Mark Reviews Movies: TOLKIEN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 9, 2019

Right from the start, there's plenty of reason to worry that Tolkien will be one of those reductive biographies of a writer, in which a creator's life story more or less serves as a mirror of his or her famous work and vice versa. Director Dome Karukoski begins this biography of J.R.R. Tolkien—the author behind The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and a series of writings about the history and mythology of Middle-Earth, the setting of those novels—in the trenches of France during the Great War. Suffering from a fever, the 20-something man, serving as an officer in the British Army, sees a vision of a cloaked figure, wielding a sword while riding a horse.

To be fair, there's no direct connection made between the shadowy figure and any of the characters who live in Middle-Earth. Later on, though, the young man also imagines fire-breathing dragons, as enemy soldiers attack a trench with flamethrowers, as well as a monster made of smoke and flame, rising up from a fire in no man's land. Those two images are unmistakable in connection to the realm of Tolkien's writings, and we also learn that a young soldier, who helps the officer on his journey toward the front, shares a name with one of the hobbit protagonists of Tolkien's three-volume novel.

Some of these details, obviously, are more blatant than others. In the end, though, it's clear that we're supposed to take away a distinct idea from the imagery and story of Tolkien's time in battle: The experience of the war was a foundational moment in the creation of Tolkien's most famous, life-encompassing work.

Pretty much everyone—save, perhaps, for the author himself, who openly criticized the belief that his Middle-Earth fantasies were allegorical—can agree that, whether he intended it or not, Tolkien drew upon his experience of the war in his writing. There is too much in The Lord of the Rings about the destructive power of industry in warfare and the lasting, traumatic effects of combat to argue otherwise.

By making only a few direct parallels while presenting a generalized sense of fantastical visions within real-life horror, Karukoski, along with screenwriters David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford, makes a fairly pragmatic decision in depicting that section of Tolkien's life. It affected his writing, yes, but only in the sense that any traumatic period in a person's life will go on define some significant part of a person.

This is ultimately a long-winded way of saying that this biography isn't necessarily one of those reductive ones—at least not in terms of arguing that, in order to understand Tolkien's work, we have to understand certain events and people in his life. It is, though, reductive in another way.

Basically, Gleeson and Beresford give us a hasty overview of Tolkien's life, from his childhood until the moment he sits down the scrawl out the opening sentence of The Hobbit, with everything framed by scenes in the war. The outline of Tolkien's life is accurate, but in the end, the story feels only like an outline.

In terms of specifics, the movie only comes to life once. The rest has a young Tolkien (played by Harry Gilby) orphaned, attending school, and starting a club with a group of friends who are as passionate about the arts as he is (The movie completely passes over the literary club of which Tolkien, along with C.S. Lewis, was a part). When he reaches his late teenage years, Tolkien, known as John or Ronald and now played by Nicholas Hoult, has plans to attend the University of Oxford and also falls in love with Edith Bratt (Lily Collins).

This plays out as one would expect from a broad view of artist's life, with the biographic details occasionally interrupted for loaded moments of artistic inspiration for the future. From his mother (played by Laura Donnelly), John learns of German legends and certain languages. There are grand statements of changing the world through art among the friends. Through Edith, he discovers Richard Wagner's cycle of operas about an all-powerful ring.

The story goes from one event to the next, hoping that we'll fill in the connections to Tolkien's work. The most involving scenes come from a pair of discussions that would seem rather dull and tedious. They both center on the concept and use of language, which, even more than fantasy narratives, was arguably the author's true passion. The first has John and Edith arguing about whether the true beauty of a word comes from its sound or its meaning. The second is a continuation of sorts, in which Professor Wright (Derek Jacobi) offers an impromptu lecture to the young Oxford student on how a single word can hold sway over the life of a person.

Those scenes work because they acknowledge and examine Tolkien's creative influences in a more honest and far more compelling way than simple allusions to stories we already know. Tolkien, though, mostly keeps it simple. As a result, we come away with little more than an understanding of what happened in the man's life and very little about why it actually matters to his work.

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