Movie Reviews: Tolkien

Tolkien
directed by Dome Karukoski

This was a tightly focused, though ultimately not very revealing look at J.R.R. Tolkien, the famous academic and author of "The Lord of The Rings", "The Hobbit", "The Silmarillion" and several other fantasy stories, most of which were set in his imagined pre-historical world of Middle-Earth. It's not easy to make compelling films about writing, and this isn't one of them. Writing is usually a solitary activity that takes place internally in a writer's brain. How do you dramatically depict that process visually so that it will resonate with people watching it?

Perhaps smartly, the director doesn't attempt to do that. Instead the director focuses on what he can visually express: Tolkien's gift for languages, Tolkien's fascination with Northern mythologies and heroic tales, Tolkien's budding romance with and fierce love for the woman who would later become his wife, Tolkien's experiences during World War I, and Tolkien's platonic love for his close friends at King Edward's School at Birmingham.

The story is a hero's journey, but we already know that Tolkien passed the trials. There's little drama. The movie does point out that Tolkien, while not utterly impoverished during his formative years, was far from rich. Tolkien's father died when Tolkien was just four years old while his mother passed away from diabetes when Tolkien was twelve. 

Tolkien and his brother were placed under the guardianship of a Catholic priest, the stern but kindly Father Morgan (Colm Meaney). Father Morgan arranged scholarships and funding for Tolkien (played as a child and young teen by Harry Gilby and later as a college student and young adult by Nicholas Hoult) to attend King Edward's school and later Oxford. 

Along the way Tolkien gets in fights with boys who will be his closest friends, falls in love with the woman who will become his wife (and the film argues muse), Edith Bratt (Lily Collins), accidentally impresses the notoriously hard to impress Oxford Professor Wright (Derek Jacobi), and finds himself at the Battle of The Somme during the First World War.

The movie's dominant theme is the romance between Tolkien and Edith. Her forest dance for him was the inspiration for the love between Tolkien's characters Beren and Luthien. The movie also investigated how language shapes and is shaped by our understanding of the world.  

The film strongly hints that one of Tolkien's male schoolmates had an unrequited crush on him. I can't call it. This movie likely appealed to people who didn't know much about Tolkien but might have been interested in learning more. The movie looked magnificent even though I thought the narrative was so-so. This film wasn't explicit. The film mixes sadness and loss with optimism and faith.

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