TOLKIEN – Review

One thing you learn early on in TOLKIEN is that it is pronounced “Tol-keen,” contrary to the way many fans have been saying it. That is one of many facts you learn in the J.R.R. Tolkien biopic TOLKIEN, which covers the early life of the “Lord of the Rings” author. It was not an easy life, as the young Tolkien, played by Nicholas Hoult (THE FAVOURITE, MAD MAX: FURY ROAD), endured personal tragedies and hardships, but it was also a time of deep friendship, challenges, growth, and even young love, capped by the singular horrors of World War I, experiences which the author later wove into his fantasy tales of hobbits, elves and the fellowship of a ring.

Actually, TOLKIEN is more an interesting film than the deeply involving one audience might hope it would be. This is despite the fact that Tolkien’s early life was marked by strikingly dramatic, even tragic, events. Finnish director Dome Karukoski, a big Tolkien fan, and screenwriters David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford carefully researched their subject but the films suffers from some flaws common to biopics. The director takes care draw attention to parallels between events in Tolkien’s life and his writings, and how these early experiences shaped the author’s later fantasy novels. It is a fascinating approach for fans, where one is constantly thinking “so that’s where that came from” as you watch the film. However, that observational, even analytical tact has a distancing effect, and the film often has a surprisingly restrained emotional tone.

Tolkien’s early life feels like something out of Dickens. The film opens with Tolkien (Hoult) in the trenches of World War I, and then periodically flashes back to his earlier life. Born in British-ruled South Africa, young John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (played as a child by Harry Gilby) learned to speak several languages and was steeped in languages, art and legends. Widowed when Tolkien was four, Mabel Tolkien (Laura Donnell) eventually relocates him and his younger brother to England, where they face financially dire circumstances. When Tolkien is 12, his mother dies and her friend Father Francis (Colm Meaney) takes charge of the two penniless orphaned boys, placing them in a boarding house run by Mrs. Faulkner (Pam Ferris) and arranging for their education.

From this point, the film focuses primarily on the friendships Tolkien forms with three other boys at the posh private school he attends and his budding romance with future wife Edith. The four boys create a fellowship of artists who encourage each other as they hope to transform the world. Lily Collins plays pretty, lively and musically-gifted Edith, another penniless boarder at the house, who earns her keep playing piano for Mrs. Faulkner.

The three friends, Christopher Wiseman, Robert Gilson and Geoffrey Smith, are played as young men by Tom Glynn-Carney, Patrick Gibson and Anthony Boyle. The friends engage in adventures, talk about literature and art, play rugby, and encourage each other as they grow from young schoolboys to college students, until their fellowship is tested by war.

In the war sequences in particular, director Karukoski draws direct visual links between those experiences and Middle Earth, with dragons and wraiths rising out of the smoke and fire of the battlefield. Other scenes evoke echoes to elements of Tolkien’s fantasy world, with Edith and their walks in the forest suggesting Elves and Ents, but none as powerfully as the war ones.

The story builds on themes of struggle, friendship, courage, love and war, mixed in with a love of legends and languages. Yet in the midst of all this drama, the film feels more focused on pointing out parallels between the author’s life and his books than in actually involving audience in the drama of that life. The director allows a bit more emotion to seep in for the love story between Tolkien and Edith but even here, there is a certain amount of restraint.

The approach has its problems. Nicholas Hoult has demonstrated his considerable acting talents in previous roles but under Karukoski’s restrained direction, he often seems to do little more than look handsome and occasionally a bit pained, the ultimate British stiff upper lip. Lily Collins as Edith gets a bit more latitude, bringing a bit more dramatic fire to her role. There are other problems. Tolkien’s younger brother all but vanishes from the story early on, and we never really get to know Tolkien’s closest friends beyond an superficial level. Even Edith never reveals the backstory on how she came to live in the boarding house. As the priest/guardian, Colm Meaney gets a little more room to stretch, and Derek Jacobi is charmingly eccentric as the Cambridge language professor who sets Tolkien on his academic career in languages. But overall, the characters feel a bit thin. It is all about pointing out those literary links.

Still, TOLKIEN does have much to offer Tolkien fans, even casual ones, who might be curious to know the personal roots of his fantastical fictional worlds. The film is packed full of intriguing references to Tolkien’s books, and insights on the origins of his fantastical fictional worlds. Young Tolkien would escape his troubles into tales of mythology, which turn up in his stories. With a gift for language, he amused himself by creating his own language, and by drawing imaginative worlds, long before the novels. While we don’t see an obvious hobbit inspiration, we certainly meet an elvish one, in the form of the musical, graceful Edith. The close friendships he forms at school clearly serves as a template for the fellowship of the ring. Even the ring of power and the heroic quest get a nod, when Tolkien and Edith visit a concert hall for a performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle operas.

TOLKIEN is an interesting film, well worth a look for J. R. R. Tolkien fans, if a less engrossing one than one might have hoped. TOLKIEN opens Friday, May 10, at several area theaters.

RATING: 3 1/2 out of 5 stars