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.

The attention to period detail is good, and the performances are engaging, though the characterisations are at times very respectful and at others perhaps too fanciful. I wonder if the young man and woman really did throw sugar lumps onto other guests' hats in a respectable Birmingham tea room, or if Tolkien really found a way back stage so that they could overhear a performance of Das Rheingold (with no hint that later Tolkien would be extremely critical of Wagner's use of medieval myth). I also wonder whether an officer at the Somme could take off along the trenches in a personal quest to find a friend - though this provides a necessary inroad to the horror of the trenches, when written down it obviously reveals itself to be quite impossible in terms of army discipline and Tolkien's own profound sense of duty and honour.

The film's most moving scene is that between Tolkien and the mother of one of his closest friends, killed at the front, when he asks if she will sanction the publication of her son's poems. Here the innate courtesy of the time, and the intense reserve of those who have experienced horrors too awful to communicate, convey more about the values Tolkien held dear than any more flashy exposition could hope to do. Nicholas Hoult handles this scene with great skill.

In comparison, the attempts to link the carnage of the trenches to the monsters of Middle Earth are rather too obvious, perhaps excused by the fact that Tolkien was succumbing to trench fever. The whole business of literary inspiration and influence fascinated Tolkien, but it is extremely hard, if not impossible, to render the subject adequately in filmic terms. Rather, there is some interest to be gained for the Tolkien enthusiast in spotting motifs - the band of close friends, or the faithful batman for example - while the film as a whole would probably not hold great interest to the casual viewer. One can understand why the Tolkien estate should distance itself from the enterprise (given their already well-known wariness of Peter Jackson's films), even though the film itself is by no means disparaging of its subject. One of the great-grandsons has a small part.