Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew does not open in theaters until February 12, and almost nobody outside the production has seen it. That has not slowed the verdicts. In recent weeks, faith-based outlets and commentators have accused Gerwig of hijacking C.S. Lewis’s story, a petition demanding that Netflix replace her on future Narnia films has gathered thousands of signatures, and the casting of Meryl Streep as the voice of Aslan has been called blasphemy in some corners. This week, the film’s official Instagram account shared clips from Gerwig’s conversation with Stephen Colbert at the trailer debut, and they are worth hearing before the trial concludes.
Asked what the books meant to her, Gerwig answered, “I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know the books. They were read to me before I could read.” She kept reading them, again and again, once she could read on her own. That is not the biography of a director out to subvert Lewis. It is the starting point of a lifelong reader, shared by a great many of the people now criticizing her.
Her preparation matches the devotion. As this site reported earlier this month, Gerwig read or re-read everything Lewis wrote, then read everything he had read, and retraced his steps through Belfast, Cambridge and Oxford with his memoir Surprised by Joy in hand. “I would not be who I am without these books,” she has said. “They created me.”
Colbert, one of the few people outside the production who has seen the film, pressed her on balancing its spectacle with the story of two lonely children. “It’s always through character, and it’s always through the soul of the character,” Gerwig said. Digory and Polly and the friendship they forge, she explained, let the film be “as vast as multiple universes, which is the size of a boy’s heart,” and at the same time “as intimate as a moment shared between two friends.”
The adult cast, she added, signed on for the same reason she did. Daniel Craig, Carey Mulligan, Emma Mackey and the rest “were all there because of their love of C.S. Lewis and The Chronicles of Narnia,” and spent the production looking out for the young leads. Her favorite story from rehearsals: Craig admitted to the children that he was a bit nervous, and they reassured him, “Don’t worry, Greta’s really nice. You’ll be fine.”
None of that erases the genuine disagreements, and they deserve honesty rather than dismissal. Streep’s casting raises a real question that faithful readers are entitled to ask, since Aslan is a Christ figure and Lewis wrote him male. It is also true that the Aslan on screen remains a male lion, mane and all, and that Gerwig has said she wanted a voice carrying gravitas and fresh wonder. The film also moves the story from Victorian London to the 1950s, a confirmed change that petition organizer Chaz Migliacci and others argue loosens the tale from Lewis’s own life and times. The petition, reported by The Christian Post at more than 3,000 signatures in mid-October, asks Netflix to replace Gerwig on any future Narnia films. Those are arguments about a film, and they can be had in full once the film exists.
What the current pile-on asks audiences to do is condemn the adaptation in October for a film that opens in February. Gerwig cannot answer with the finished work, because it is not finished. What she can point to is a lifetime with these books, an exhaustive education in their author, a cast that came aboard out of love for Lewis, and a fellow reader in Colbert who has seen the film and praised it as visually spectacular and emotionally overwhelming. Fairness is not hype, and it is not public relations. It is simply this: hear the filmmaker out, then judge the film.