Tolkien
Cert: 12A / 112 mins / Dir. Dome Karukoski / Trailer
IT'S THE STORY THAT TOLKIEN'S FAMILY DON'T WANT YOU TO SEE! imply the headlines following a cursory Google search into the contractual furore surrounding Dome Karukosi's biopic of the celebrated author. Having watched the film without being already familiar with John Ronald Reuel's life, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly controversial in there. That said, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly interesting, either.
Maybe that's their beef…
SOMME
We meet Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) as a bedraggled officer in the Somme. A particularly gruelling morning in the trenches leads to our protagonist staring glumly into the middle distance, a recurring pose that acts as a framing device for a series of flashbacks which pan from his adolescence in Birmingham through to university days in Oxford, up to the First World War. The earlier part of this (with Harry Gilby as younger-Tolkien and Guillermo Bedward as his brother Hilary*1) is belted through at a rate which barely escapes the pacing of a montage, each beat so mercilessly on-the-nose that the film hardly has the time to pat itself on the back after winking at the audience. Although it manages this anyway.
In this first-act zipping back and forth, the audience's suspension of disbelief is challenged by a casting director who was unable to find an actor who looked like a young Nicholas Hoult. If only there was some sort of accessible reference material. Mid-way through a scene in Barrow Stores' tea room, we leap forward five years or so to find Tolkien and his three compatriots played by different actors. Let's just say that time has evidently not been kind to these kids. We plod along through Uni-life at an unremarkable pace until Sir Derek Jacobi™ arrives for his two scenes, chewing his way through the scenery as an Oxford professor and stopping one board short of going Full Widow Twanky.
(Still, it makes a nice change to see a group of young, privileged, entitled white males bemoaning their struggle to make professional inroads into the arts, rather than government. Although the fact that they're not being immediately shepherded down the pit is another sign of their position in life. As war breaks out*2, they may be sent to the front lines, but they do so as officer-class, after all).
DANNGER
Hoult is basically fine as the lead, but he's not right for the part. He does abrasive and rebellious well enough, but struggles with the sadness and… well, the struggle that his character has to show, giving nothing more than the surface-contents of the script and never getting underneath the page. Which, when you remember the context of his role, is criminal. Lily Collins does well as JRR's muse Edith, but she's definitely treated as The Girl One in a film more preoccupied with The Lads. This could be a sign of the times of course, but whether it's a sign of those times or these is less clear.
While it may not be the fault of the film explicitly, a big part of the push for this telling is that it's what inspired Tolkien's fantasy writings. What we see here is a young man having a close bond with some friends, hardly an unusual occurrence at all. And while that's certainly an aspect of Lord Of The Rings, the journey through the midst of war to find purpose and light is what's going on around Tolkien while he's laying in the mud thinking about his salad days. The film doesn't outright ignore this (how many other Sunday night dramas do you see shoehorning in a CGI dragon?), but the actual horrifying inspiration for his works' darker scenes is treated as something of an afterthought.
MINNNIE
Because ultimately, the main thrust of Tolkien is 'man lost some friends in the war'*3. Yeah, a lot of people did mate. A lot. With the best will in the world, there's nothing unique about JRR's experience as shown here, only what came out of it. And the film doesn't have the insight to reflect that properly.
Moving on from JRR's mustard gas induced reverie*4, we get a muted finale in which Tolkien is still struggling to write his magnum opus, the tale closing on an unearned moment of iconic triumph as pen hits paper in trademark (and trademarked) calligraphy. Tolkien's work may have a timeless quality, the background to it is rather more mundane.
Marketed as a behind-the-scenes precursor to Lord of The Rings, Tolkien is bloated and self satisfied, with remarkably few strings to its bow. You might expect the formative years of one of literature's most notable authors to be more interesting, frankly. Because if it's not, is it really a story worth telling..?
Watch alongside War Horse, for similarly romanticised levels of existential futility.
With the best will in the world, not really.
Yeah, if you like.
It is not.
We will.
There isn't, and given the trench-scene here that's unforgivable. Although there is a moment with a dude running around completely on fire, which is the next best thing.
Level 1: Young Mon Mothma's in this.
*1 A pivotal part of JRR's young life whom the film manages to forget about completely, and so won't be mentioned again here either. [ BACK ]
*2 Loving that moment from the trailer (intact in the film) where a rep from Oxford University's town-crier society helpfully strides across the quad bellowing to let everyone know "WAR! WAR! ENGLAND'S AT WAR!". I like to think that all the colleges had one of these (and still do) for just such an occasion. Or indeed, lesser points of note on a daily basis.
- "DRIZZLE! DRIZZLE! IT'S LOOKING A BIT GREY, BETTER TAKE YOUR MAC OUT WITH YOU!"
- Get off the bloody grass, Jenkins!
-"BUT RAIN, PROFESSOR!" [ BACK ]
*3 One of the closing caption-cards tells us that JRR named his third child Christopher, implying that this was a nod to Christopher Wiseman, one of his close friends he lost during the war. My initial thoughts were a) Is there any citation for this which you haven't mentioned, though? Christopher is hardly an unusual name. Because b) I notice the tribute was so important to Tolkien that he waited until his third child to implement it. Then I thought 'now be fair, his first two may have been daughters and this was the first opportunity he got to honour his friend'. Nope, John and Michael arrived before Christopher did. How lovely. I'm knocking off a point for that, and it's not even the fault of the movie. [ BACK ]
*4 A slow fade to black gives us a caption card reading "Oxford: years later". What, it's "years" later because Tolkien looks absolutely no older but his hair's a bit different? We skipped forward about five years earlier and you changed the fucking ACTOR. Why does this film hate putting the date on the screen? If it wasn't for the outbreak of the First World War, there'd be no timestamp on this until the closing caption cards (which kindly explain that Tolkien went on to write Lord Of The Rings, for any audience members who weren't sure what they'd stumbled in to watch). A bittersweet coda also gives us a brief flashback to the tea room scene from earlier, the very moment that Tolkien tells the audience that this is the same tea room from earlier. You know, in case you'd forgotten the film you were still watching. It's the little things which annoy, dear reader. The little things. [ BACK ]
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