Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Purists?

NOTE: This is my original review of “The Fellowship of the Ring”; I do feel, however, that many of the points are relevant with respect to “The Hobbit”.

I’ve now seen The Fellowship of the Ring and it seems to me that people just have to see the movie for themselves in order to make up their minds.

Unforgiving Tolkien purists will probably be offended. I think they have pretty much painted themselves into that corner. There is no saving grace in the movie for the hardcore fans who have dreaded the release of this picture, and who wish it had never been produced.

There are Tolkien purists, however, who (like me) will do their best to separate their feelings for Tolkien’s work from their reactions to Peter Jackson’s work. I have to admit that it’s not easy to watch this movie without thinking, “Well, that was different from the book.”

But each time I found myself reacting that way, I reminded myself that I had come to watch the movie, and not to condemn or criticize it. Picking every little nit at this point isn’t going to do anyone any good. The deed is done and we either live with it or not, but either way we have to get on with our lives. Besides, The Two Towers is coming in a year, and angst-driven personalities need a little breathing space before they start gearing up to bemoan the onset of that movie.

As movies go I cannot say that this was the best movie of the year for me. It certainly wasn’t the worst movie. I think that, if I were to compile a list of flaws in the film, and set them in a scale, the balance would be tilted in favor of the action-packed finale — that is, I think the good by far outweighs the bad in the scale of Purist Justice.

Peter Jackson likes to tell a very visible story, and in so doing he tends to exaggerate certain elements. He brings an intensity to the screen which is absent in other directors’ palettes. Of course, every director paints a different picture. One cannot help but interpret the interpretation according to one’s own desires and expectations.

Still, what made the movie most memorable for me was the fact that I shared the evening with over 1,000 other people in two auditoriums (and I actually got to interact with people in both rooms). The audience I watched the film with was very quiet throughout most of the story. I think people were afraid to talk because they didn’t want to miss anything.

And it’s not like you can close your eyes and lose track of the story. This movie was very predictable in some places. Ploddingly predictable. But the story unfolds so quickly you don’t have time to get bored, and by the time the credits rolled I think everyone looked at their watch and said, “That can’t have been three hours!”

Cinematically, if there is a weakness to the movie it has to be the pacing. The scenes are so fast and the characters sweep across the landscape so rapidly that any time they settle into a scene for more than a minute, the change in pace seems a little jarring. But short of making six three-hour films or cutting out even more of the story, I don’t see that there is much else to be done with the material.

I was comfortable enough with the journey of the Ringbearers that I stopped and scoured the walls of Moria for some of those details we are supposed to know are there but cannot see. Did I see anything interesting? Well, there were a lot of runes carved on the walls. Whose runes? I have no idea. The camera didn’t sit still long enough for me to get a good look.

It has been said that Peter Jackson treats the camera as another person in each scene. This is his way of drawing the audience into the story. He uses changing angles, reverse-action whatchamadiggits, and sweeping panoramic shots that scope out the countryside, focusing in on the action as it heats up.

If anyone is afraid that the movie departs from Tolkien’s book, they may rest assured that it does. If anyone is hoping that the movie brings Middle-earth to life, they may rest assured that it does. Is it Tolkien’s Middle-earth? Of course not. It’s Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth. But it’s a beautiful image and one well worth absorbing at least once or twice.

I have to say that I liked the performances. Some of the dialogue was a bit below the actors. I got the impression that they wanted to say more but they couldn’t — they had to get on with the scenes and that was just the way it had to be. So there was an intensity about the delivery.

I’m a big Liv Tyler fan, so I’m biased in her favor. Nonetheless, I think she came off better than many people expected (or feared). There were some snickers from a few people when the sub-titles appeared. They were so low on the screen the bottom half of the words were cut off. Still, I liked seeing Liv and look forward to seeing more of her in these movies. Arwen doesn’t have to be a prissy seamstress. People who insist that is all she can be obviously don’t pay attention to what Tolkien wrote about Arwen and her family.

Ian Holm is the perfect Bilbo Baggins. He is an accomplished actor and he thoroughly understood the material. But what most impressed me about Bilbo was the fact that nearly all of The Hobbit was recapped in several scenes across the movie. I don’t mean they acted out the story. I just mean that most of the events from the earlier story were mentioned or referred to. I liked that.

Holm’s Bilbo is charming, reassured, comfortable, and entirely believable. I can’t think of a single moment where I would have wanted something done differently.

Nonetheless, the best performance came from Ian McKellen. I don’t know if he has enough Oscar-quality material in this movie to actually win an Oscar, but he should be nominated for the little statue. It’s not because he is Gandalf, or because someone thinks he should be Gandalf. It’s because, when McKellen delivers certain lines, he makes them sound so real and convincing. It doesn’t matter if the character speaking them is Gandalf. What matters is that they don’t sound like some character in a movie is speaking them.

