(avg. read time: 14–28 mins.)
I know that the 20th anniversary of the film release of Fellowship of the Ring is coming up next week. I do, in fact, have a lengthy—to say the least—review of the Peter Jackson films in terms of their quality as adaptations. But I have decided to hold the release of those for the 20th anniversary of The Return of the King, especially since we have the 10th anniversary of the release of the first Hobbit movie next year. I want the extra time, not just to give you all something to look forward to, but also to make any final additions or alterations to the review on further consideration and further dissection of the special features (yes, I am doing an extended edition of my own review). But as for this year, I wanted to share a review I wrote in 2019 about a film that, unlike the Jackson films, did not make many waves and seems to have largely passed out of the cultural consciousness at this point: the Tolkien biopic.
As soon as I knew this movie was being made, I knew that I was going to see it and that I would write a review on it, despite early grumblings against it and the fact that the Tolkien Estate did not endorse it (which is not because those associated with the estate saw it and did not like it, but they simply wanted to clarify to everyone else that they were not involved in making it, which is their typical practice). I have done in-depth reviews for The Hobbit trilogy and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, so it only makes sense that I would do the same for the first theatrically released biopic on J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of it all. I cannot say that I had any definite expectations for the quality of this movie. I thought the timeframe chosen for this movie was a bit strange, since I knew the movie would end well before we reached any of the parts of Tolkien’s life that directly concern his publications. I insisted that I would not let the early negative opinions influence my expectations out of neutral, since it is quite possible that they were exaggerated outbursts from fans, much as some who love LOTR overstate how those movie adaptations deviated from and degraded the books. As with my reviews of the aforementioned trilogies, I knew that I would need to analyze this movie in such a way that combined considerations of filmmaking with considerations of the source story. There are inevitable challenges when adapting such extensive literary work to a new medium that cannot fully convey that work. By the same token, the makers of Tolkien had to consider how to adapt a much larger story, the life-story of Arda’s sub-creator himself, into a single movie that was less than two hours long.
In general terms, how did they do? My basic view is that the movie as a movie is an unremarkable—and too formulaic—story, at best, for those who do not know anything about Tolkien’s life-story. But it is far too distractingly distorted as a biopic for those who do know something about Tolkien’s life-story. If I were to give it a grade, it would probably be a D(-). It does present plenty of facts about Tolkien’s early life in Hollywoodized fashion (though directed and written by otherwise independent filmmakers) and it serves as a relatively quick introduction to the man in that sense. However, even when it has the facts, it does not have the flavor. Much of the story is lacking in its proper context, the most significant factor of which I save for the end of this analysis, and its emphases are often questionable at best, as the filmmakers pass up other aspects of Tolkien’s life that would have fit well for this big-screen version of the story. As a biography of Tolkien, it is in need of drastic improvement; as a film, it still needs improvement to rise above being a formulaic biopic.
Although it tells a coherent story, provides viewers with genuine facts about Tolkien, and does well in portraying some aspects of his life, it falls short in two essential parts of its implicit thesis. One, the implicit claim that Tolkien’s fantasy emerged from events in his life is only shown in a scattershot fashion and almost exclusively tied to Tolkien’s time in the Somme. It is not a total failure and there are some good ways in which the film anticipates its ending, but this aspect of demonstrating the film’s thesis is distorted and does not take advantage of nearly enough aspects of Tolkien’s life. Two, the implicit claim that this film will show you why you should care about the life of the author of a beloved fantasy world is also not demonstrated. I say this as someone who does care about Tolkien’s life-story, who has read multiple biographical sources on Tolkien (beginning with Humphrey Carpenter’s authorized biography that is still the standard reference, even though he often has issues with properly documenting his sources), who has read his letters, and who has constantly probed his Catholic Christian theology as a means of illuminating his work. However, the movie undermines interest in the life of this extraordinary man who stood out in his own time—much more so in comparison to ours—by telling his story in an utterly formulaic fashion to make him seem more like anyone else in a biopic, save that he knows a lot of languages. As such, the movie cannot properly even hint at the dynamics of Tolkien’s life that made him so different. I will highlight these dynamics as I proceed with this review.
