By Mary DeTurris Poust

Changing directions on 'The Golden Compass'

Reviewer defends himself after bishops' conference pulls his glowing take on controversial movie

Capping weeks of controversy, the U.S. bishops’ conference has yanked off-line a glowing and widely broadcast review its film critic wrote of “The Golden Compass,” a film adaptation of the militant atheistic and anti-Catholic trilogy, “His Dark Materials.”

The reviewer, Harry Forbes, director of the bishops’ Office for Film and Broadcasting, tells Our Sunday Visitor he stands by his opinion that the movie is artistically well-done and morally unobjectionable. He notes he’s not alone in his view among Catholic reviewers.

But a growing number of bishops, bloggers and other critics say Forbes should have taken into account the anti-religion agenda of Philip Pullman, author of the trilogy, who has been quoted as saying that his novels seek to “undermine the basis of Christian belief.”

Plot twist

When New Line Cinema launched wave upon wave of publicity for “The Golden Compass,” it seemed as if Catholics were fighting a losing battle against a secularized culture that has no problem with entertainment that takes aim at God in general or Christians and Catholics specifically.

Then came the surprise plot twist. Film reviewers for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Office of Film and Broadcasting gave the film a positive review. New Line Cinema plastered the review in promotional blurbs — attributed to the U.S. bishops themselves — in double-page newspaper ads and wire stories across the country.

The movie opened Dec. 4 in theaters. While taking the top spot in the box office its opening weekend, it left audiences and critics unimpressed, and only made a disappointing $26 million. But controversy over the bishops’ conference review continued to heat up.

Confusion in community

Bloggers and individual bishops protested the bishops’ conference review. Then, without explanation, the bishops’ conference on Dec. 11 ordered the review withdrawn from the website of Catholic News Service, its news agency.

“The order came down to take it off the site,” Jim Lackey, news editor of CNS, told OSV. “Since it’s their review and not our review, we felt obliged to take it off.”

But the genie was already out of the bottle. Diocesan newspapers across the country had already run the review, whose take sometimes stood in contradiction to what local pastors and school principals were telling parishioners in the pews and the students in their classrooms.

The day after the movie review was withdrawn, Archbishop Edwin O’Brien of Baltimore told the Baltimore Sun that his archdiocese was “grateful” for the conference’s decision, because the review “caused much confusion in the Catholic community.”

“From all reports, the review failed to adequately warn parents about the movie’s widely-recognized dark themes and anti-Catholic imagery,” Archbishop O’Brien said.

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver said that he went to see the movie for himself, and that he found the film’s anti-religious themes impossible to miss.

“The aggressively anti-religious, anti-Christian undercurrent in ‘The Golden Compass’ is unmistakable and at times undisguised. The idea that any Christian film critics could overlook or downplay these elements, as some have seemed to do, is simply baffling,” he wrote in a column in the Denver Catholic Register.

Slap in the face?

The bishops’ conference review praised “The Golden Compass” as “intelligent and well-crafted entertainment” and assigned it an A-II rating, or appropriate for adults and adolescents. It was penned by Harry Forbes, director of the conference’s Office of Film and Broadcasting, and by John Mulderig, a staff reviewer.

Forbes and Mulderig downplayed the overtly atheistic underpinnings of the book trilogy that the movie is based on.

“Taken purely on its own cinematic terms,” they wrote, the movie “can be viewed as an exciting adventure story with, at its core, a traditional struggle between good and evil, and a generalized rejection of authoritarianism.”

But other critics found it more difficult to disassociate the movie from the books that inspired it.

 “For bishops and others who had taken pains to warn the faithful regarding the atheism and anti-Catholicism of the novels, and were concerned about the movie as a marketing opportunity for the books, all of this came as a slap in the face,” said Steven D. Greydanus, a Catholic film critic and founder and editor of decentfilms.com.

“Certainly the sheer effusiveness of the review, in contrast to the tepid response of critics generally — not to mention the movie-going public — compounded the problem. The impression was, not only does the Church endorse the film, they actually like it better than practically everyone else,” Greydanus said.

No danger

In an interview with OSV, Forbes, the author of the review, defended his positive assessment of “The Golden Compass.”

“The fact that a particular film is cinematically impressive never blinds us to its moral shortcomings, if any. The latter consideration always takes primacy,” Forbes said. “But in this case, other Catholic film critics concurred with our assessment that there was nothing to endanger young adults.”

Other reviewers who shared Forbes’ generally positive view included Australian Sacred Heart Father Peter Malone, a film critic and author, and the Catholic Digest.

Forbes said he called New Line Cinema as soon as his review began appearing in the movie’s advertisements and asked them to pull the quote. “It would have been better if they had put my name in there, but they wanted the weight of the bishops’ conference,” said Forbes.

Forbes referred questions about why his employer pulled his review to Sister Mary Ann Walsh, director for media relations at the bishops’ conference. She did not return calls and emails for comment.

Sense of responsibility

Forbes said that he does feel an extra sense of responsibility when writing reviews because he realizes Catholics, many of them parents, are using his reviews as guides for their families. He said that when a controversial movie has come up in the past, he has worked directly with appropriate USCCB departments, such as the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities when analyzing “Bella,” a widely praised story of a young pregnant woman who chooses to have her baby, and the Office for Migration and Refugee Services when analyzing “Trade,” a movie about human trafficking.

In the case of “The Golden Compass,” however, Forbes said there was no appropriate department at the USCCB that would oversee such a subject and that he had not read the trilogy on which the movie was based.

“I do wish, if we could do it over again, that perhaps the conference could have hired someone, an expert that we trusted, to read all three books from cover to cover and do a real analysis,” said Forbes.

Forbes is no stranger to controversy. His review of “Brokeback Mountain,” popularly referred to as a “gay cowboy love story,” was revised three times and had its rating changed from an “L” for limited adult audiences to an “O” for morally offensive. Similarly, he received criticism for his review of “The DaVinci Code,” which he called a “glossy, well-acted, mostly fast-moving thriller” despite giving it an O rating.

Total context

While “The Golden Compass” has failed to excite movie-goers, sales of the trilogy “His Dark Materials” have spiked 500 percent because of the movie-generated buzz, according to Random House, the books’ publisher.

Greydanus, the film critic, noted that movie adaptations usually spur book sales, citing the recent phenomenon of “The Chronicles of Narnia.”

“One of the concerns I’ve seen people raise regarding the review is that it essentially limited its evaluation to the film itself, bracketing the source material. Critically, that’s a necessary distinction, but culturally you have to look at the total context, not just what’s on the screen,” Greydanus said.

 “A movie doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” he added. “Yet when it came to ‘The Golden Compass,’ the (bishops’ conference) review repeatedly brushed aside larger cultural contexts, raising them only to dismiss them.”

Mary DeTurris Poust is a contributing editor to Our Sunday Visitor.