Review: The Golden Compass

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Within moments, “The Golden Compass,” adapted by Chris Weitz (“American Pie,” “About a Boy”), reveals itself to be one of the nattiest examples of latter-day in media res filmmaking, a parachute jump out of a zeppelin into a lavishly designed parallel universe of gleaming Victoriana. The result is less gibberish than playful folderol. Agnostic writer Philip Pullman’s “Dark Materials” books, of which this $180 million-plus budgeted movie is the first, is leached of its explicit anti-religious material, but there’s enough about free will and the preservation of individual rights to strike fear in the hearts of various authoritarian zealots given breath by the media, such as the television-enabled bigot named William Donohue of something called the “Catholic League” who sees anti-Catholic monstrosity in any challenge to established authority. Simon Burney plays the murderous member of the “magisterium” who speaks most like Donohue: “There will always be freethinkers and heretics unless we deal with the root of the problem.” Burney widens his eyes for the line, “We owe it to the young, do we not?” the cry of charlatans everywhere, as is the later, “A wise person knows there are subjects you don’t speak of.” What Weitz has confected instead is a hopeful zoom through the Pullman universe, setting up a world where everyone has “daemons,” or animal-like avatars that accompany them, an adventure for the expressive young Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra Belacqua, whose uncle Lord Asriel (the ever-savory Daniel Craig) has committed free-thinking crimes of seeking knowledge about something called “dust” that the “magisterium” wants to suppress, something that reveals worlds that are “invisible, intangible and inaccessible.” Among her adversaries: Marisa Coulter (Nicole Kidman, fiery ice as a baddie), aka “That Coulter woman!” Richards is splendidly cast, less a tomboy than a Dickensian urchin with large eyes and a face that wants scrubbing. The editing (“Lawrence of Arabia” editor Anne V. Coates shares credit) is attentive in even the largest setpieces to darting, delicate, darling gestures and fleeting facial expressions. The animal avatars are ever-present amid the world of shiny, satisfying detail, surely part of the huge budget: memorable is a scene where Coulter’s golden monkey daemon sits beneath a table, tumbling Lyra’s ferret daemon in its paws like liquid gray fur. Other delights: a dirigible that recalls Philip Johnson’s “Lipstick Building” turned on end; a hearth that burns with a fire of spearmint green; Eva Green’s two prominent, prodigious front teeth; Sam Elliott as a cowboy “aeronaut” with a wryly designed “jackalope” daemon; a heroic “ice bear” who’s an ursus ex machina more than once; and a general air of Jules Verne by way of Hammacher Schlemmer. There’s more stuffing here than in granny’s sofa. You’d think a modern mind raised in the machinaverse of videogames could conceivably take in all this tumult in one go. Like “Southland Tales,” the overstuffed quality seems utterly of the present moment. The movie ends at just less than two hours, as if designed to be only the first two of three acts. You almost expect an end credit resembling another long-running series: “LYRA BELACQUA WILL RETURN IN ‘THE SUBTLE KNIFE.'” Kate Bush sings the end song: wouldn’t that be someone to see onstage on Oscar night? 113m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Ray Pride)