General Observations
As with the other reviews, I want to look at some general features of the movie first before dissecting each scene and aspect of the movie as it progresses. Of course, since this is a biopic and a production with a much smaller budget than the subjects of my other reviews, there are not as many features to note. Unlike in the films about Tolkien’s stories, the setting is not a significant factor. It is generally the Edwardian era and WWI era of England, which is not so distinct a setting to most people that it would not require some subtitles explicitly saying as much. A significant portion of the movie takes place in the trenches of the Somme, which are as serviceable and indistinct here as they are in any other film featuring WWI.
It is always awkward to insert snippets of a war movie into a biopic like they do here. The war scenes inevitably become toned down in their intensity, brutality, and horror. Still, because this is such a central point of the movie, the filmmakers clearly put some thought into how to work around this toning down to convey these horrors of WWI beyond the portrayals that directly link the war with Tolkien’s imagery—which I address in more detail below. The audience witnesses the chaotic charge into no-man’s land, the sudden appearance of flamethrower-wielding enemies spewing flames into the trench, and a pit full of bodies draining blood into a pool at the bottom, which Tolkien sleeps in as he suffers from trench fever. The war scenes are used effectively for this movie, especially in light of the adjustments the filmmakers had to make.
The music, on the other hand, is much less noteworthy. It is a stereotypical soundtrack of whimsy that represents an odd mixture of A Beautiful Mind and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It fits the mold of making this biopic more generic. The one exception is the music taken from Wagner’s “Ring” in the scene where it is necessitated. It is but a hint of what might have been. Given the connections this movie tries to make with imagery the audience would recognize from Tolkien’s stories—mainly due to the movies—one might wonder why the movie does not also make some subtle musical connections. It does not need to match Howard Shore’s epic score, nor does it need to be bombastic, but maybe featuring more of the horn-based soundtrack from LOTR at key points would help or perhaps the strings- and flute-based Shire soundtrack in nature scenes. You know, it could help to have something to set this movie apart from other biopics.
One thing that does perhaps set this movie apart as a biopic is that it is way too short. There is no standard biopic length, but when you consider movies like Malcolm X, Gandhi, or Patton, all of which are near or over three hours long, one wonders why a writer of epic fantasy has his life-story told in under two hours (more like about 105 minutes pre-epilogue and credits). This movie need not have been as long as the aforementioned examples, but it is not unusual for a biopic to be in the neighborhood of 150 minutes (though an award-winning biopic like A Beautiful Mind could be as short as 135 or so). The length really depends on what the filmmakers are trying to accomplish, but even for a fairly unambitious project like Tolkien, a movie that does not even come close to covering half of Tolkien’s life (except by skipping over the chunk between WWI and the start of The Hobbit), it seems like a length at least comparable to A Beautiful Mind would have been justifiable. When one considers how long the adaptations of Tolkien’s work have been, I think audiences would have understood something closer to the two-and-a-half-hour mark at least.
Otherwise, my general observations concern the cast. There are plenty of minor characters that pop into the movie for a time (the headmaster, the professor, Sam, and so on), but I will be restricting my analysis to the following: J. R. R. Tolkien, Mabel Tolkien (I do not recall his mother’s name being used in the movie, though), Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan, the members of the T.C.B.S. (Geoffrey Smith, Christopher Wiseman, and Robert Gilson), and Edith Bratt Tolkien. Although the movie features Tolkien’s younger brother, Hilary, he is quite non-descript. To be fair, Tolkien biographies generally do not say much about Hilary in any case, so it is not surprising that he is practically a non-entity in this movie. I appreciate that the filmmakers did not try to get too speculative about their relationship, but when they leave out what we do know, it unfortunately subtracts from Tolkien’s character as well. For example, John Ronald and Hilary would serve the Mass at their Oratory as they were taught to be strict observers of their religious services (Letter #306, October 1968). When they were kids, John Ronald would also make up stories for his little brother about ogres based on the adults in Sarehole (as shown in Black & White Ogre Country). The two were close and would remain so, keeping in touch with each other through correspondence as their lives took them their separate ways. As much as John Ronald is known for his love of the natural world, his brother was more grounded in it, being a farmer and gardener for most of his life. Each of these aspects has significance for how the movie portrays Tolkien and so I will return to them below.
