Tolkien

Much like the British Prime Min­is­ter and her bat­tle-scarred Brex­it deal, Hol­ly­wood appears deter­mined to make a cer­tain breed of lit­er­ary biopic hap­pen. No one asked for either, no one’s going to cham­pi­on either, but here they are again regardless.

It speaks to the lack of col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion that in less than 12 recent months, we had two mounds of Pooh to con­tend with, and just like the May deal on its sec­ond attempt, summer’s Christo­pher Robin was last autumn’s Good­bye Christo­pher Robin wear­ing a fake mous­tache. Nei­ther made any mon­ey, and both swift­ly joined the likes of Find­ing Nev­er­land in the box labelled ​‘sup­pressed’ held in the library of film­go­ing subconscious.

To be fair to mul­ti­ple offend­er Marc Forster, his afore­men­tioned JM Bar­rie biopic made some seri­ous bunce, enough per­haps to makes the likes of Fox (pre­sum­ably green with envy at Amazon’s $250m deal with the Tolkien estate) hope­ful that audi­ences aren’t yet bored of the rings.

You prob­a­bly don’t need us to tell you that Tolkien fol­lows the well-worn path of the lit­er­ary biopic, stead­fast in its refusal to even con­sid­er the sep­a­ra­tion of art from artist. It’s in the nature of the ungain­ly beast to forge a ten­u­ous link between flights of imag­i­na­tion and lived expe­ri­ence, some­thing JRR Tolkien him­self knew all too well, insis­tent­ly resist­ing alle­gor­i­cal read­ings of his work, not least when it came to the ques­tion of war.

There’s an awk­ward irony to these films osten­si­bly about the pow­er of imag­i­na­tion that come with their fail­ures of imag­i­na­tion inher­ent­ly built-in, seem­ing­ly unable to trust the very thing they’re sup­posed to be cel­e­brat­ing. As Tolkien would have it, for exam­ple, one of the most esteemed stu­dents of lan­guage and mythol­o­gy need­ed to be blast­ed with a flamethrow­er in the Somme to pic­ture a drag­on in his mind’s eye.

Who knows, per­haps there is some­one some­where who, on fin­ish­ing Tolkien’s mag­num opus, won­dered how a writer could pos­si­bly have come up with, like, so many ideas. It’s been assumed that said read­er is prob­a­bly unin­ter­est­ed in the philo­log­i­cal his­to­ry of hero­ic verse and mythol­o­gy that Tolkien made his life’s work, and that it’d just be eas­i­er for every­one involved to set out the notion that war is bad and Sauron is bad, so war might as well equal Sauron.

As direct­ed by Tom of Fin­land​’s Dome Karukos­ki, Tolkien car­ries its bland hand­some­ness about as well as you’d expect from a C‑list pres­tige pic. Bio­graph­i­cal details are tidi­ly trot­ted out across two long hours, from the writer’s ear­ly orphan­age to his Birm­ing­ham child­hood; his (facepalm) ​“fel­low­ship” of pals and accep­tance into Oxford, before the com­ing of war. An unex­pect­ed jour­ney this ain’t.

I’m sure that the cen­tral romance is of great sen­ti­men­tal val­ue to the descen­dants of the Tolkien estate, and that to some degree the loss of his friends to war did inform the notion of friend­ship in his work, but such facile reduc­tivism hard­ly makes for great dra­ma up on the big screen. If you real­ly want to bet­ter under­stand the life of a man whose life was his work, you’ll only find it in his life’s work itself, not in this clum­sy attempt to define its inspiration.