BEFORE: I forgot to even mention St. Patrick's Day yesterday, but there's a lot of that going around because events were shutdown all over because of the corona virus, and the new "shelter in place" mentality that prohibits anyone from going out and having any fun. Sure, it's preventing me from going to work, too, so it's not ALL bad, but we're all going to get sick of staying in with the same people every day, and not seeing friends or work-friends in person. Aren't we? I know that it's all supposedly for the best, limited interaction means less spread of the virus, yeah whatever, but I remember what was called the "nesting" phenomenon in the days after 9/11, then it was by choice and not mandated by the government. After that terrorist attack sporting events were also cancelled, but movie theaters and restaurants remained open, however few people were in the mood to go out and have fun, and people like psychiatrists and social workers determined that after a national tragedy, people were just more inclined to stay in and spend time with their families. I remember weeks later people were unsure about whether it was appropriate to tell jokes, watch sports, or just go out for a nice meal, because how would that look when others were still mourning their losses?
I think we'll see something similar take place, whenever the quarantines (either government- or self-imposed) end, it will take weeks for people to realize that it's OK to have fun again. I'm all for getting out and having fun now, I'd love to have a restaurant or a stadium or even Disney World to myself, but how would that look? (Besides, none of those places are even open, anyway.) I don't want to be seen celebrating life while other people are sick somewhere else, but if you think about it, we were all doing that before the virus, we just weren't aware of it - there are always sick people somewhere, after all. Fact of life.
Anyway, St. Patrick's Day - I didn't have any film remotely Irish to watch, so I had to substitute films based in the U.K. Part of "Tomb Raider" took place in London, and Tolkien was born in South Africa, but after moving to England he attended Oxford. I see that Colm Meaney is in "Tolkien", though, and he was born in Dublin. So was Genevieve O'Reilly - that's the best I can do, give a shout-out to two Dubliners today. (Wait, wait, two more - Anthony Boyle was born in Belfast and so was Laura Donnelly)
Derek Jacobi (born in London) carries over from "Tomb Raider".
THE PLOT: The formative years of the orphaned author J.R.R. Tolkien as he finds friendship, love and artistic inspiration among a group of fellow outcasts at school.
AFTER: Why have there been SO many movies in the past few years about authors? Last year alone I watched TWO movies about A.A. Milne writing "Winnie the Pooh" (one factual, one fictional) and one about the poet Keats ("Bright Star"), then there was that "Mary Shelley" film explaining the inspiration behind her book "Frankenstein" (also a documentary about Joan Didion and that comedy about the writers of the National Lampoon magazine). The year before that, I recall prominent biopics about Beatrix Potter, Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger. And before that, there was that movie about P.L. Travers, who wrote "Mary Poppins", and "The Invisible Woman", which was about Charles Dickens, and I suppose the trend stretches back to Johnny Depp playing J.M. Barrie in "Finding Neverland". I'm probably leaving out a few here, but I've made my point, it's a definite trend. But why? And why is Nicholas Hoult in all of them (OK, maybe just two).
My question is, what's the fascination? Why can't we just enjoy the books themselves (and movie adaptations of them) without also needing the "behind the scenes" movie to speculate about what the author drew inspiration from? How can a movie about the WRITING of "The Lord of the Rings" be anywhere near as exciting as the story itself? And right now, are there screenwriters pounding out biopics about people like Rudyard Kipling, Agatha Christie, or Stephen King? Who's going to play Dan Brown or Anne Rice in the inevitable biopics that take wild stabs at what inspired their novels?
For the Disney films, it always feels like double-dipping, or even triple if they're making a movie ABOUT the author of "Mary Poppins" at the same time they're planning a sequel to the original film. You know, something to fill the theaters while they're re-making their entire cel animated feature library into CGI abominations. If someone seems to have a genuine love for the work of Dickens, or Keats or whoever, that's going to shine through in the biopic. But still with "Tolkien", it's bound to feel like a cash-grab, because the only people you imagine would be interested in learning the finer points of his life are the Middle-Earth nerds who wish there were even more "Hobbit" movies, or that someone would find a way to adapt "The Silmarillion", which is a terrible idea. People, we HAVE the books, just re-read them! Or if you want to learn about Tolkien's life, isn't that what we have Wikipedia for?