Nicholas Hoult plays John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Hoult presents a fairly close likeness to the young Tolkien, probably as close as any other recognizable actor (I doubt this is a role they wanted to give to a new guy), even though we do not see much of his character’s distinctive pipe. (On the other hand, Harry Gilby, who plays the pre-teen Tolkien, does not have as close a resemblance.) Any problems I have with Tolkien’s portrayal in this movie have nothing to do with Hoult’s performance. He does what he can with the script that he is given; it is that script that is the problem. He is pensive (often to the point of being lost in his own thoughts), a passionate, bookish student, an introvert with a small circle of friends, charming, and he has a clear love for stories. These characteristics are not entirely inaccurate, but this is all quite superficial; we never get a real sense of what motivates and animates Tolkien. There is too much dissonance and too few factors of his character included (we see virtually nothing of Tolkien’s humor, for instance). The movie does not show some of Tolkien’s more obsessively perfectionistic writing tendencies, his strong self-criticism and self-doubt, or how he put his linguistic and writing skills to use in a variety of ways before he ever published The Hobbit, which included the infinitely revised stories that would become The Silmarillion, his academic writing (including a revolutionary lecture/essay on Beowulf that grew out of his own translation and commentary on the text), the stories he would tell his children, and the letters he would write to them from Father Christmas. True, much of this type of portrayal would have taken the movie beyond its temporal scope, but it could have hinted at it, instead of implying that he had hit a dry spell before he got the inspiration for The Hobbit from thinking back on his own life with Edith and the T.C.B.S. (though surely this would make more sense as a connection to LOTR, if this is the route they wanted to go). We also do not see any real indication of Tolkien’s love for the natural world and how he pushed back against the industrializing tendencies of modernity. We do not see Tolkien’s Hobbit-like characteristics that would give him such sympathy for this race of his (e.g., Letter #213). Nor do we see some of his most important relationships properly developed in this story. The most important and devastating omission from the movie is something that I save for the last part to address.
Tolkien’s mother, Mabel (née Suffield, played by Laura Donnelly), is actually a minor character in the context of the movie, but I would be remiss not to comment on her. Mabel has a minimal presence in the movie and Tolkien does not often reflect about her. This is a huge disconnect with Tolkien’s real life because he positively revered his mother as a martyr for the Catholic faith. After the death of Arthur Tolkien in South Africa in 1896, when Tolkien was only four years old, Mabel stayed with her sons in Birmingham and in the surrounding area for the rest of her life, near her own family’s home. By 1900, she had become a Roman Catholic (after her initial participation in the Anglican Church), much to the objection of the Suffields (who were mostly Methodists) and of her in-laws, the Tolkiens (who were mostly Baptists). Such was the antagonism towards the Catholic Church that the Suffields never kicked up as much of a fuss about her father being a Unitarian. But Mabel persevered in her Catholicism and instilled this faith in her sons, with the help of Fr. Morgan and others. When she died from diabetes, and, as Tolkien insisted, the distress from being cut off by the rest of her family for her Catholic faith, her legacy solidified Tolkien’s own devotion to Catholicism. Combined with his father’s death, it is unsurprising that the orphan Tolkien was driven to creative pursuits. Many of the most renowned authors in history are people who lost one or both of their parents (whether to death or abandonment) in childhood. Unfortunately, this aspect of Tolkien’s life is simply presented matter-of-factly and never truly explored for its significance, not even by means of his connection to his mother (who he at least knew better than he did his father). There is a sort of half-hearted attempt to link Tolkien’s love of fairy stories and mythology with his mother, but I will get to that later. For now, it is sufficient to note that Tolkien’s connection to his mother was a prime area for exploration and Tolkien himself—not to mention his biographers—often reflected on his mother, but the film does an absolute disservice to this aspect of his life. Considering how essential it was to his development as a person and as a literary artist, I think this was a true failure on the part of the film.
