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Lots of you won't like what's said here.__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
They took our precious'Rings' films taint the beloved books
By Deborah P. Jacobs, Boston Globe Staff, 1/2/2004
We live in a forgiving age. If in recent years we have reconsidered the sins of figures such as Richard Nixon and Marv Albert, the time has certainly come for a reevaluation of Gollum. Sure, it's hard to cuddle up to someone who tears live fish apart with his fingers, but he's not all bad. With the opening last month of ''The Return of the King,'' the final installment of director Peter Jackson's film version of J.R.R. Tolkien's ''The Lord of the Rings,'' I've been thinking about Gollum, both as mad villain and metaphor.As rendered by Jackson and actor Andy Serkis, he's arguably one of the movie's most riveting characters. Tricked out digitally with glaucous eyes, ceaselessly moving limbs, and a voice that oozes between outrage and abasement, he's evil on the small and immediate scale, far more frightening than the numberless hordes of Orcs, Nazgul, and other monsters that crowd the film's elaborate battle sequences.
So, yes, evil. But a familiar evil. As Gandalf tells a skeptical Frodo in the chapter ''The Shadow of the Past,'' Gollum's people were ''of hobbit-kind,'' and ''there was a great deal in the background of [Bilbo's and Gollum's] minds and memories that was very similar. They understood one another . . . very much better than a hobbit would understand, say, a Dwarf, an Orc, or even an Elf.'' Tolkien clearly painted Gollum as the uncomfortably close flip side of Frodo's noble nature; Frodo's companion Sam Gamgee cannot help but notice the strange bond between the two as they travel through Mordor.
At the precipice of Mount Doom, it is Gollum who does what he has set out to do, unlike Frodo, who has the chance to destroy the One Ring but cannot. Gollum is steadfast until the very end, never veering from his purpose, to get his clammy hands on that gleaming golden prize. This is a guy with standards, a guy who would never accept a substitute.
And to a lover of Tolkien's books, that is what Jackson's ''The Lord of the Rings'' feels like: a substitute, one far inferior to the original vision. Our precious has been taken from us, and we hates it, yes, we hates it.
Reams have been written about the director's dedication, about the hours his crews spent fashioning the charming hobbit hole of Bag End, the great hall in Minas Tirith, the enchantments of Rivendell. These sights are admittedly marvelous. But they're not enough. Neither they nor the ballyhooed battle scenes nor New Zealand's breathtaking scenery can compensate for what was altered. In transferring a thousand-odd pages of Tolkien to celluloid, cuts of course had to be made, but Jackson's nips and tucks have deformed the tale and its players.
One of Tolkien's most important symbols is Aragorn's sword, ''the Sword That Was Broken,'' which once belonged to his ancestor Isildur. Early in the book ''The Fellowship of the Ring,'' before Frodo and the rest of the Company of the Ring leave Rivendell for Mordor, Elvish smiths remake it and invest it with new strength, giving Aragorn at last his rightful authority and power. Thus one can only wonder at the wholly invented scene in which Elrond, the lord of Rivendell, visits Aragorn on the eve of the climactic battle to bring him the reforged Anduril and tell him that his daughter, and Aragorn's beloved, is dying. Oh, right. It's not enough that the Dark Lord is about to take over Middle-earth; Aragorn needs another incentive -- Arwen's life -- to fulfill his destiny.
In another bewildering alteration, the tricksy Gollum tries to make Sam look guilty of taking more than his share of the hobbitses' . . . hobbits' depleted stores as they make their perilous way through Mordor, and Frodo falls for it. Frodo falls for it. And then he tells Sam to go home. If in the books the bond between Frodo and Gollum is undeniable, the one between Frodo and Samwise is one nearly as thick as blood, making such a scene impossible.
In Tolkien's version, Merry and Pippin are transformed through war from unsophisticated but far from simple-minded young fellows into the ''fearless hobbits with bright swords and grim faces'' who will later put things to rights back in the Shire. In Jackson's film, they're reluctant warriors at best. As in ''The Two Towers,'' the director uses them almost exclusively for comic relief, having other soldiers belittle their martial prowess and playing up their weakness for ale.
And speaking of the Shire, the version of the hobbits' home shown to us at the end of ''The Return of the King'' is the worst insult of all. For it to have been completely untouched by war makes no sense dramatically or logically -- if the Shire were not vulnerable to Sauron's predations, why would the hobbits have felt compelled to defend it by striking out to destroy the Ring? It also provides for one of the deadest stretches of film time in recent memory: the four hobbits, each clutching a stein, smiling lamely at one another in a Hobbiton tavern.
