One ring to rule them compass
I feel sorry for The Golden Compass. Of all the fant-lit-to-film gimmes in the half-decade since The Lord of the Rings, Compass is the one which most painfully wants to wear Daddy’s clothes. Its every nook and cranny is so painfully subservient to that frantic desire that the film that emerges is utterly naked. From an opening stanza that apes Fellowship’s prologue to an industrious T, to the horrific neo-Enya ballad which closes the film, Compass looks and feels like its own principal character: a skinny little girl out in the cold, dealing with shit way too big for her.
I didn’t hate the film throughout; mostly, I just wanted to leave. It was boring. After about a half an hour of The Golden Compass, I accepted the fact that the film would be utterly without experience for me, because it is so completely without feeling. The Golden Compass hits all the major beats of its source book with mallet-like dedication, but is so fundamentally bereft of any real “moments” (Coppola said all great films need to have at least five) that the film feels dim and static. The days of Kenneth Branagh’s gargantuan 4-hour Hamlet are behind us, and anyone walking into the theatre this weekend expecting chapter-and-verse translation of His Dark Materials, Book 1, doesn’t understand filmmaking. But that still doesn’t mean the story needed to be told this poorly. If Rings gave us one thing, it was proof that a filmmaker can skip the text if they can get at the mood, but no such transformation takes place here. It’s not that the movie is inaccurate to the book; it’s just that it’s nothing more.
I think the key problem is that the filmmakers are convinced that the book is “tricky.” It might very well be: there are windows between worlds, and long-lived witches who fly, and talking bears. But I rather think these could all have fallen under “things shown,” like the giant wall of fur in Star Wars. I don’t recall a two-minute dialogue scene in that film which stopped the action to explain why there are Wookiees in the world.
The most complicated elements of His Dark Materials, from a storytelling perspective, are Dust and the daemons; the first is the crux of the story, and invisible; the latter are the cruxes of the characters, and all too visible. I can see New Line’s production department throwing a month-long hairy conniption at having to explain these metaphysical gumballs to the Wal-Mart crowd. Clearly, the studio and the filmmakers came away from that conniption having decided that serious expositional bricklaying would be necessary in order to get a workaday audience to understand particles that are the conscious embodiment of Original Sin, or animal companions that stroll around mirroring their humans’ innermost thoughts.
These are not challenges of exposition, however, but rather of screenwriting and visual storytelling. In both cases, Chris Weitz is pale to the task. Take the use of daemons as a keen example. The daemon performances in the film (all are, of course, CGI) vary throughout. Evil Mrs. Coulter’s golden monkey is a terribly designed but wonderfully performed little bastard; heroic Lyra’s Pantalaimon is passable at best; snowy Stelmaria might as well have not shown up at all. This latter, however, feels like the case throughout: the daemons are, for the most part, left out of the proceedings altogether. They’re just there. They are rarely used as narrative tools or as character tools, and are treated instead as overlarge costume props.
The only time the daemons truly impress, ironically, is when they die – each of them vanishes in a dangerously aestheticized explosion of fiery Dust particles. This positively reeks of a studio saying “we could do something really cool here!” rather than thinking that, perhaps, a person’s death ought to be played as horrific rather than wondrous. But I’m sure some spreadsheet somewhere proved that golden baths of dusty colour sell more happy meals than souls being abruptly and unglamorously pinched out of existence by the brutal finality of death.
Among all the clunky over-explanation, the one notable area where the film chooses not to explain serves as an embarrassing admission of guilt by omission: the Magisterium has, of course, been turned from a thinly-veiled analogue for the Catholic church into a one-dimensional regime of capital-E Evil that would make Darth Vader at his finest seem multi-partisan. Openly claiming a mission to control all thought and free will, the Magisterium in the film takes the concepts in the book to their most vulgar, alien extreme, in a messy attempt to maintain the stakes of the story without actually hitting any of the meaning. But, as we’ve known for several decades, a movie like this is only as good as its bad guy, and the Magisterium is faceless: interchangeable monks and priests and cardinals, and the presumed threat of bad guys not evident.
There is, of course, a bad girl; Nicole Kidman comes close to actually being excellent in her lead role as Mrs. Coulter. She’s certainly working at a level higher than most of the rest of the film, actually daring to do things to convey character and meaning. All others around her have little time for character, having been shoehorned into horrible expository speeches, grafting non-dialogue prose from the book wholesale into endless explanations of Dust, Sin, and What the Hell Is Going On. It all starts to sound like Shakespeare’s nurses at the beginning of the plays: whispering to each other the details of a plot they already know. Story points move by at lightning speed in the film’s headlong rush to get from A to Z in two hours. There is not a single line or scene in the entirety of The Golden Compass which does not seem designed to force maximum exposition out of minimum screen time.
