Dickie Attenborough, RIP

Mark Steyn had a lovely little obit for the late Labour life peer Lord Attenborough, and left his best 'til last.

In the Nineties, Attenborough returned to acting, to supporting roles (Jurassic Park) and occasional leads (the remake of Miracle On 34th Street), but one of his late directorial assignments is a very low-key, small-scale but tremendously assured film. In 1994, he released Shadowlands, "based on a true story" of C S Lewis' relationship with an ex-Commie Jewish-American divorcee. As with Gandhi and Chaplin, the "true story" was rather more complex, but Attenborough managed to penetrate deeper into the real shadowlands than his big biopics do, and he drew two splendid performances from his leads. "You're the truest person I've ever known," Anthony Hopkins (as Lewis) tells Debra Winger, and you believe it because you see it for yourself; she's one of those actresses whose straightforward honesty - the rueful, lopsided smiles, dark curls tousling the head - dignifies even the silliest movie. But she's even better here, dying of bone cancer without turning it into disease-of-the-year Oscar-bait. 

For a love story, there's not much kissing or touching, at least for the first hour, but Attenborough manages to breathe life into the usual English movie portrait of repressed dysfunctional ninnies. Hopkins and Winger maintain a stiff formality: he doesn't know what to do; she does, but she finds pleasure in waiting for him. In the distance between them, the passion is palpable. You long for him to take her hand, to kiss her, and the longer you wait, the more intense is the sheer romance. During the Encaenia at Oxford, in the middle of the national anthem, Hopkins stares across the massed ranks of college dignitaries and finds Miss Winger, unfamiliar with the words of but nodding teasingly along. In effect, Attenborough turns "God Save The Queen" into the meet-cute love song. Later, at the garden party, she playfully reaches up and brushes something from his face. Later still, when she comes home from hospital to find he's pushed together two single beds, she asks him to describe his bedtime routine. These may well be the three funniest scenes a somewhat humorless director ever shot, and they're very affecting.

I've never actually seen the original version of Shadowlands, which is possibly just as well. And it's terribly disappointing that the film-version utterly fails to capture Lewis's character, or his thought, or even the feel of the Narnia books. But Oxford is beautiful, Oxfordshire is beautiful, England is beautiful, Wales is beautiful, Anthony Hopkins's voice is beautiful, every performance Edward Hardwicke ever gave was a thing of beauty, and at the time Joseph Mazzello was at his most beautiful (and he's still fairly dishy to this day!) - and basically the moral of the film, as far as I can make out, is that in the 1950s everything was beautiful, and that's why we still need films like Shadowlands - to remind us, so that we can remember.