Tolkien. Directed by Dome Karukoski. Written by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford. Chernin Entertainment and Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2019. Starring Nicholas Hoult and Lily Collins.
The Tolkien biopic will have the fortune of a cult: those films that we will ask ourselves why it is not made compulsory to watch them according to school programs, and instead they only arrived at the local film club and the summer festival “Dancing Under the Stars.” A bit like The Orchid Thief or Waking Life, for those who know the films.
The film was fought on several fronts: first the excommunication from the J.R.R. Tolkien Estate, then the apostasy of the greatest expert John Garth on the period in question in Tolkien’s life, youth, reviews oscillating between enthusiasm and disappointment, finally the barbarian treatment reserved for the film in Italy, a delay of four months to see it only at the Cinemattina of Grovignano sul Pardigo, the only show at 5 a.m., room at risk of falling plaster.
In this apocalyptic scenario, which in its own way “helps” in making the experience unusual, what do you draw from the vision?
A well-rounded film, which does not leave out any aspect of the writer’s life, unlike what some critics suppose.
Moreover, in doing so, it is fun, managing an enjoyable vision even for the layman (who do not know it exists, oh well, but this does not depend on the director).
Between the marvelous vision of Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) crying drunk in Gothic in an Oxford courtyard and the famous (certainly) scene of the lumps in the hats, the smile leaves the viewer only on the trenches of a Somme deliberately reminiscent of Smaug’s lair … Where, however, in plain sight, and in defiance of the parlor inquisitors, stands a crucifix as eloquent as a Hobbit in Bree.
The romance with Edith (Lily Collins) works so well that it leaves Lúthien’s dance as mere suggestion, an almost minimalist touch of taste that seems to me to connect to the calm and muffled, snowy soul of Finnish director Dome Karukosky.
The TCBS is reminiscent of Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, but in a discreet and not slavish way, the air is perceived, but not so much as to clash with historical reality in fictional contexts per se (which Garth seems to ignore).
And then, one might say, all very nice, but what is the gist of it?
The juice is the water of Cellar Door, as Tolkien explains in the film’s key scene to Edith. A water that reveals the deepest truths to those who drink it. Edith had just criticized Tolkien’s idea that language is beautiful for sound by reiterating instead, like Professor Wright (Derek Jacobi) later, the importance of meaning.
The matter is complex and has its roots in the origins of the philosophy of language. In Plato’s dialogue entitled “Cratylus,” Socrates and Cratylus himself discuss whether the sound of a word is casually or essentially linked to its meaning, without reaching a conclusion. Even in the Middle Ages, universal terms were debated, whether they were representatives of ideas in the mind of God, or simple flatus vocis, breath of mouth. Even today, there is no scientific answer to this question, in either form.
Tolkien, the person and the film, doesn’t give a scientific answer either. The answer, in the film, the director’s true masterpiece in capturing not the letter, but the spirit of Tolkien, is precisely the one he gives to Edith, a pragmatic answer.
Anyone who thinks that words are sounds belittles them, does not know what he is saying. It is precisely because they are sounds, because things resound and things resound, that words have a meaning. The contradiction is the problem, the fact of asking it, rather than “drinking the water.”
That’s why Tolkien is one of the best films I have ever seen.