J.R.R. Tolkien was the fountainhead for fantasy, the great source for the genre as it evolved from The Hobbit to “Game of Thrones.” His early life and the origin of his ideas are the subject of the biographical fictional film, Tolkien.
The early scenes jump to and fro. Medieval horsemen riding against a lurid sky are juxtaposed with the charnel-house trenches where Tolkien survived World War I. Cut to the wooden sword fights of early childhood and leap into the gothic halls of the academy where he found his circle of friends—his fellowship. The back and forth seems like an arty tic before Tolkien finally settles into a rhythm of school days and war years. The idea is to connect the dots between Lord of the Rings and real life, between the Middle-earth Tolkien imagined and the world he experienced.
Aside from the war scenes, many of them too literal in their effort to show how slaughter at the Somme led to carnage at Pelennor Fields, Tolkien is a film of (mostly) quiet conversations about art and the power of imagination. Various scenes illuminate the shaping of particular facets of Tolkien’s creative life. His mother is shown reading Nordic sagas about dragons with an energy verging on performance. The love of his life and future wife, Edith, is a passionate Wagnerian eager to watch the composer’s mammoth operatic cycle on the rings of power. As a student, Tolkien already displays a facility for languages, whether ancient or invented. The scars of his wartime ordeal leave their stains on “Lord of the Rings” as a band of allies sally forth to thwart the evil lord and his minions.
Finnish director Dome Karukoski recreates the period atmosphere with a fair degree of accuracy and the cast—led by Nicholas Hoult as Tolkien and Lily Collins as Edith (with a short appearance by Derek Jacobi as Tolkien’s academic mentor)—march through the sometimes draggy screenplay with sufficient engagement if little transcendence. Many individual scenes are good yet by the end, Tolkien is less than the sum of its parts and falls short of compellingly dramatizing its subject.
The real fun of Tolkien is for the author’s avid readers, who will enjoy many flashes of connection between his life and his fiction.
