RING MASTER

Fantasy author's formative years, obsessions, explored in Tolkien

When movies are made about real people — especially creative artists — it's always interesting to see what aspect of a life the filmmakers choose to spotlight. Will the focus be on a singular event in the subject's life to build a story around? Or will the movie try to suggest in dramatic terms what inspired the subject's work?

In the atmospheric Tolkien, a movie about the celebrated fantasy author who gave us The Hobbit, and The Lord Of the Rings, these two approaches are the same thing. The movie begins in the horrific trenches of The Somme, in France, during World War I, a setting to which it keeps returning throughout the film.

The devastation of warfare was certainly the most singular event in J. R. R. Tolkien's life as a young man, but it also inspired him to create the epic battle between good and evil that occupies the Rings trilogy.

Directed by Dome Karukoski, from a script by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford, Tolkien tries hard to elide the author's experiences as a schoolboy, an Oxford student, and a soldier into the larger themes of quests, courage and fellowship that would dominate his later work. The filmmakers are largely successful at this; their workmanlike approach doesn't always create a lot of deep resonance, but it's a satisfying look at the gestation of the creative process.

J. R. R. Tolkien's dust jacket design for The Hobbit, 1937

This is not a portrait of the artist writing in a fever of inspiration. Instead, Tolkien (played as an adult by Nichols Hoult) is depicted as a man of very methodical, intersecting obsessions, writing stories, and developing complex language systems for his own amusement. He also sketches almost constantly: fantasy landscapes, menacing figures emerging out of the shadows, dragons. (Tolkien himself provided watercolor paintings for the dust jackets and endpapers of many early editions of his work.)

The director's thoughtful approach may drag a little in the midsection, but his themes line up with Tolkien's stated purpose to explore "the journeys we take to prove ourselves."
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