This all falls most heavily on Lyra, one of the best-developed female characters in all literature, who is here condemned to wander through the bones of her story, asking questions of an endless line of people who will tell her, flat out, the various things that the filmmakers think we need to know. “Here’s how to use a golden compass.” “Here’s how to trick the king of the ice bears.” “Here’s why you never wage a land war in Asia.” In the role, Dakota Blue Richards is shaky at best. She has a few hum-dinger scenes, but she can’t muster up even the cinematic spark of the least of the Harry Potter kids (yeah I’m looking at you, Rupert) to really hold the center of the film in a convincing way. And without her exhibiting that firm control, the finer adult performances supporting her stand at the edge of the stage, as if unwilling to step into the center and overshine her. Sam Elliott is frickin’ great in this movie, but you’d never know it: he’s so cautiously trying not to overwhelm the girl that his cowboy boots might well be bunny slippers.
One suspects Eva Green could have done quite well if her part as the queen of the witches weren’t so sorely under-written; Ian McKellen, likewise, does his workmanlike best with the voice of the noble polar bear, but rarely gets to explore the scenarios beyond the very cursory requirements of the plot. Daniel Craig shamelessly phones in his two-scene performance to a degree that would be amusing if it weren’t so sad; cut off at the knees by the removal of his final act, he gets little opportunity to do anything here anyway, and should probably be consulting his agent this morning.
Right, that third act. As fans already know, the final 3 chapters of the book have been excised from the film at the last minute, purportedly in a ploy to use them as the launching pad for the next film, but now more likely doomed to dwell the rest of their days in the deleted scenes section of the Golden Compass DVD.
Maybe we wouldn’t have noticed otherwise, but The Golden Compass simply drops dead after its substituted narrative climax – a climax which has, notably, not resolved Lyra’s relationship with her mother, her father, or her doomed friend Roger. What? It’s been a while since I’ve been in a screenwriting class, but I do still think it’s important to bring at least one of your narrative lines to a satisfying close at the end of your film, beyond simply staging a half-handed Braveheart battle in the snow between faceless Samoyed warriors and a bunch of kill-happy Gyptians.
Not to continue to lean too heavily on the hackneyed “book does it better” stick, but the reason the dreamy conclusion to Compass works in the novel is that Lyra, having now been betrayed (but made wiser) by both parents, and having herself betrayed her friend Roger (but become wiser by her betrayal) , choses to cross the bridge in the sky anyway – the moment she ceases to be the rat girl who scampers across Jordan rooftops at the beginning of the story, and begins to become the woman who will bring about “the end of destiny.” With the changes to the conclusion of the story arc in the film, Lyra’s true character is inexcusably absent from this version of the story.
Weitz’s failure as a director is largely one of editing. Not only is his final battle is so incomprehensibly plotted that it makes the non-space physiodynamics of 300 look like vintage Hitchcock, but even his dialogue scenes seem to miss the beats and breaths that carve depth and grace out of clunky rushes of stiff line readings. Weitz, who notably quit the production after turning in his script because he thought the material was over his skill level, only to be lured back onto the project after a few years of turnaround, should have obeyed his original instincts. He demonstrates himself to be years, or even decades, away from the kind of aptitude at visual storytelling that even the most journeyman Hollywood director must fundamentally bring to any production with this many moving parts.
I should close by remembering that I didn’t hate The Golden Compass until its very last scene. Until then, it was merely a stifflingly bland and uninvolving take on a pretty decent children’s yarn – surprising in its lack of flavour or dimension, but hardly impassable for its blunted skill. With its trite smiley-face conclusion, however, where Lyra and Roger snuggle up against their tamed bear and talk about how they’ll win the war next time, The Golden Compass belies the moral cowardice that seems to run like a sewer pipe through every moment of its tortured cinematic evolution. At what point did Chris Weitz, his team, and his studio, for lack of a better term, “sell out?” How did they overlook the fact that for anyone to adapt the His Dark Materials trilogy in George W. Bush’s America, at least a portion of simple courage would be required?
That fortitude is utterly lacking here. What voiceless, directionless muck. This film just sucks.
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