'Golden Compass' briefly loses its way

Fantasy tale of an oppressive regime and rebellious free thinkers dazzles but moves too quickly

By Michael Sragow | Sun Movie Critic

December 7, 2007

(B) The familiar fantasy character of the feisty tomboy heroine gets an upgrade in The Golden Compass. This smart, streamlined adaptation of the first novel in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy unfolds in a world similar to but vastly different from our own in a time that's like a blend of our 19th and 20th centuries. The movie goes by quickly -- maybe too quickly.

You want the film to slow down so you can savor the alternate-universe England that writer-director Chris Weitz and production designer Dennis Gassner conjure from a millennium's worth of public monuments, as well as a mix-and-match of Victorian and Edwardian architecture and industry. We move from the brushed stones of Oxford to an art deco London without losing our bearings, so cunningly have the filmmakers filled out their vision with burnished wood and coruscating metal and glass. As the movie whizzes along, you wish you could learn more about this bizarre version of Earth in which combat results not in gore, but in sparkling clouds, and each character has a companion known as a daemon -- an animal spirit who embodies a human mate's soul.

Luckily, Weitz has anchored the whirling plot in Dakota Blue Richards' rough-edged 12-year-old Lyra. From her fresh, sharp perspective, you see an alternate world in an exploding nutshell. The movie starts with Lyra witnessing an attempted poisoning in the peaceful halls of Jordan College at Oxford, where she lives as a ward of the university. Soon she overhears a scholastic briefing on the existence of a trail of Dust: glittering particles of the human spirit.

With its tale of an oppressive regime known as the Magisterium and the free thinkers and wandering warriors who rise up against it, nothing in this film is as it seems, and few of the characters in it reveal themselves immediately. It's not the most transcendent or passionate of sagas, but The Golden Compass embeds Pullman's themes in its brisk, confident storytelling: the need to develop critical thinking as an individual and create, with other creatures, sturdy bonds of understanding and feeling. Weitz deletes the word "church" from Pullman's bracing attack on dogmatism and the arbitrary uses of authority. Otherwise he pulls no punches.

Weitz doesn't manage Pullman's feat of being rational and magical simultaneously. But he rapidly and intelligently opens up Pullman's world. Watching the film before reading the book transported me back to age 8, drinking in the movie of The Time Machine and growing fascinated by its vision of travel in a new dimension.

In The Golden Compass, Lyra soon discovers that her world may actually be part of a whole network of worlds and that her uncle, Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), thinks he's found a way to pass from their world to another. Asriel's talk of all that and of Dust marks him as a risk to the Magisterium, which dictates how everyone should behave and what everyone should believe. Meanwhile, Lyra and her young friends swap rumors of the Gobblers, a group that appears to be stealing children. When the glamorous Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) visits Oxford in her glittering couture, she dazzles Lyra and persuades the deans to let her take the girl back with her to London as her protege and assistant. Lyra is overjoyed. Coulter has impressed her new charge with a marked irreverence toward college graybeards.

But Coulter swiftly shows Lyra that she expects unquestioned obedience. Kidman is perfect at negotiating Coulter's cool turnaround from potential heroine to villainess, and Richards is up to the challenge of facing her down. This spunky young actress conveys Lyra's precocious grasp of the import of the Golden Compass, a truth-telling device that's been passed down to her. It demands that its owner divine the hidden meanings behind combinations of symbols -- and that's what Lyra must do with every move she makes from now on in her young life. Lyra and her daemon (who is mostly a cat, though a child's daemon can change species) escape with the Golden Compass from Coulter and her daemon (a golden monkey). Weitz sets several streams of action flowing toward an eerie, icy confrontation between good and evil in the northern climes.

Sometimes an eddying narrative can generate its own headlong beauty, even if some characters and nuances get smudged along the way. Both things happen in The Golden Compass. Lyra joins forces with the roaming people known as the 'Gyptians, as well as a cowboy aeronaut named Lee Scoresby (Sam Elliott), and an armored bear named Iorek (the voice of Ian McKellen). You want more of Scoresby and his character's daemon, a big, tawny rabbit (given voice by Kathy Bates), and of Eva Green's fiery presence as a witch.

Yet there's still satisfaction to be had in watching all the characters, including the Gobblers and Coulter, come together in heroic and antiheroic patterns that are like funhouse exaggerations of redemption and betrayal in real life. Craig's fierce, virile, indelible presence can't stop Asriel from fading in and out of the big picture. (That's partly because Weitz had to chop off the ending to provide an upbeat conclusion for this film and a dynamic beginning for the second film in the projected trilogy). But Lyra's bond with the bear could scarcely be any stronger. The digital wizards have imbued Iorek with haunting expressions of self-loathing and loss. When we meet him, he's been separated from his armor -- his species' equivalent of a daemon -- and reduced to menial work. Lyra's cleverness and bravery restore his confidence and he repays her, and the movie, in a battle with the armored-bear king that's a genuine clash of the titans.

Maybe Weitz should have found a way to end this film right then and there. Everything that happens afterward is a bit of an anticlimax, and even in a proud, brainy spectacle, the rule should be: Always leave them gasping.

>>> The Golden Compass (New Line Cinema) Starring Dakota Blue Richards, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig. Directed by Chris Weitz. Rated PG-13. Time 118 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com