Gandalf absorbed some lines from other characters due to compression. But the sentences were often lifted right out of Tolkien. What amazed me, however, was the way I was pleased with the delivery of several out-of-context lines. And I mean, with respect to “proper Tolkien context”, some of the dialogue is widely moved from where it occurs in the literary story that no purist can help but notice.

But I do not say it is displaced. One of the most effective alterations in the story occurs in the scene where Gandalf utters the famous line to Frodo about not being so quick to deal out death in judgement. It’s an incredible scene. All of the emotion and moral fortitude that I have pictured in Gandalf, when he cautions Frodo about judging Gollum (in the book), is right there on the screen. And it’s not because Peter Jackson and the other writers found a clever way to use that material in a different place than in the literary story. It’s because Ian McKellen understands the momentity of what he is saying. He clearly and obviously feels comfortable saying it.

One of the most frequently voiced concerns over the past four years (in my experience) dealt with the necessary compression. I and many other purists have wondered if the 17 year gap between Bilbo’s departure from the Shire and Frodo’s fateful conversation with Gandalf will be cut down to a few months.

To be honest, I can’t really tell. The story moves so quickly that it feels like no time has passed at all, but when I see Bilbo in Rivendell, I think the full 17 years have elapsed. We just didn’t get any sub-titles saying, “17 years later”. Peter may or may not have intended at some point to say, “Several months later”, but in the end he elected to leave it up to the audience to decide how much time passes.

Nonetheless, when Frodo awakens in Rivendell, Gandalf tells him it’s October 24. Check your book, purists. That is the date Frodo awakens in Rivendell. On the other hand, a lot of the history was altered, and I don’t see why. In fact, a number of specific aspects of Sauron’s character have been radically altered. I can’t see why.

Is that good? I have no idea. I won’t say it’s bad. But it’s a departure from Tolkien. Nonetheless, they did try to keep Sauron in the background, which is what a lot of fans wanted. I think they kept him in the background too much. Well, that was bound to be one of those, “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” things. Sauron’s role in the movie doesn’t break the story, and he does come across (in my humble opinion) as something better than a typical sword-and-sorcery dark-lord knockoff villain.

On the other hand, some of the grandeur of Tolkien’s Dunedain has been lost. But it has been argued by many people that if they were to stop and deliver a history and culture lesson at every point where Tolkien does so, the movie would never get past Bree (Bombadil is big into history, for example).

But I think Aragorn was short-changed. Viggo Mortensen does a wonderful job of playing the character, but, damnitall, he needed more screen time. Strider comes on weak and almost empty early in the story, and he gradually gains the reader’s (and Hobbits’) respect. The movie just throws him into the situation and baddabing baddabam! Strider is Aragorn, the long-lost heir of Isildur.

Of course, short of releasing six three-hour movies, I’m not sure they could have done much about the Strider-to-Aragorn transition without cutting out the rest of the movie. But once again the writers were clever and they altered Strider’s storyline, deferring some key moments until the second or possibly third movie. Hardcore purists will scream, but if the rest of us ignore them, they will quickly become irrelevant.

On the other hand, we are treated to almost the full spectacle of the Black Riders that Tolkien shows us in the book. I can’t think of anything wrong with the scenes themselves, and it’s not worth nitpicking on costume designs, since no two people would come up with the same costumes. But the emphasis on Black Riders in the first half of the movie and the light treatment regarding Aragorn in the second half of the movie leaves me with a sense that balance is not quite right.

The Fellowship of the Ring tells us two stories. One story is about a Hobbit named Frodo who finds himself saddled with a frightful responsibility. The other story is about a mysterious man who offers to help Frodo, and who undertakes his own doubtful journey even as Frodo marches closer to Mordor.

Tolkien’s Aragorn doesn’t need to be shoe-horned into anyone’s society. He has his own clear place in the world, and the reader is carefully given only enough hints about Aragorn’s place to understand that, when Gandalf sacrifices himself, Aragorn is capable of assuming the leadership of the company but his leadership offers no guarantees.

I missed the doubt. Viggo is well-capable of portraying an uncertain Aragorn, and he does in fact do that — but the uncertainty has been relocated to a different part of the story. I was suprised to see that.

To be honest, there were quite a few surprises in the movie. And the only way to pull off those surprises, really, was to alter the story. One can enjoy the moment of recognition when a character speaks a line from another part of the story, or one can lament the departure from Tolkien. Whether switching the dialogue around was cinematically necessary or responsible is an opinion which can wait for another day.