Speaking of failures, let’s talk about the movie’s treatment of Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan, played by Colm Meaney. On a more subjective level, I am incredibly disappointed as a Star Trek fan that the movie cast Colm Meaney—most famous for his role as Miles O’Brien—in what should have been a major role and then put him in three short scenes. But that is neither here nor there in terms of the quality of the movie itself. The problem for the movie is that it took the character of Fr. Morgan and only put him in three short scenes. One never gets the sense of him as Tolkien’s father figure—the one he knew better—and the profound impact he had on him. It was not for nothing that Tolkien named his first son John Francis Tolkien. In the movie, he is like a distant guardian figure who shows up only to get the orphaned Tolkiens into lodging, to tell Tolkien he cannot see Edith anymore until he is 21, and to visit with Tolkien after he returns from the Somme. If someone only knew Fr. Morgan from this movie, one could never understand why Tolkien said of him in Letter #267 (written to his son Michael in 1965):
I have met snuffy, stupid, undutiful, conceited, ignorant, hypocritical, lazy, tipsy, hardhearted, cynical, mean, grasping, vulgar, snobbish, and even (at a guess) immoral priests ‘in the course of my peregrinations’; but for me one Fr. Francis outweighs them all, and he was an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old snob and gossip. He was – and he was not. I first learned charity and forgiveness from him; and in the light of it pierced even the ‘liberal’ darkness out of which I came, knowing more about ‘Bloody Mary’ than the Mother of Jesus – who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists.
Likewise, as Tolkien reflected on the griefs he had experienced in his life in 1972 (in Letter #332 also written to Michael Tolkien) after the recent death of his wife, he says of Fr. Morgan, “I remember after the death of Fr Francis my ‘second father’ (at 77 in 1934), saying to C. S. Lewis: ‘I feel like a lost survivor into a new alien world after the real world has passed away.’” When his role in the movie is purely functional, we miss any such depth of feeling. His parents and parental figures are made less important for this story than his friends and that seems radically out of keeping with how Tolkien thought of his own life and the clear influence they had. What we get of Fr. Morgan is not entirely out of keeping with this characterization; he is caring, kind, compassionate, firm but not harsh, and they even remembered his love for the pipe (which they could have visually signaled as influencing Tolkien’s own habit later in life as some small token of his effect). But it is all superficial. He shows characteristics of a generically beneficent person, but these are never glimpsed in actual parenting, teaching, discipline, or in Tolkien’s respectful and grateful interaction with him. He is here because he has to be, not because the film aims to show us how he shaped Tolkien’s life beyond getting him to a certain place or being an obstacle to the love story. If this movie aims to tell the story of Tolkien and to help its audience know him, then this is yet another area in which its failure is quite drastic.
In contrast to these characters who needed more focus in a story about Tolkien, we have Tolkien’s closest friends of his early years: the members of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (T.C.B.S.). I will address the concept of the group as a whole later, but for now I want to comment on the individual members besides Tolkien. The filmmakers made some … interesting decisions in the portrayal of these characters, to say the least. One of the core members of this group—Vincent Trought—is nowhere to be seen. I am not sure if the filmmakers only wanted to simplify the story of the T.C.B.S., since Trought died of illness at Oxford two years before WWI, but it could have added to the story of Tolkien’s frequent experience of loss.
Christopher Wiseman (played by Ty Tennant [young] and Tom-Glynn Carney) was the first of Tolkien’s friends in this group, but he is portrayed as the one Tolkien has the most antagonism towards. Wiseman was a musician and the filmmakers show this common interest with Edith, Tolkien’s lover, and made some not-so-subtle hints of jealousy developing between these two young men over Edith. There is no indication that this affair was an actual matter of history; it is purely manufactured conflict on the part of the filmmakers to lead up to … a punch from Tolkien followed by a quick apology that cleared the air between the two. It is mentioned in the epilogue that these two were lifelong friends, but could anyone have gotten that impression from watching the movie? Could anyone have realized why Tolkien would name his youngest son—and literary executor—after Wiseman? There was enough trouble in Tolkien’s life that they did not need to manufacture this conflict between friends (and honestly not have their relationship be much more than that), except to paint the numbered space for a formulaic biopic in which friends have a falling out and maybe say things that they do not really mean. A further problem is just how half-hearted it is. Even as the movie does not commit to an accurate portrayal of their relationship, it does not fully commit to them being antagonistic; it only bubbles up every now and then. It is almost as if the movie would have been served better by dropping this part altogether.
