SHADOWLANDS (Directed by Richard Attenborough. Starring Anthony Hopkins, Debra Winger, Edward Hardwick)

DIRECTOR Richard Attenborough, famous for shedding tears, gets into the business of jerking a few with this restrained but weepily efficient meditation on love and death.

Although Welsh, and a former hell-raiser, Anthony Hopkins appears to have turned his back on Hannibal Lecter and co. to typecast himself as a repressed Englishman. Here it is author and Oxford don C. S. Lewis, who found himself, late in life, torn from his quiet, celibate bachelor existence by a bold American poet, Joy Gresham (Debra Winger). This is the kind of special relationship the Americans love. “Tea?” Lewis enquires of Gresham shortly after they first meet. “Why not? We are in England!” Gresham replies. Well sort of: we are amongst the Oxford spires and in the country houses, where an American can save an Englishman from his own good manners whilst getting to live in true Merchant Ivory style.

But the film is better than that might suggest. Oddly for Attenborough, past master of the grandiose, it is an intimate affair, concentrating on two fine actors and a well-proven script. William Nicholson has now done versions of Shadowlands for the television and theatre, and has adeptly manipulated it for each medium. The early scenes make for engaging, slightly eccentric romance, while setting up the parameters of the film’s premise: that pain is a necessary part of life.

At the beginning Lewis, a committed Christian, preaches the positive values of pain, yet himself has retreated into a hermit-like existence to protect himself from it and is unprepared for the effect it has on his real life. It is only when Joy, whom he has courted but not romanced, is diagnosed as having terminal cancer that he finally summons up the courage to emerge from his own shadowy world.

It is all potently dealt with, making the most of the lethal Love Story combination of passion and fatal disease, whilst underpinning it with effective philosophical contemplation. Where it fails is in objective consideration of the masochistic and slightly misogynistic relationship it represents, where a man can only declare his love when the woman who has challenged him as an equal becomes helpless.

It skirts around the issue of sexuality too: only the charisma of the actors gives any hint that this went beyond Plato. But it achieves its most direct aim with five handkerchief precision: at the screening I attended, towards the end of the film, the soundtrack was drowned by a chorus of sniffling and nose-blowing. I myself seemed to get something in my eye. Damned contact lenses.