You may be wondering what a Greatest Living Author watches when he’s not writing. Well, how about a movie about the Greatest No Longer Living Author?
I’d try to build up the reveal here, but 1) you should know who I’m talking about by now and 2) the movie’s literally called “Tolkien“, so it ‘s not exactly subtle about it.
Image by bairi from Pixabay
As for the movie, it’s probably somewhere above average as a movie.
It is, uh, less so as a biography.
Fundamentally, it’s a bad biography of the actual J.R.R. Tolkien (“John Ronald Reuel”; “Jonald” to his friends). But it’s actually a pretty compelling story about an author.
Let me put it this way: Tolkien had the approval of neither the Tolkien Estate or the Tolkien Society and didn’t have the rights to any of Tolkien’s published works — so, instead of mentioning any of his books by name, the characters just make a lot of vague allusions by dropping words like “rings” and “fellowship”.
Like, if the movie was a completely fictional account and they changed the Tolkien to, say, Johnny McWritesBooks, the film would have been pretty well received as a fairly emotional love story and commentary on the life of an artist.
The movie gets the broad strokes of Tolkien’s life right: orphaned at a young age, fostered by a priest, fell in love with a woman he wasn’t allowed to see until he was 21, had a core group of friends from school, saw most of those friends die during World War I, studied at Oxford, became Oxford professor.
Stole a bus.
Photo by Oleg Magni on Pexels.com
However, the film does play pretty fast and loose with the specific details. To be fair, that is also true of most film versions of real people and events.
The most glaring issue, at least if you’re familiar with the course of the real Tolkien’s life and career, is that the film portrays him as writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the trenches. He wrote The Hobbit as a bedtime story for his kids, and it wasn’t even part of the Middle-earth stories initially, and Lord of the Rings came about when his publisher asked for a sequel.
Famously, it was the stories that ultimately formed the core of The Silmarillion that Tolkien was writing first and continued to work on while a soldier and while convalescing after getting sick on the front.
And the World War I influence is pretty clear on this stories, to the point that the Balrogs are riding tanks in the earliest versions of the Fall of Gondolin.
Also, while most of the audience probably won’t care, the movie managed to make a lot of Catholic media rather indignant by completely neglecting Tolkien’s Catholicism.
Sidebar: one of Tolkien’s major influences was an Anglo-Saxon Advent poem called the Christ I (that’s a one; it’s the first of the poems titled “Christ” in the Exeter Book).
The poem contains the line: “Hail Earendel, brightest angel over Middle Earth sent to Men”, which Tolkien evidently took and ran with, giving us the greatest of mariners who went on to slay the greatest dragon ever to exist with his magic space-boat and became Venus.
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Again, to be fair, it’s clear that the filmmakers are trying to make the most uncontroversial, conventionally appealing film possible, and in-depth discussions of religion are rarely conducive to that. Also, I’m not entirely sure how you’d portray on screen.
Of course, you could always have a couple scenes of him going to church, or something…
Anyway, like I said, it’s a good movie in general. It’s just not a good Tolkien biography. Which is probably a problem given that the movie is, you know, called Tolkien.
Now, if you know absolutely nothing about Tolkien’s life in, uh, real life, you’ll probably learn something about him, though not anything you couldn’t learn better or more accurately elsewhere.
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And the thing is, the performances are all pretty solid, the dialogue is well-written, well-delivered and some of the vague allusions to Tolkien’s works that the film is legally not allowed to talk about directly are actually really funny — for example, when a character asks “Who needs six hours to tell a story about a ring?”, in context, he’s talking about the Ring Cycle, but given that the Lord of the Rings movies exist, the meta reference is obvious.
But if you want a fairly enjoyably way to spend a couple hours learning about a fictional character who resembles but is legally distinct from the real Tolkien, Tolkien the movie is a solid option.
It probably would have been better if they’d been legally able to actually talk about Tolkien’s actual works. Honestly, a movie about writing The Hobbit and/or Lord of the Rings probably would have been really cool. But, like, I said there’s enough compelling material in Tolkien’s actual life that even following just the broad strokes creates a decent level of drama.
And, again, the stuff that they’re inventing whole cloth at least makes for a pretty
So, to sum up, the movie’s main issue is that it’s called Tolkien, so the obvious solution would have been to get permission to actually make it about the real, recognisable J.R.R. Tolkien. Or to call it literally anything else and make it a fictional story about a fictional author.
Still, there’s enough positive aspects here that it’s worth watching once for the sake of an all-in-all decent story, however much said story may or may not resemble a real person.
My other recommendations are available here.
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