eventual spiritual recovery is documented in his published diary A Grief Observed. A number of commentators have noted that the film does not end on the same note of spiritual acceptance. The real Lewis was able, after the first violence of grief was past, to reject the notion of an evil or uncaring God on characteristically rational grounds. Shadowlands, on the other hand, portrays Lewis as recovering from his grief naturalistically, through time and his relationship with Joy's son Douglas.
The final lines of the film portray an emotional but almost anti-intellectual acceptance of the situation: “Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers any more. Only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I've been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal.”
Praise for the Emotional Accuracy of Shadowlands
Douglas Gresham, who described the film as “very inaccurate concerning matters of historical fact”, nevertheless admired Shadowlands for its portrayal of love and grief. Gresham declared “in terms of the emotional progression through which the protagonists pass, it is spot on”; he also considered Debra Winger's portrayal of his mother to be very accurate.
