Tolkien has a lot to live up to. Directed by Dome Karukoski and written by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford, it shows how the titular author, J. R. R. Tolkien, wrote his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Watching the film, it’s impossible not to think of Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning adaptations of Tolkien’s trilogy and while Karukoski’s personal, melancholy film perhaps never stood a chance in living up to that sprawling, epic series, it unfortunately also doesn’t live up to the legend it’s trying to tell.
That legend stars Nicholas Hoult and Harry Gilby, who play Tolkien as an adult and boy, respectively. Born in South Africa and left the ward of a Catholic priest in England after his mother’s death, Tolkien (known as Ronald throughout) and his brother are eventually adopted by a wealthy society woman. With a gift for languages and a keen imagination, Ronald is sent to a boys school where he meets three boys from wealthier families who grow to be his best friends. With a camaraderie that looks suspiciously like that shared by the 4 main hobbits of Tolkien’s Rings Trilogy, the boys seem inseparable—until World War I breaks out.
It’s a compelling set up, but before we dive into how the film squanders that potential, it’s worth examining the ways Tolkien does and doesn’t recall Jackson’s film. Since Tolkien is from Fox Searchlight and Jackson’s trilogy is from New Line Cinema, Karukoski can’t use any of the iconic imagery audiences know so well. While some viewers will never get past that dissonance, Karukoski does his best to deliver a distinct visual take on Tolkien’s concepts. Take the scenes where Tolkien, hallucinating thanks to “trench fever” during the Battle of the Somme, keeps seeing a black-masked figure riding a horse. It’s obviously supposed to be a proto-version of a ring wraith and though it doesn’t look much like the terrifying giants in Jackson’s film, it’s forgivable precisely because we know this is just an idea in Tolkien’s mind, a literalization of the toll the war is taking on his psyche.
That said, while the imagery itself (and Thomas Newman’s score, which recalls Howard Shore’s without actually quoting it) works, as a device, the hallucinations are a bit dicier. That’s unfortunately true of many of the ways the film foreshadows the world Tolkien eventually creates. It’s difficult to describe the exact problem, but it is perhaps best summed up by a sense of inescapable corniness. Every time something happens that feels reminiscent of LOTR, the score swells and the actors feel like they’re winking at the audience. Some will certainly take joy in that self-awareness, but it can take the viewer out of the moment.
Still, while a moment where Tolkien and his friends struggle to name their loyalty to each other before landing on “fellowship” can induce a cringe, there are scenes where Karukoski pulls of that tone. Take the scene where Hoult’s Tolkien and Lily Collins as his future wife, Edith Bratt, go to the opera to see part of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle,” Das Rheingold. Though we expect the scene to contain some moment where watching the opera influences something in the books, that doesn’t quite happen. Unable to get tickets they can afford and underdressed for those they really can’t, they’re forced to sit in an alley behind the opera house and use the props and costumes stored there to act out the music themselves. It’s the kind of scene that could only ever happen on film and while its romance is over-the-top, it works in large part because Collins is so compelling as the willful, driven Edith.
However, the reason Collins can steal that scene and basically any in which she appears is that she’s one of the only actors given anything to do—including Hoult. There is a really meaningful story to be told about the way Tolkien used LOTR to both come to terms with the horrors of WWI and honor the friendships either changed or ended by that war, but by focusing on those experiences rather than drawing a direct line from them to the writing, they end up feeling less meaningful.
By flashing back to Tolkien’s younger years from the war rather than during the writing process years later, Gleeson and Beresford emphasize what’s lost without letting us see the full impact of that loss. We learn through title cards that Tolkien and one of his school friends never have the same relationship after the war, but we don’t understand how that impacts Tolkien emotionally later in life or his writing. We slowly realize that one of Tolkien’s friends is in love with him, but we never see Tolkien realize that or if that played into the way he wrote about concepts of brotherhood in his books. Sure, focusing on the good makes the film a relatively enjoyable experience, but by never showing the sad, messy aftermath, we never fully understand the tragedy of all that was lost.
Though all the elements are there for Tolkien to be great, it just doesn’t deploy them in the right way. By holding the writing of the Lord of the Rings trilogy to the final scenes, it feels like the film ends just as it’s finally beginning. Karukoski may give us the context for what drove Tolkien’s writing, but by expecting the audience to make the connections to that future work rather than drawing them for us onscreen, Gleeson and Beresford rob us of a more emotionally satisfying understanding of that context. Tolkien probably never had a chance to rival the spectacle and meaning of Jackson’s trilogy, but despite strong performances and production, for most, it won’t even serve as a satisfying companion piece.
