For the two younger children, Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Lucy, Narnia is a place that tests their integrity and challenges them to be self-sufficient. Edmund, in particular, is facing a difficult time. The movie's early scenes suggest that he's deeply unhappy about something: His malaise is unidentified (and unidentifiable), but we do know that the children's father is away fighting the war, and it's clear that Edmund fears he'll be killed. Edmund's adventures in Narnia not only bring his loyalty to the others into question, but also force him to define his own future. It's the first time he has to ask himself what kind of adult he wants to be.

But it's Lucy who's the soul of the movie, not because, as the youngest child, she's the most innocent character, but because she's the most heart-wrenchingly open. As Henley plays her, she's not a wide-eyed moppet but a highly introspective little person -- as some children are, she's a perpetual grown-up in training, without ever being precocious or show-offy or overcute. Of all the characters, her responses to what she sees and hears in Narnia feel the purest: She responds to talking foxes and beavers with appropriate curiosity and delight, but she takes them seriously, too. Unselfconscious and subtly expressive, Henley gives one of the most astonishing child performances I've seen in years -- maybe since Drew Barrymore's in "E.T."

Some of this may make "Narnia" -- directed by Andrew Adamson, whose credits include the two "Shrek" movies -- sound dreadfully serious and, well, messagey. And understandably, many fans of the Narnia books who've put up with or ignored the novels' Christian subtext (or overtones, depending on how you look at it) may be fearful that "Narnia," which has been heavily marketed to Christian groups, is really a religious movie in disguise.

But I'm not sure the Jesus imagery in "Narnia" is any more overt than what you get in "E.T." (he does, after all, have the power to heal and to rise from the dead). One of the movie's central characters is a noble lion named Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson), an obvious Jesus stand-in. He's a lovely creature, with a mane the children want to sink their hands into, and with eyes whose noble blink feels like a benediction. But the most "Jesusy" section of "Narnia" is one that's played so powerfully -- it's moving and staggering at once -- that it can be read on any number of levels. I think, more than anything else, it speaks to our capacity for compassion, and if that's not nondenominational, I don't know what is. If certain religious groups want to lay claim to compassion as a brand, that's their business. But it shouldn't interfere with anyone's pleasure in "Narnia," or, for that matter, in C.S. Lewis' books.

And there's so much pleasure to be had in the look of "Narnia" that the experience feels somewhat decadent, anyway. There's Ray Winstone as a Cockney beaver with a fat, round shape (he's the one who explains to the children who Aslan is, describing him as "only the king of the whole world -- the top geezer!"). James McAvoy plays Mr. Tumnus, a polite, nervous fawn whose uniform consists of a red scarf wrapped around his neck and trailing down his bare chest. And the second half of the movie builds up to a majestic, and in some places intense, battle sequence in which satyrs, cheetahs, and humans stand up to the White Witch and her many followers, troops consisting of twisted-looking dwarves and rangy (and rather scary) wolves.

This is a movie that achieves a level of craziness that feels more operatic than it does outright Christian. And if Henley is the movie's soul, then its claws belong to Swinton's White Witch. The White Witch has eyebrows and eyelashes the color of snow; she wears her hair in a tumble of icy blond dreadlocks. Her stare is like a stab of metal; her smile, when she needs to muster one, is a tight little sliver of moon. Swinton makes a terrifying villainess because she's wholly devoid of camp. There's no silly swanning around for this deep-freeze diva: She strides through the movie in giant white ball gowns made of stiff wool felt, always the guest of honor at her own interior party. You feel certain you'll be able to leave the White Witch behind in the theater, but she follows you home and straight into bed, wrapping her chilly hands around your dreams. And when, during the big battle scene, she shows up in a spiky chariot drawn by two polar bears, you gasp at the image even though you know you should be laughing at its sheer craziness. That's when you realize you've bought the world of "Narnia" on its own terms.

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