Woman at War

seen on 20 May 2019

Benedikt Erlingsson directs Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir as Halla, a woman taking on international industrial giants as an eco-warrior in rural Iceland, while also managing a local choir and suddenly finding that a four-year-old application to adopt a child has finally been approved by the authorities. 

The tensions between her subversive actions, the beneficent life of the choir, and the impending responsibilities of parenthood are cleverly balanced so that no heavy-handed moralising upsets the general tone of serious but quirky attention to all the details of Halla's life. The scenes with the choir are delightful; the discussions with the sympathetic civil servant (also a choir member) hint at the awkward conflicts of loyalty swirling around direct action; Halla's forays into the countryside to sabotage power lines approach the excitement of a thriller or action movie but remain grounded in the realities of human frailty, exposed landscape, freezing glaciers and providential hot springs. Sveinbjörn (Jóhann Sigurðarson), a curmudgeonly farmer who may be related to Halla ('alleged cousin') provides timely support in an entirely plausible manner.

Tolkien

seen on 13 May 2019

Dome Karukoski directs Nicholas Hoult as J.R.R.Tolkien and Lily Collins as Edith Bratt in a film written by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford about Tolkien's boyhood, war experience and early academic life: the last word of the film is the fateful word 'hobbit', devised in the late 1920s and first reaching the public gaze in 1937. The younger Tolkien and Edith are played by Harry Gilby and Mimi Keene.

The film adheres broadly to the events in Tolkien's life, but is not strictly factual, and the chronology is misleading. (Tolkien did not in fact enlist soon after the declaration of war, as the film implies, but rather spent a whole further year completing his degree. Also it is implied that he and Edith were married after he was invalided out from the front line, whereas in fact they married before he was posted.) However, since it is not a documentary, this can hardly be a major criticism, as the salient factors in Tolkien's development - the love between himself and Edith, the importance of his school friendships (the 'T.C.B.S'), and his fascination and skill with languages - are all given their due; only his deep Catholic faith is not well imagined or adequately represented despite the necessary presence of his guardian Father Francis Morgan (Colm Meaney). There is a delightful cameo by Derek Jacobi as Professor Joseph Wright, the philologist who encouraged Tolkien as a student in Oxford once the undergraduate had lost his enthusiasm for Classics.