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THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (Go, whether you know Tolkien or not)
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With all the hype, anyone considering FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING must be wondering, do you need credentials to enjoy this movie? Who is the right audience for this film? As a public service, on Christmas Eve one Tolkien expert (I, who have read the books carefully enough to quarrel with Tolkien's plot and storytelling decisions) and one Tolkien neophyte (the Boss, who could not have told a hobbit from an uruk-hai) saw it. Both fen and mundanes will love it -- fen for its fidelity to the vision, mundanes for the story in its own right.
As part of a conscious trilogy of long movies adapted from a painstakingly realized trilogy of long novels, FELLOWSHIP is texturally different from almost any other movie I can remember because it knows from the opening voiceover that its tale will be nine hours' long. What other film would with stately orotund feminine tones offer a ten-minute info dump to tell the newcomer everything she needs to understand what happens onscreen and integrate new information and new characters as they arrive? With this uncredited, untitled, uncharactered visual and auditory sweep, the movie establishes that it will operate on a vast scale -- the whole world of Middle Earth.
Though Tolkien had distinguished predecessors -- E. R. Eddison and Lord Dunsany first among them -- in literary terms Lord of the Rings was the Ur that legitimized the adult fantasy. His tale, which "grew in the telling" as he wrote afterwards, benefited enormously from fellow-writer critiques (Tolkien was in the 1930's Inklings workshop with among others C S Lewis and Virginia Woolf). A professor of languages and lover of Celtic lore, Tolkien liked nothing better than to stop his story cold for a drinking song or historical poem, all of them lovingly rendered in the books and thankfully dropped from the film. Meanwhile, he wrote as an adult, for readers who were adults, about characters who are adults, not children in elf suits. So he dramatized the full range of adult emotions (except sex, which in true pre-Raphaelite fashion is never staged, and indeed there are virtually no children anywhere in the novels). Focus characters die, and die horribly. The others grieve for them and are allowed their grief, it is not glossed over (although the subhuman orcs are slaughtered by the bucketload … and wait for the next two movies for orc-baths).
After Tolkien, a generation of baby boomer auteurs devoured Middle Earth for inspiration and, as Tolkien had cleverly distilled and reworked the mythic tropes of Christianity, the Arthurian story, and Celtic legend, his filmic successors picked over the traces (such as George Lucas for STAR WARS; younger viewers will doubtless gripe about Tolkien stealing plot points from Lucas.…)
For the first eighty minutes, this movie is nigh unto perfect. Floods, fireworks, spells, and wizard's towers are all shown in precise mesmerizing detail. Hobbiton, on which Tolkien lavished so many words of description, is nailed. The elves, a difficult race to portray, are right on, willowy but in no way fey, diffident, or weak. The Nazgul black riders are outstanding: real and unreal and terrifying. This movie is not for children.
Characters march onstage and define themselves. Perfectly cast, and delivering lovely performances that do not overfill their characters, are Gandalf (Ian McKellen), Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm), Aragorn the Ranger (Viggo Mortenson), and Galadriel (Cate Blanchett reprising her Elizabethan ice queen in shimmering samite). And director Peter Jackson uses technology to wise effect -- to make his hobbits three feet tall, he gives them carefully cut clothes and then blue-screens their encounters with other characters to make them appear smaller, and he body-doubles the dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies, unrecognizable except for that church-organ voice) for a similar purpose.
Fans treat Tolkien as they would Shakespeare or Holy Writ, so changes will be endlessly scrutinized. Like Shakespeare, Tolkien can be cut, and Jackson was judicious in his choices (few will miss Tom Bombadil or the local Shire bullies, but I would have liked to see Radagast the Brown) -- but Jackson also simplified the story in ways that damage it. Backstory about Aragorn presented early as audience grab bars would have been better saved for later episodes. As Saruman, Christopher Lee snarls so hideously that we lose all trace of the wily mage who thought he could tussle with Sauron and emerge victorious. Liv Tyler is ferociously miscast as fightin' Arwen Evenstar, a performance and role -- Tolkien women blush and cast down their eyes, they don't lob scimitars at Ringwraiths -- that will spin the author's coffin. Huge Weaving's Elrond is a hard-charging board chairman rather than a seer older and wiser than even Gandalf.
By far the film's best acting is done by Sean Bean, who as Boromir wonderfully portrays Tolkien's most complicated, conflicted character. If his role were not so short, he would be a candidate for the Best Supporting Actor nomination that will probably go to McKellen (who, though fine, in fact shows little of his range).
We saw FELLOWSHIP in a cavernous new 650-seat theater, the ideal venue to appreciate its exquisite scenery (both real and computer-generated) and breathtaking, transporting high-quality sound (arrows whiz through four speakers before hitting their targets). The story will be harder to show in its next two installments -- Tolkien's action bounces around among locales and there will be an extraordinary amount of running around and orc-bashing -- but we have our next two Christmas Eve movies and venues already booked.
You have to go see this movie.
P. S. Before FELLOWSHIP, we were treated to wide-screen previews. Judging by the offerings: