Three stars. Rated PG-13, for war violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.10.19
Aside from outliers such as Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, most writers lead rather ordinary lives.
And what they do — crafting humble words into mesmerizing stories, generally in isolation — is hardly the stuff of engaging cinema.
 |
| Surrounded by the notes and illutrations that he feverishly sketches while playfully creating entirely new languages, John Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) nonetheless cannot shake the feeling of not really belonging in his highbrow Oxford surroundings. |
That said, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s back-story is more provocative than most.
Director Dome Karukoski’s Tolkien hits the myriad heartbreaking high points of Tolkien’s youth and young adulthood, and star Nicholas Hoult persuasively conveys the curiosity, intelligence, facility with languages, and almost magical gift for storytelling that later would inform his literary career.
David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford’s sensitive script clearly is well-intentioned, and Karukoski’s touch is sincere.
And yet…
The pace is dreadfully slow, and the decision to employ Tolkien’s horrific World War I experiences as a framing device is questionable, to say the least. We’re apparently expected to recognize that this is the devastating Battle of the Somme; context for this portion of the film is utterly absent. Every so often, Karukoski drags us back for another grim interlude, as Tolkien wanders through the body-strewn trenches in a daze, under the watchful gaze of a young private (Craig Roberts) who worries that his companion is about to drop dead.
The apparent point of these sequences is that the disoriented Tolkien — suffering from an acute case of debilitating trench fever — hallucinates the battle carnage into symbolic smoke- and shadow-laden warriors and monsters that later will inform the mythic creatures he concocts for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Well … no.
It’s a clumsy, contrived device that simply becomes tedious as the film proceeds. It’s also superfluous; we’ve already seen that young Tolkien was inspired by his mother, Mabel (Laura Donnelly), who — as a means of distracting her two young sons from their “impecunious” existence — excels at spinning fantastical narrative adventures with the aid of a slowly spinning shadow lamp festooned with magical patterns. This sequence is far more magical — and persuasively credible — than the repeated bounces back to the trenches.