Instead, the part of Tolkien’s first real friend and inductor into the group that would become the T.C.B.S. falls to Geoffrey Smith (played by Adam Bregman [young] and Anthony Boyle), who was actually younger than the rest of the group (almost three years younger than Tolkien). Smith is portrayed as the warmest, friendliest, and most sensitive of the group. Although they were all encouraged to write poetry—a point not referenced in the movie—it became a distinctive part of Smith’s legacy, not least due to his death at 22 in WWI. In actuality, Tolkien and Smith did not become so close until after Trought’s death. Smith had also enrolled at Oxford with Tolkien, unlike the other members of the T.C.B.S., who had gone to Cambridge (as the film accurately notes). On the one hand, the emphasis placed on their relationship comes as a result of the movie trying to juggle too many things at once as part of a movie that should have been longer, and they needed to set up a part near the end of the movie in which Tolkien convinces Smith’s mother to publish his poetry (despite his parents’ earlier objections to his artistic pursuits). On the other hand, given that they chose to include this aspect of Tolkien’s life in the movie, it makes sense that the filmmakers would work to set up the significance of this relationship from early in the story, earlier than it would be if they had been aiming to tell a more accurate story. This focus also helps the impact of Smith’s words in the form of a letter to Tolkien, words which portended his devotion to the mythology of Arda from 1917 until his death in 1973. This relationship could have been preserved and not been so almost exclusively central to the story if the movie had more time. As it is, the time distribution for Wiseman and Smith is presented as a zero-sum game in which time spent on Smith’s relationship to Tolkien is almost necessarily time spent apart from Wiseman’s relationship to Tolkien.
The last member to discuss is Robert Gilson (played by Albie Marber [young] and Patrick Gibson). Although it is never given much attention in the movie, Gilson is the visual artist of the group, given to drawing, designs, painting, and so on. He is presented as the most daring and silliest of the group, one with an overwhelming interest in and desire to capture the attention of women. He is also the only one besides Tolkien who gets something of his own subplot in which he is directly involved (I say “something of” because it only appears in two scenes; Smith does get a subplot, but he is not actually present in it, since it involves his mother and Tolkien). His characterization makes sense as the son of King Edward’s headmaster, constantly pressured to live, behave, and perform in school by his father’s strict standards. Of all of Tolkien’s friends, he is the most distinct as a character, and yet the movie does not mark his death with any distinction. He is simply mentioned as having died at the same time we get the confirmation that Smith died. This is all the more a shame because one of Tolkien’s earliest letters (Letter #5, August 1916) was written in response to his death and in conversation with the surviving members of the T.C.B.S. (at the time). We can see from this letter that the pain he experienced in losing one of his dearest friends also caused him to become introspective about the T.C.B.S. and what it means now that one of its members has died:
His greatness is in other words now a personal matter with us – of a kind to make us keep July 1st as a special day for all the years God may grant to any of us – but only touches the TCBS on that precise side which perhaps – it is possible – was the only one that Rob really felt – ‘Friendship to the Nth power’. What I meant, and thought Chris meant, and am almost sure you meant, was that the TCBS had been granted some spark of fire – certainly as a body if not singly – that was destined to kindle a new light, or, what is the same thing, rekindle an old light in the world; that the TCBS was destined to testify for God and Truth in a more direct way even than by laying down its several lives in this war (which is for all the evil of our own side with large view good against evil).
So far my chief impression is that something has gone crack. I feel just the same to both of you — nearer if anything and very much in need of you — I am hungry and lonely of course – but I don't feel a member of a little complete body now. I honestly feel that the TCBS has ended – but I am not at all sure that it is not an unreliable feeling that will vanish – like magic perhaps when we come together again. Still I feel a mere individual at present — with intense feelings more than ideas but very powerless.
Of course the TCBS may have been all we dreamt — and its work in the end be done by three or two or one survivor and the part of the others be trusted by God to that of the inspiration which we do know we all got and get from one another. To this I now pin my hopes, and pray God that the people chosen to carry on the TCBS may be no fewer than we three.
