Who is this unusual film for?

The direction of our modern culture is to reduce every aspect of human experience, including politics, sex, the arts, and even religion, to entertainment. But this has not always been the case.

THE MOST RELUCTANT CONVERT: 
The Untold Story of C.S. Lewis 
Dir. Norman Stone. Cert. 12A
In cinemas 7 November and soon to be released on streaming platforms.

The word ‘entertainment’ originally denoted the frivolous passing of time between the more serious and weighty episodes of life. Thus when an aristocrat on hearing the first performance of Handel’s Messiah praised it as ‘a noble entertainment’, Handel replied, ‘My Lord, I should be sorry if I only entertained them; I wished to make them better.’ Making us better human beings, not merely entertaining us, was the assumed purpose of art. Which is why, although it may not be as entertaining as the latest blockbuster from Hollywood, I would recommend investing your energies in following the densely argued narrative arc of The Most Reluctant Convert: The Untold Story of C.S.Lewis.

Produced by the faith-based Performing Arts Company, the movie is a screen adaptation of a one-man stage play by Max McLean, who also plays the older Lewis in the film. It’s not a biographical drama in the vein of the 2019 film Tolkien, nor does it attempt to tell all the events that Lewis records in his 1955 autobiography Surprised by Joy. Rather the film concentrates on Lewis’ spiritual journey, from the loss of his childhood faith when his mother died of cancer, through his years of atheistic materialism and the horrors of WWI, to his reluctant surrender to theism as a young Oxford don, and his eventual conversion to Christianity in 1931. This explains why some of the episodes described in Surprised by Joy are left out, such as Lewis’ excruciating years at an English prep school that he only calls by the name ‘Belsen’, and his later complicated relationship with Mrs Moore. One could argue we are shown a partially sanitized Lewis, but the film certainly doesn’t side-step his attachment to lusts, temptations to the occult, or his intellectual pride and snobbery.

What makes this film unusual is that McLean’s middle-aged Lewis carries out a continuous on-screen narration of Lewis’ thoughts as the film flits back and forth between the ‘present’ day of 1950s Oxford and live-action scenes covering Lewis’ life from his childhood in Northern Ireland to his academic years at Magdalene College. I suspect that McLean’s entire script is taken from Lewis’ written words, which makes it feel rather like listening to all of Lewis’ most famous quotes packed into 73 minutes. Although this both guards against taking creative licence with Lewis’ biography and gives us full access to his literary genius, it does make the film very wordy, and there were times when I wished that the scenes of the boy Lewis (Eddie Ray Martin) or Lewis the young don (Nicholas Ralph from Channel 5’s All Creatures Great and Small ) could be allowed to flow without the older Lewis constantly interrupting the drama.

Another unusual device is that the movie starts and finishes with McLean the actor entering and exiting the film set through a door, as he first dons and then takes off the role of Lewis. This deliberately breaks the suspended reality of watching the film, making the viewer conscious that this is a piece of theatre rather than maintaining the fully immersive entertainment experience we are so used to at the cinema. Perhaps this was intended as a clever reference to the doors that lead from our world into Lewis’ magical land of Narnia. Certainly it gave me a helpful sense of watching something that was connected with my present-day reality rather than just being another well-made period drama. I was less positive, however, about the decision to show a ten-minute ‘making of’ documentary before the main feature, which felt like showing an audience how a magic trick is done before the conjuror takes to the stage. (After this article had gone to print in the Decmeber issue, the producers confirmed that the ‘making of’ documentary was supposed to go after the main feature but has been shown in error before it in some cinemas.)

My main question is who is this film for? It will certainly connect well with Lewis fans but what would a non-Christian who has no attachment to Lewis make of it? It has a clear and persuasive evangelistic edge, and it certainly isn’t one of those cringy Christian films that one would be embarrassed to take a friend to see. But the narrative voice-over style assumes a degree of caring about Lewis and his faith-journey, rather than building sympathy for him through the live-action scenes, and with such a wordy film you have to be really committed to following the argument in order to be impacted by its spiritual punch. Interestingly, when the film finished, I felt that I could immediately watch it again, preferably with subtitles and a pause button to stop and discuss the narrative at each stage of Lewis’ journey to belief. Which might not be what we would do with the latest superhero movie, but could be worth doing if we really want art to make us better.