Ten Overlooked Fantastic Films You Should See – Number Four

4. Hearts In Atlantis (2001)   For a “fantastic” film, this adaptation of the Stephen King novella  ”Low Men in Yellow Coats”, is unusually quotidian.  It is like Stand By Me without the body or like Children On Their Birthdays with a psychic neighbor.   Bobby Garfield lives with his widowed (?) mother and times are tight, even in the prosperous, confident early 60s.  His mother takes in a boarder, Ted Brautigan, played by Anthony Hopkins as yet another instantiation of the  Elder Gentleman With Impeccable Manners And A Secret (The Mask Of Zorro, Shadowlands, The Wolfman).

Bobby and Ted form a bond.  It turns out that Ted can see the future, read people’s minds, and move objects  around with his will.  These abilities rub off on Bobby, allowing him to impress a neighborhood girl.  Unfortunately, Ted is being pursued by the government (?), and Bobby’s mother betrays him.  When Bobby  has to choose between protecting Ted or the girl, he chooses the girl.  Ted is apprehended, Bobby regrets it,  and the movie ends.

There isn’t much more to the movie than that.  No beasties, no locusts coming out of a man’s mouth, no bloodbaths.  What there is is sentiment, not something often associated with Stephen King, but I maintain that Mr. King is one of the few writers writing today who has what CS Lewis would call a functioning chest.  There is  clear good and clear evil in the movie, and the line is drawn where an American of King’s (and my) generation should draw it; for the particular against the general, for the individual against the collective, for honesty and genuine affection against ambition and realpolitik.

Although the movie didn’t contain the references to King’s  Dark Tower myth that the novella did,  perceptive viewers would see how well it fits.  If you want to see Sir Anthony out of character, watch The World’s Fastest Indian.

“The Man In Black fled across the desert…”

…and earlier this month it was confirmed that Spanish actor Javier Bardem would be pursuing him, on the big screen, anyway.

I have a love-hate relationship with fantasy films.  Ralph Bakshi’s 1980 attempt at animating The Lord Of The Rings was deeply disappointing to me, so much so that I didn’t even bother to see the first film of Peter Jackson’s trilogy when it came out in 2001.    Despite my love of the genre, there have been fantasy films which have been so awful as to be unwatchable.  Eragon, for example.

I haven’t finished The Dark Tower series yet.  Even though the pace is slow and some of the episodes are gruesome, I am very, very impressed by it so far.  So impressed that I am ready to consider it the quintessential piece of American mythopoeia.    The Dark Tower  is American in a way that reworks our history.  For this reason it is violent and virginal at the same time.  There is a lot more I would like to say about King and The Dark Tower, but not now.

I hope Ron Howard is up to the task.  He is not the first director that springs to mind in adapting Steven King to the silver screen.  He is somewhat sentimental, but in this, he matches King himself.   The Dark Tower is awash with sentiment, despite its darkness.  Brian De Palma didn’t capture it in Carrie and Stanley Kubrick certainly didn’t capture it in his emotionally frigid The Shining.   Both of those films are technically superior to Hearts In Atlantis or The Green Mile,  but these two imperfect films capture King in a way that Carrie or The Shining do not.  I have to keep telling myself that Howard has some fantasy rep;  Splash, Cocoon, and Willow  were all good films.

It remains to be seen if the rest of the series is as well-casted.  May I suggest Ryan Gosling as Eddie Dean, and Isaac Hempstead-Wright (Bran Stark from A Game Of Thrones) as Jake Chambers?  I know Isaac is British, but isn’t Jake upper-crust New York?  It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.

Successors To The Inklings

In one sense, its a little misleading to speak about “successors” to the Inklings. The Inklings were not a self-conscious literary movement,  and as far as I know, l there are no little coteries of academics gathering in a tavern on Saturday nights to drink and read excerpts from their works-in-progress. Would that it were so. Also, I think it is hard for us to appreciate how counter-cultural Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams were, writing and publishing tales of the fantastic when the literary world was dominated by modern realists, by the likes of Lawrence, Hemingway, and Joyce.

These days, though, writing fantastic literature appears to be a lucrative pursuit., and the bastard children of the Inklings  appear to have swept the field.  “Fantasy and Science Fiction” occupies a healthy percentage of my local Barnes and Nobel bookshop, even more if you add the two or three shelves of “graphic novels”/manga with which it is customarily bundled.

What hath Tolkien wrought? There is so much fantasy on the shelves that I wouldn’t know where to begin. Trilogies abound, of course, and a lot of them take place in a pre-Modern setting where the red iron of brutish trolls and tragic High Elves clash on darkening plains. There is so much of this that I haven’t read because I don’t know where to start. In the ‘seventies I read the Earthsea books by Ursula Le Guin and found them engaging. I yawned my way through the first Shanarra book by Terry Brooks and the first Thomas Covenant trilogy and found both of them tedious and uninteresting.

Nor do I think that the self-consciously Christian fantasy works that have belatedly crawled out of the Evangelical presses in Wheaton or Grand Rapids to sulk on the shelves next to Janette Oke’s prairie romances or the horrid Left Behind series will beget much in the way of mythopoeia.   Sure, there are plenty of brutish Shadowghouls clashing with High Lightbearers on the Iron Plains of Bethania, but there is always a Lost Book of Hidden Wisdom that restores the Balance, or even worse, smites the agents of Darkness with the light that pours off its pages.

I think the problem with “Christian” fantasy is that Williams, Lewis, and Tolkien operated in the jagged edges of Christendom, whereas the modern Evangelical lacks that framework.  “Christendom” as a political and geographical substance is great mythopoeia in its own right, and the fantastic works of  Williams, Lewis, and Tolkien don’t make much sense apart from it.

There are three series I feel bad about not reading. The first is the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. I have heard much good about this series, but also I have heard that it rambles badly. If I read something that requires that much patience and effort,  I’d prefer to start with the Gormenghast series by Melvyn Peake.

The Harry Potter books I haven’t  gotten around to yet either, although I did read the first volume in His Dark Materials. From a philosophical point of view, Christians should be far more concerned about Pullman, who definitely has a bitter axe to grind, than they are about Rowland, who just wants to tell a good story.

Finally, I think Steven King as a mythopetic writer has been woefully underappreciated.  I haven’t yet read his Dark Tower series but I believe I shall have to.  I believe King,  along with such writers as William Vollman, Walker Percy, Philip K. Dick, Cormac McCarthy,  and even William Burroughs are participating in a project of which the Inklings would be proud; the mythopoesis of America.

Neil Gaiman, in American Gods, stumbled upon the main theme of this project; America is poor breeding ground for the supernatural.   We have no myths.  Our country is an abstraction, based not on blood or belief, but on a sort of least-common-denominator secular frame of exchange, and we don’t know our hills and our rivers from the inside yet like the Germans know the Rhine, the British the Thames, or the Central Europeans the Danube.  The strength of the hills is not yet in us.