Tolkien Bio-pic

[Rhun charioteer]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

I have to wonder, though, how much of that shadow is Tolkien's, and what part Peter Jackson's.

The Jackson movies would not exist if not for the source material. Even people who haven't read the books if they are even marginally aware of the movies they enjoy know that Tolkien was the author. Thus even the movies ultimately owe their clout to Tolkien because without him they could not exist.

Also the studio has responded to the estate's disavowal. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.gam.../1100-6466429/

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I think people often forget that, although he wasn't the first or only fantasy author of the early twentieth century, it was Tolkien who launched the genre into the stratosphere. He's so pervasive that it's almost impossible now to conceive of the classic fantasy races in any terms other than his. You could argue that without him there would be no D&D, no sword and sorcery films, no fantasy culture as we know it. It's even possible that he has led more people to serious medieval studies than any other academic of his generation, and he certainly showed the way to anyone who wanted to use European mythology in fiction.

In short, he casts a long shadow. He's so much a part of the cultural landscape that people mistake Tolkien's inventions for tradition, or quote him without realising it. I think Peter Jackson owes him for more than some story ideas: he only had an audience, or even a subculture to join, because - in a rare move for him - Tolkien actually finished his Hobbit sequel. Those films are almost Tolkien eating himself, because so much that they take for granted was invented, revived or re-imagined by Tolkien, and much of the popular culture they draw on was influenced by his work. The shadow is his, and the films are just a finger of it.

As for the biopic: it will be what those are. It will give you a few highlights and greatest hits, interspersed with conjecture and narrative licence. I'm not planning to watch it until it appears in the Christmas schedule, when I'll be filling up the corners and not paying much attention anyway.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

I really can't blame Christopher for not wanting to give his seal of approval to a fictionalized biopic of his own parents, one which almost certainly is going to get almost everything from their appearance to their speech to their mannerisms to their personalities, wrong.

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

I really can't blame Christopher for not wanting to give his seal of approval to a fictionalized biopic of his own parents, one which almost certainly is going to get almost everything from their appearance to their speech to their mannerisms to their personalities, wrong.

No. Tolkien expressed disdain for the prospect of being "an object of fiction while still alive", but I don't think he'd have been all right with it ante mortem either.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Well, I've seen it. It's a pretty thing, but very slight. Lovely sets and costumes, competently acted (except by Jacobi, who phoned it in)... but really pretty empty. Most significant, I think, isn't really whether or not this incident or that was "real" but rather that the film gave us absolutely nothing of Tolkien as a person or as a mind. We have Nicholas Houton doing a reasonable job playing a man to whom the same life-events happened as happened to Tolkien- but it isn't Tolkien, and that goes beyond looking nothing at all like him (why for the love of God couldn't they at least put a mustache on him for the wartime bits?), but extends to not speaking or thinking like him (or much like anyone at all; the character is written as a cipher). The man we know from his letters, his essays, from anecdotes by those who knew him- he simply isn't there. Instead we have an earnest young man who can recite bits of texts in dead languages and who really likes his chums.

Even where the film makes an attempt to link up its ostensible subject to his writing, it gets it wrong. The discussions of sound and meaning with Edith and then with Wright* completely misrepresent Tolkien's own clearly expressed views, which were themselves heavily dependent on comparative philology as it was understood in his day: languages need peoples to speak them, because the history of a language is inseparable from the history of its speakers. The proto-Silmarillion, already during WW1 (something which the movie denies ever occurred!), could I think be fairly said to be Tolkien answering the question, "How did Eldarissa and Goldogrin come to be different?"

--
The battlefield scenes were palpable nonsense (as almost always in the movies). Cavalry? Seriously? Charging across no-man's land into machine guns? That lesson was learned the hard way in August 1914 and wasn't repeated.** For that matter, if a bunch of Tommies was going over the top, then the entirety of Tolkien's journey along the trenchline would have been thunderously drowned out by the preparatory bombardment, which by 1916 doctrine would have gone on for days.

(Incidentally, Smith was killed well after JRRT had already been invalided home, and it happened behind the lines as he was organising a football match. CL Wiseman did not as the movie suggests suffer from "shell shock" or PTSD, since aside from being present but not engaged at Jutland, he spend the war at anchor in Scapa Flow, or conducting event-free patrols)

________________________
*The writers apparently have no clue how academics work at Oxford, either: professors then and now don't have "classes" in the American sense; and Tolkien would have had no "grades" at all until Trinity (spring) term of his second year, after taking Honour Moderations.

**During the opening phases of the Somme the British maintained a cavalry force well in the rear in reserve, anticipating a breakthrough that never happened; by October it had been dispersed. There was no German cavalry at all in France at the time, since there was no use for it.

[Inziladun]

Thanks for that, WCH.

I have not seen it. I honestly forgot about it, as a lot of RL stuff has been going on the past few months. I wasn't all that enthused about it anyway, obviously.

I wasn't expecting any real insight into the man, that I didn't already possess. I thought style over substance would be the direction, and the main effort toward reflecting a Tolkien that would fit in with the recent LOTR and Hobbit films.

I am curious as to how Catholicism was treated. Was there any mention Tolkien's stance on "dramatisation" of his works?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Catholicism was basically omitted entirely. I'm not entirely sure if it even pointed out that Fr Francis was RC and not Anglican. As to Tolkien's stance on 'dramatisation' - well, the film ends in 1916 but for a flash-forward epilogue ca 1930, so it's not an issue. But the film basically doesn't present Tolkien's stance on anything.