To sum up, the movie Tolkien had some good moments but was overall a disappointment. The biggest problem with it is, I think, that it tries to do too much and ends up doing nothing well. The film also makes very weird choices about what to cut out and what to include- for instance, all but ignoring Tolkien's very real faith yet jamming in an entirely speculative gay friend plot point. Ludicrous. There were, in my opinion, several interesting movies which could have been made from this material- for instance, one about Tolkien's Catholicism, how it influenced his outlook and writings, how it came full circle with first his mother being estranged from her family for converting and then his wife, for the same reason. We could have had more of Colm Meaney's Father Francis... heck, we could've maybe even seen how Tolkien helped turn his pal CS Lewis away from atheism. Or they could have made a movie about Tolkien's war experiences without the bizarre fantasy scenes overlaying them: his initial reluctance to join up, his training and assignment to the Lancashire Fusiliers as a signals officer, his growing admiration and respect for the men of the "lower classes" under his command. This could also have shown Edith at home in England, dreading every knock on the door which might be someone bringing news of her husband's death, keeping track of his battalion on a map she kept of the eastern front (Tolkien the language expert developed a code comprised of dots to let Edith know his location in his letters without alerting the censors). It could have shown the horrors of the trenches, the utter destruction of man and nature, and shown how this later influenced not only Tolkien's writings but also his environmentalism and his distaste for rampant industrialization. Alternatively, they could have made a movie about Tolkien the language scholar. Some of the most interesting scenes in the existing film- at the restaurant with Edith, or in discussion with Professor Wright- center around this, and it would have been nice to flesh this out further. This would have been an ideal way to work in his relationship with his three school friends, and how they inspired each others' creativity and scholarship until this was brutally- and, for two of them, fatally- cut short by WW I. This relationship could even be compared/contrasted with Tolkien's later one with the members of the Inklings. Any of these topics could have supported a movie on its own but unfortunately, the filmmakers of Tolkien jammed in pieces of each one, mixed in some utterly fictitious and silly bits, and tried to make it all fit together in a cohesive and interesting way. They did not succeed, and somehow the movie ends up being lesser than the sum of its parts.
The relationship between Tolkien and his love interest/ future wife Edith- as portrayed in the film- works fairly well. This is no doubt partly because time is actually spent developing it, unlike the relationship he has with his friends. There's one scene in particular which works quite well: the one where John and Edith are sitting in a restaurant and Tolkien is describing how he develops an entirely new language. Unfortunately, this scene is also highlighted in every trailer so you kind of know where it's going right from the start. The film strays away from fact in that it has the two still unmarried when Tolkien goes off to war when in fact they were married in 1916, before he was sent to the front. I suppose this was done to increase romantic suspense or something but to my mind, having one's husband gone to war would be far more dramatic than one's intended. Especially a war as brutal and deadly as WW I; certainly Tolkien had no illusions about his probable fate: "Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then... it was like a death." But this is a minor quibble about the movie's accuracy. There is a much larger problem with it... The film all but ignores Tolkien's Catholic faith, which in fact defined his life and influenced every part of it. One reason why Tolkien's mother struggled financially after her husband died was because she converted to Catholicism and her Protestant family withdrew its financial support because of this. Then, after her death, the two Tolkien brothers were put under the guardianship of Catholic priest Father Francis Xavier Morgan, whom Tolkien respected greatly: "He was an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old gossip. He was—and he was not. I first learned charity and forgiveness from him..." Father Francis does appear periodically in the film- played by Colm Meaney!- but really only to tut-tut disapprovingly about Tolkien not concentrating on his studies and about his relationship with Edith. This is yet another underdeveloped character; we see nothing of Father Francis as the spiritual advisor of young JRR, and Meaney is criminally underused. In addition, Edith was a Protestant and this also was the cause of quite a bit of trouble. As a practicing Catholic, Tolkien couldn't marry Edith unless she converted- which she did, albeit somewhat reluctantly by all accounts. Unfortunately, her guardian was pretty anti-catholic and ordered Edith to find somewhere else to live when she became engaged to Tolkien. None of this is in the movie. We get a tantalizing glimpse of Tolkien's tutelage by Joseph Wright, Professor of Philology at Oxford whose book Primer of Gothic Language had been read by a young JRR and helped inspire his fascination with languages. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, Wright only pops up late in the movie, and for a very short time. Yet again, too little, too late. To sum up, the movie Tolkien had some good moments but was overall a disappointment. The biggest problem with it is, I think, that it tries to do too much and ends up doing nothing well. The film also makes very weird choices about what to cut out and what to include- for instance, all but ignoring Tolkien's very real faith yet jamming in an entirely speculative gay friend plot point. Ludicrous. There were, in my opinion, several interesting movies which could have been made from this material- for instance, one about Tolkien's Catholicism, how it influenced his outlook and writings, how it came full circle with first his mother being estranged from her family for converting and then his wife, for the same reason. We could have had more of Colm Meaney's Father Francis... heck, we could've maybe even seen how Tolkien helped turn his pal CS Lewis away from atheism. Or they could have made a movie about Tolkien's war experiences without the bizarre fantasy scenes overlaying them: his initial reluctance to join up, his training and assignment to the Lancashire Fusiliers as a signals officer, his growing admiration and respect for the men of the "lower classes" under his command. This could also have shown Edith at home in England, dreading every knock on the door which might be someone bringing news of her husband's death, keeping track of his battalion on a map she kept of the eastern front (Tolkien the language expert developed a code comprised of dots to let Edith know his location in his letters without alerting the censors). It could have shown the horrors of the trenches, the utter destruction of man and nature, and shown how this later influenced not only Tolkien's writings but also his environmentalism and his distaste for rampant industrialization. Alternatively, they could have made a movie about Tolkien the language scholar. Some of the most interesting scenes in the existing film- at the restaurant with Edith, or in discussion with Professor Wright- center around this, and it would have been nice to flesh this out further. This would have been an ideal way to work in his relationship with his three school friends, and how they inspired each others' creativity and scholarship until this was brutally- and, for two of them, fatally- cut short by WW I. This relationship could even be compared/contrasted with Tolkien's later one with the members of the Inklings. Any of these topics could have supported a movie on its own but unfortunately, the filmmakers of Tolkien jammed in pieces of each one, mixed in some utterly fictitious and silly bits, and tried to make it all fit together in a cohesive and interesting way. They did not succeed, and somehow the movie ends up being lesser than the sum of its parts.
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