C7A said:
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This idea of treating PJ's Frodo as fanfiction also led me to another realization. One way I might comfortably look at the movie Frodo is to think of him as being about 21 years old, rather than 33. This is when Bilbo first adopted Frodo and brought him from Buckland to the Shire. He is the less secure young man, who has grown up largely "on his own" in the great hall of the Brandybucks (tons of relatives there, but no one special person) and still, I suspect, feels the loss of his parents.
I actually see Bilbo as incredibly important in Frodo's life, teaching him and helping him to mature in his 'tweens, an age which hobbits viewed as being a particularly critical and unpredictable time. In our focus on Frodo's friendship with Sam which is depicted with such insight in LotR, we often lose sight of Tolkien's view that Bilbo was actually the hobbit whom Frodo most longed to be with. To me, the movie Frodo with his fears and immaturities, his lack of spiritual awakening, might be more relevent to the time when he first came to Bilbo and Hobbiton
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This would also mathc up with the way Jackson didn't allow the time to pass between the Party and Frodo's departure. In the movie, it seems like only a few weeks pass between the two events, so in the movie, Frodo is 17 years younger than in the book. Since he didn't have this time to mature, it's understandable that Elijah Wood would play him at his own age (20), which is probably about the equivalent of a Hobbit's 33.