The Most Reluctant Convert

I saw “The Most Reluctant Convert” recently, the new movie about the life of the Christian apologist and literary scholar C. S. Lewis,  perhaps best known for his “Chronicles of Narnia” series of children’s fantasy novels. This film is not a general biopic, but is specifically focused on the story of Lewis’s conversion from atheism to Christianity, mainly as detailed in his memoir “Surprised By Joy.”

The approach of the film–we’ll get to the spiritual content in a bit–is unusual and creative. The screenplay was based on a one-person play, which was written by the actor who plays the elder C. S. Lewis (Max McLean), and that format is partially carried over to this cinematic version, while simultaneously making many transformations to take advantage of the big screen.

The story starts with McClean, the actor, getting made up for his part, then stepping into his role as C. S. Lewis. The storytelling goes back and forth between Lewis’s narration as he ambles around Oxford, eating breakfast, having coffee, sharing mugs of a preferred beverage with you, the audience, as a convivial companion, and introducing vignettes of key moments in his life–including his mother’s death when he was ten years old, his stormy relationship with his father, his time in the trenches of World War I, and education and early experiences at Oxford.

As someone who has read and taught C. S. Lewis over the years, I was familiar with most of the story outline and a number of lines from the film, which are lifted out of the Lewis oeuvre, but it was fascinating to see how the screenplay put these lines into specific dramatic contexts. It is no small feat to take written work and a rather wordy film and make it play well as a visual experience.

For me, it worked splendidly, since I already find Lewis a compelling figure, and magnetic as embodied in the jowly Max McLean, the very essence of C. S. Lewis. Imagine sitting down with a hot drink, snug in a little eatery, and listening while one of the great conversationalists of the world tells you his story. I could have hung around with him all day.

Turning to the spiritual aspect of the film, the “most reluctant convert” idea is pretty interesting, and as mentioned above Lewis worked it all out in “Surprised by Joy.” In short, Lewis grew up in a nominally Christian home, became a confirmed atheist by age fourteen, and converted to Christianity as a young Oxford professor at the end of his twenties. All he really wanted was to be “left alone” from a big spiritual commitment, and as an atheist he enjoyed his freedom very much.

However, his logical training “forced” him to examine the evidence as it came to him, and his experience of tastes of “joy” over the years, such as looking at the miniature garden his older brother made out of bits of flora, and his reading of George McDonald’s “Phantastes,” led him to believe there were pleasures that humans were made for that were not fully realizable on this earth. That led him to believe there must be something more that we were made for, a subject he also explores in “Pilgrim’s Regress,” his adaptation of Bunyan’s allegory to his personal experience.

In the end, as the film and “Surprised by Joy” depict it, Lewis was “forced” to accept Christianity because the evidence for it, as he saw it, was too strong to deny. It’s an amazing story and, from a Christian perspective, incredibly inspiring to think about how God seeks after the lost and can turn a confirmed atheist into a mighty Christian apologist. It’s also just an interesting and creative film about an unusual human interest story. Hats off to director Norman Stone, Max MacLean, and all the others who made this film a possibility.