Sanitized film not worth boycott

The trouble with calling zealots on their foolishness is that it could unintentionally give them the attention they crave.

But in the spirit that the clash of many opinions is likelier to lead to truth, let’s shine a light on the latest movie boycott movement.

The Catholic League, among others, wants you to shield malleable minds from “The Golden Compass,” a New Line Cinema movie that opens this week.

Set in an undated alternate world featuring Oxford, the arctic north, Tatars, witches, a ballooning Texan and a ginormous talking warrior bear, “The Golden Compass” revolves around a feisty, unruly preteen heroine named Lyra who’s been raised at a college believing she’s an orphan. When children in the community start disappearing, including Lyra’s best friend the kitchen boy, she sets out to rescue them from a fate crueler than death: separation from their daemons, their soulmate companions that can morph into anything from a mouse to a moth.

The movie, starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig (aka James Bond) and newcomer Dakota Blue Richards, is based on the first book in a trilogy by former schoolteacher Philip Pullman.

But the Catholic League Web site, promoting a $5 booklet called “The Golden Compass: Agenda Unmasked,” warns that “unsuspecting parents who take their children to see the movie may be impelled to buy the three books as a Christmas present. And no parent who wants to bring their children up in the faith will want any part of these books.”

Why?

Well, Pullman’s a well-known heathen, it seems. A financially successful one, mind you – to the tune of 15 million copies worldwide.

But he’s been quoted as calling his books “far more subversive” than Harry Potter because they’re “about killing God.”

I suppose we should be glad they aren’t calling for 40 lashes in a Sudanese prison for inciting religious hatred.

But the irony of the boycott ballyhoo is that the movie version apparently will be anything but heretical – except, maybe, to Pullman’s vision.

In the December issue of The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin writes about the years of fussing and fretting that went into bringing the 1995 novel to the big screen and describes the result this way: “This is Hollywood at its most hazily indignant and self-congratulatory, recycling the generic theme of ‘Victory,’ ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ ‘Dead Poets Society’ and countless other films – a band of grubby, half-crazed heroes takes on the System and wins.”

Rosin concludes: “In the end, the religious meaning of the book was obscured so thoroughly as to be essentially indecipherable. … With $180 million at stake, the studio opted to kidnap the book’s body and leave behind its soul.”

Which is something of a shame, because the book revolves around the essence of the soul to the person, to life itself.

Lyra’s motivations are innocent and pure: As the narrative explains at one point, “all she saw was right and wrong.”

When she encounters the Northern Lights, the sight is “as if from Heaven itself … so beautiful it was almost holy.”

Yes, the “Magisterium,” the local church hierarchy, is somehow behind the kidnapping of children and the Kidman character’s shadowy plot to separate them from their souls. And the story explores whether “Dust,” which starts collecting on people at puberty, is evidence of original sin to be eradicated, a power to be mastered or more a powerful spiritual presence to be harnessed.

Catholic theologian Donna Freitas wrote in the Boston Globe that “reading this fantasy trilogy enhanced my sense of the divine, of virtue, of the soul, of my faith in God.”

Freitas described the books as a retelling of John Milton’s poem “Paradise Lost” about Lucifer’s battle against God. She argues that in Pullman’s version, the authority figure is a terrorizing tyrant, and thus not the true God who embodies all good things.

These are pretty weighty concepts, most likely to fly right by the fourth- and fifth-graders wowed by the page-turning action and suspense of “The Golden Compass.” And for young readers with questions about the books’ theological heft, what an opportunity to engage in discussion about God, faith and core beliefs.

Why fear exposure to ideas?

As Milton himself said, “Who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”