Film review: Tolkien

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: Today is Friday, May 10th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Megan Basham.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Megan reviews the new biopic about the 20th century’s most influential fantasy writer.

MEGAN BASHAM, REVIEWER: If you aren’t passionate about JRR Tolkien and the world he created in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, you might find Tolkien a perfectly pleasant movie.

The biopic (rated PG-13 for language and war violence) is set mostly in Edwardian England with brief forays to World War I-era France. And it’s heavy on pleasingly musty academic atmospheres and lovely pastoral scenes.

CLIP: Since childhood I have been fascinated with language. Obsessed with it. I’ve invented my own. Full, complete languages. Look. This is… it’s everything. And the drawings? I’ve made stories. Legends. After all, what is language for? It’s not just the naming of things, is it? It’s the lifeblood of a culture, a people. Yes, exactly.

Picture the misty, cobbled lanes of Oxford leading to overstuffed armchairs in cozy tea rooms. Or to glades of flowering cow parsley hidden beneath deep forest canopies.  

Nicolas Hoult and Lily Collins are equally eye-pleasing as Tolkien and his wife-to-be, Edith. From his tweeds to her soft Gibson Girl chignons, they present a sort of platonic ideal of scholarly romance. Their performances are engaging enough. As are those of Tolkien’s school chums in the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, a fellowship formed to pursue greatness in art and literature.

CLIP: Cellar Door is a place. An ancient place. Impossible to reach except by the most treacherous climb. No? It’s not a climb, it’s not a climb.It’s a path. Through a dense, dark forest. Oh is it now? And at the heart of Cellar Door, which is actually a shrine, there stands an extraordinary site. Is it a proud and opinionated princess? It is a place which is revered by all who know of it, marked at its center by… By? By trees.

For Tolkien fans, however, it’s all likely to feel disappointingly generic. We see none of the fire and even less of the humor of the man who wrote Gandalf’s rebuke of Saruman or Bilbo’s jokes at his relatives’ expense.

The film’s failure to delve into Tolkien’s Christianity is part and parcel of this lack of specificity. Especially since it played such a large role in his imagination and in setting up the moral stakes of Middle Earth. A life as singular as Tolkien’s shouldn’t feel like it’s been crafted from outtakes of Dead Poets’ Society.

Worse is when the film subtly rewrites history to accommodate our modern obsession with representation. Christopher Tolkien complained in 2012 that his father’s legacy was being “absorbed by the absurdity of our time.” Perhaps nothing better illustrates this than the filmmakers’ decision to subtly suggest Tolkien’s close friend, poet Geoffrey Bache Smith, was in love with him.

Anthony Boyle, the actor who plays Smith, defended this unfounded reading in an interview last week. He said, “There’s no direct proof that he was in love with him, but if we don’t follow our nose when these clues are given to us then we’re writing these people out of history.” Those clues were apparently unearthed by co-screenwriter Stephen Beresford. He’s best known for winning a “Queer Palm” at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. His conclusion about Smith’s supposed feelings come from battlefield letters to Tolkien. Here is a representative passage:

My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight there will still be left a member of the TCBS to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon…May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot.

What a sad, emotionally impoverished culture we live in to read something sexual into a youthful friendship of shared literary ambition. The Tolkien family put out a statement saying they, “did not approve of, authorise or participate in the making of this film.” They went on to say they “do not endorse it or its content in any way.” That’s not surprising given the arrogant bending of Tolkien’s actual life to check identity boxes not supported by historical evidence.

At the same time some relatable facts seem too complex for this bland hagiography. Like certain hobbits, the prospect of war at first left Tolkien quaking and it took him some time to volunteer. Writing to his son Michael, he said, “In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage.”

As a writer, of course, he understood the value of showing weakness or fear in even the most likeable characters. It also allowed him to highlight the valor of those lower down the social ladder. As he later wrote, “My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself.” Unfortunately, Tolkien’s filmmakers don’t appear to have absorbed these lessons. They never show their protagonist as less than valorous.

Thankfully, at least two more Tolkien biopics are reportedly in the works. One will focus on his friendship with C.S. Lewis. So the most influential fantasy author of the 19th and 20th centuries may yet see his story told right.

WORLD Radio, I’m Megan Basham.

(Photo/Fox Searchlight Pictures)

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