For me this felt like an odd combination of "Rebel in the Rye" with the love story of "Bright Star" with the battle scenes of "1917" mixed in for good measure - but maybe that's just me, because who else would have watched all three of those films within the last two years? Then, of course it jumped around quite liberally in time, which as you know is an easy (some would say the easiest) way to tell someone's life story, without having to stick to a linear narrative, and therefore being able to skip over the boring parts. As I've said many times, this technique is most often used when telling the story in the proper order would have created an unwatchable film - if we followed Tolkien's life from the age of 10 all the way to him writing "The Hobbit" in the proper order, the story might not be anything close to interesting until very close to the end. At least with all the time-jumping, the editors can try to get to the exciting bits sooner - didn't seem to work, though, because this movie still tanked at the box office, it made $9 million but the budget was around $20 million.
It turns out it was a very different time, back in the early 1900's, and while there are no exact dates given for most of the scenes here, World War I looms large in the plot, and Tolkien was born in 1892, so that would put the early school scenes somewhere around what, 1905? This demonstrates he was something of an outcast at school, because he was an orphan and relatively poor, but he found other social outcasts (but who came from wealthier families) and together they formed a little club, read poetry to each other and vowed to change the world. These days, a group of social outcasts would be more likely to either read comic books or shoot up their school, and I think in this case I prefer the old ways.
But I think there's a bit of a story problem here, as the film focuses a little too much on Tolkien's friends, and the film's really supposed to be about him, right? So what if one of his buddies was a poet and another one was a composer? Was he the most boring one in the group, was that the story problem here? The most interesting thing about him when he was at school was apparently his penchant for making up fictional languages, which unforunately was a useless skill until he wrote those books about elves and orcs much later on. So, really, he was a dud until then - the king of the nerds before there even were nerds to read his books.
Then there's him getting the inspiration from the WWI battle scenes? I'm not sure this was presented very well, because they couldn't really show depictions of the most famous characters from "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings", we only see Gandalf in a shadowy profile once, and even then it's very vague. From the references of "fellowship" we're supposed to gather that Tolkien and his three closest school-mates were somehow the inspiration for the four hobbits? Or for the other heroes in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy? It's all a bit nebulous because legally they probably couldn't draw a direct line between the four mates and Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin. Besides, Tolkien wrote "The Hobbit" first, and there was only 1 hobbit there, plus a wizard and 13 dwarves, so what was the inspiration for all of them?
Also, NITPICK POINT that there's a very strong implication that flame-throwers used on the WWI battlefields were the inspiration for Smaug, the fire-breathing dragon in "The Hobbit". But earlier in the film, we see young J.R.R's mother reading him a story about someone slaying a dragon - so wouldn't DRAGONS from other stories be the real inspiration for the dragon in his?
Just a little bit of research on Wikipedia tells me that a camping trip that Tolkien took across Switzerland when he was 12 probably influenced the journey across the Misty Mountains described in "The Hobbit", why didn't we see any of THAT in this movie? I think they really over-simplified the connection between Tolkien's experiences and the events in his books, and that's a damn shame.
They also muffed some of the details about his life - he actually got engaged to Edith before going off to fight in the Great War - and he composed poems and stories to send to her, along with a secret code that told her where he was and how he was doing - plus he also worked as a code-breaker in the days before World War II. All that would have been immensely fascinating to me, but it's just not here.
Also starring Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "X-Men: Dark Phoenix"), Lily Collins (last seen in "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile"), Colm Meaney (last heard in "I Am Your Father"), Anthony Boyle (last seen in "The Lost City of Z"), Patrick Gibson, Tom Glynn-Carney (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Craig Roberts (last seen in "The Fundamentals of Caring"), Pam Ferris (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), James MacCallum, Harry Gilby, Mimi Keene, Adam Bregman, Albie Marber, Ty Tennant, Guillermo Bedward, Laura Donnelly, Genevieve O'Reilly (last seen in "The Young Victoria"), Owen Teale (last seen in "King Arthur"), Nia Gwynne (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Adrian Schiller (last seen in "Bright Star"), Holly Dempster.
RATING: 5 out of 10 old Finnish curses
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