Obviously, the film would not have needed to include this entire letter, but some condensed expression of it could have made for a powerful scene. It would also make the contrast with Smith’s words to Tolkien all the more impactful. As it is, we only hear of his death. We see no one else’s reaction to it, which represents a missed opportunity for bringing Gilson’s subplot to a proper conclusion with his headmaster father’s reaction to his death.
Finally, we must address Edith Mary Tolkien (née Bratt; played by Mimi Keene [young] and Lily Collins). Like Hoult with John Ronald, Collins fairly well approximates Edith’s appearance, but for all the changes and additions to her character, I am afraid that she does not have nearly enough material to work with. Edith was indeed an accomplished pianist and she and Tolkien bonded over their artistic personalities and their shared experience of being orphans. After her death, Tolkien would reflect in a letter to his son Christopher (Letter #340, July 1972) on aspects of their relationship that he could never properly express in biographical format:
it is against my nature, which expresses itself about things deepest felt in tales and myths — someone close in heart to me should know something about things that records do not record: the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another, but could not wholly heal the wounds that later often proved disabling; the sufferings that we endured after our love began – all of which (over and above our personal weaknesses) might help to make pardonable, or understandable, the lapses and darknesses which at times marred our lives — and to explain how these never touched our depths nor dimmed our memories of our youthful love. For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade, and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.
The woodland glade that Tolkien references is from a time he relates earlier in the letter. He notes that he never called Edith Lúthien, the most prominent woman in Tolkien’s mythology and an Elf-maiden who gave up her immortality for her love for the mortal man Beren. Their story together began in a scene in which their fates were forever intertwined as he witnessed the most beautiful of all of God’s children singing and dancing in a glade:
but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance.
It is a crying shame that this scene was never adapted to the film, that we never saw Lúthien represented as Edith in Tolkien’s conception of the story of Beren and Lúthien.
Edith’s relationship with Tolkien, like Lúthien’s with Beren, faced obstacles, and this is somewhat reflected in the movie, but we never truly glimpse the dedication, loyalty, and fortitude in Edith’s character in response to these challenges. As Edith renewed her relationship with Tolkien and called off her existing engagement to George Field, she faced a social rupture with her previous life, which only worsened as Tolkien convinced her to move to Catholicism from her Anglican church in which she participated quite actively. This process deepened Tolkien’s admiration for her, given his reverent memories for his mother who faced similar problems—but it also soured Edith’s affections for Catholicism even as she was converting. This fact caused some friction in their marriage for a couple of decades as her participation in their local Catholic congregation declined and she vocalized her problems with Tolkien taking the children to confession and Mass. One wonders if her disposition might have been different if Tolkien had not pressured her to convert before she felt that it was the right time or if he had interacted with her objections more like he did with C. S. Lewis’s objections (for the latter, he better explained his reasoning and rationale for his beliefs, but for the former he was more prone to emotional reactions and expressing his emotional attachment, not least because of his mother’s legacy and the parallels he saw with Edith’s struggles).
She would also be frustrated by the fact that she was more extroverted, but she had no interest in Tolkien’s academic environment, in which he had the majority of his interactions. She was often isolated, not by any explicit desire of Tolkien’s, but mostly by his negligence for her socializing needs beyond his own company and their family (although it is notable that she would become friends with Lewis’s wife, Joy). Times could be rough for them, but they persevered and reconciled their differences as Edith grew in her involvement and practice of Catholicism—even if she may not have been as active in it as Tolkien—and Tolkien became more attentive to her needs to socialize, hence why they had a home in the bustling Bournemouth in Tolkien’s retirement (and despite Tolkien’s personal displeasure with the location).
In any case, their affections for each other were never in doubt (Humphrey Carpenter’s biography notes their concern for each other’s health, the care they would put into their gifts for one another, and Tolkien’s greater attentiveness to the life that he knew Edith wanted combined with Edith’s pride in her husband’s authorial fame), nor was their deep love for the family they had made together. This kind of real life-story gives us a view of the deep character we never really got to see in the movie, even if they do convey some facts accurately. But I have to save the details of this point for my point-by-point analysis next time.