The Fellowship of the Ring sets the stage for the next movie in the classic, accepted mode for opening acts: it raises questions about what is going to happen to certain characters. Because Peter Jackson’s Aragorn doesn’t follow J.R.R. Tolkien’s Aragorn exactly, the audience is left wondering about where or whether all of Tolkien’s Aragorn pieces will fit into Peter Jackson’s puzzle.

This was probably the best decision they could have made. Frodo is almost identical to the literary Frodo. Elijah Wood has the thankless task of keeping up with the audience’s expectations. The only place where he may fail to deliver the goods is in portraying Frodo as a 50-year-old Hobbit in a young Hobbit’s body. It’s hard to say. The movie is so fast-paced that we just don’t get to see enough of Frodo’s bewilderment as things proceed from bad to disastrous for him. So there is really no way that the first movie in the trilogy could anchor audience questions on Frodo.

Orlando Bloom is a bit underused in the movie, which is fair enough. The Legolas-Gimli relationship doesn’t really start to mesh until the middle of the story. But there is a wonderful, classic moment where Legolas reacts to John Rhys-Davies’ Gimli in such a way that the audience could not help but laugh in both full appreciation of the subtle gesture and in anticipation of what must surely lie ahead.

I am glad to say that they did not overutilize the special effects team in giving Legolas his superb skill with the bow. He is fast, he is deadly, he is believable. You just don’t get to see that in a movie Elf. At least, not in any movie Elf I can remember. My only disappointment with Legolas came when someone else delivered a very important Legolas line. I don’t understand why they did that, but it didn’t ruin the movie for me. In fact, it helped to build the other character a little. But I couldn’t avoid thinking the writers had missed an important point regarding Legolas and something else, a point Tolkien covered in one of his letters.

John Rhys-Davies has always been one of my favorite actors. He is such a pleasure to watch on-screen, and after hearing what tribulations he went through during the filming of these movies, I can only respect him more for delivering a fine performance. I don’t think Gimli was really that over-the-top in Tolkien’s mind, but Gimli had the unfortunate (or fortunate) responsibility for laying down some backstory. He plays into several common fan expectations, which will smooth some ruffled feathers, I think, but it may add further fuel to the purists’ bonfire of the profanities.

Merry and Pippin don’t really play important roles in most of the movie, but their final scene is very moving. Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd work well together and I look forward to their storyline in The Two Towers.

Sean Bean’s Boromir, like Viggo’s Aragorn, was short-changed due to compression. I think in this case the writing team understood very clearly they were having to make a hard compromise, and to compensate they altered the storyline once again to give Sean an opportunity to squeeze Boromir’s conflicting priorities and emotions into a very well-written scene. In fact, he had two well-written scenes. But he still needed more screen time to really do Boromir as well as anyone could demand.

When Boromir’s moment of glory came, however, the audience was truly moved. Damn, that was some fine acting. The scene could have been more faithful to the book, and in my opinion it would have been stronger, but Sean and Viggo took what they had and just blew the audience away. It’s not often I’ve seen a theater filled with people cheering as if their home team had just scored a major goal on the field. In fact, I’ve never seen that kind of reaction in a cinema audience. People were sreaming, clapping, cheering.

Peter, you nailed that scene. And even if you didn’t have Ian McKellen and Ian Holm’s fantastic performances to lay down what is virtually the backbone of this first movie, I think most audiences will come out of the theater with the Viggo/Sean scene so strongly impressed in their thoughts they will feel they have been well-served.

And finally, I have to reiterate my complaint about the smoking. It was completely uncalled-for. There is no justification for depicting characters using tobacco in the movies. The affectation was something that Tolkien had no idea was so deadly and dangerous. It is not fair to his audience to endanger future lives by portraying tobacco use as a harmless passtime.

The movie is enjoyable, but if the tobacco use is in there to placate people’s puristic desires, it was not necessary. It adds nothing to the storyline and the characterizations are not dependent upon it. People die from using tobacco products. People suffer greivous harm from using tobacco products. Hollywood needs to understand that it has a responsibility to its audience not to glorify behaviors which are now known to be deadly.

We didn’t see any Hobbits drinking rat-poison or standing in front of freight-trains. No Hobbits put guns to their heads and blew themselves away. We don’t need to see Hobbits, Wizards, and Rangers smoking. I know that I will be attacked and criticized for taking this stand. But I’m just someone who regards human life to be more important than a misguided attempt to be faithful to a book when making a movie.

So, I hope people enjoy the movie. I look forward to seeing it again. But I am saddened to see that such an irresponsible decision was made on a very important issue. For the movie overall, Peter, you get a “Well done”. For the tobacco, you get a “shame on you”.

Cancer is no laughing matter. I hope you never lose any relatives to it. I’ve lost way too many.

This article was first published on December 19, 2001.

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