Jackson did show his heart was in the right place by preserving the last line of the book: ''I'm back,'' spoken by Sam after bidding farewell to Frodo at the Grey Havens. But by then the damage has been done, in each of the three films, particularly the second and third. The subtleties, delights, and marvels of the books have been replaced with the predictable dimensions of a video game (''Extreme Hobbit,'' anyone?), with the exaggerated villains and heroes intent only on bloodletting. Tolkien's opus -- the collective precious of several generations -- has been tainted, almost like a favorite toy that one lends to a friend only to have it returned slightly scuffed and wobbling and, somehow, no longer itself.
So for now I'd just like to forget about the films and retreat somewhere dark and quiet for a while, until I'm ready to reclaim my precious. Got room for me in the cave, Gollum? Thanks. And pass the fish.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company
Follow Ups:
Could it be that someone has fallen under the spell of "the one true ring" on his or her cell phone which might bring a substantial salary offer in a different shire? :o)There are always a few critics with their eye on career goals who are willing to ignore the differing requirements of film if it makes their negative review stand out, drawing attention to their aspirations. Literary adaptaion to the cinema is a tricky business under the best of conditions, but especially when dealing with revered works such as trying to adapt a complicated series of books like Tolkien's Ring trilogy. Many of Jackson's choices were obviously made because they made more sense in terms of dramatic rhythm. While some of the critic's comments might appear justified at first glance, they just don't hold up under close scrutiny.
Examples: Merry and Pippen were more believable in a filmic sense as reluctant warriors transformed into heroes by circumstances and cleverness. Their vulnerability and the gentle comic relief of their fish-out-of-water adaptation to their dilemma is more appealing cinematically than the literary version, because the audience identifies more with them. The distrust over missing food arising between Frodo and Sam through Gollum's deception is entirely believeable when one takes into account the influence of the ring on Frodo as he approaches Mount Doom. Again, this works cinematically because it allows the pace of the story to flow naturally through evolving tension.
FTR, I have nothing personal against Deborah P. Jacob's reviews generally, but in this instance she may have missed the last boat from Gray Havens in an attempt to book first class passage to Grey Poupon! ;^)
AuPh
Check out the current issue.For some book fans, no adaptation will ever be worthy enough. They will never be comfortable with another's personal vision, much less changes in emphasis or cuts - all necessary in the transition from page to screen.
The Boston Glove writer has missed much in the film, particularly regarding character development.
Jackson's LOTR is not perfect - few movies are. But I believe the essentials of Tolkien's story are well captured in Jackson's films. The spirit and themes of the book are there, if one has eyes to see.
Lotsa laffs, all at the expense of this pretentious trilogy:FULL CIRCLE
by ANTHONY LANE
“The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.”
Posted 2003-12-29
This is what happened when a fellow-critic and I emerged, on December 11th, from a screening of “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” It had started well before noon, and the skies were practically dark by the time we staggered out. The movie, the last of a trilogy, runs almost three and a half hours, but, if you factor in the emotional buildup, the crammed ticket line, and the decompression period that will be required afterward, you are talking about an entire day ripped from your mortal life.
So there we were, fresh from the battles of Middle-earth, nursing our punished eardrums, when what did we see? A throng of youth, six or seven deep, caged behind barricades, lining the route from the movie theatre. Like pleading spirits in Dante’s Purgatory, they stretched out their arms, beseeching us to sign their programs, their curling copies of Tolkien, and, for all I know, their naked limbs. Bear in mind that this was a press screening, and that these boys and girls were forcing themselves upon movie reviewers—by and large, a profession that spends remarkably little time fending off the attention of groupies. Indeed, there is a body of opinion which holds that we should carry little bells, like lepers in the Middle Ages, to warn respectable citizens of our foul approach. The question is: If this was the press screening, what the hell were the premières like? Why did a hundred thousand people cram the route to the theatre when the film first showed in Wellington, New Zealand, on December 1st? Did the kids tear the clothes off Orlando Bloom, the svelte incarnation of Legolas? Is Sir Ian McKellen prepared to be mobbed, on a regular basis, on red carpets all over the world? In short, what is going on?
As Alfred Hitchcock said to one of his leading ladies, “It’s only a movie, Ingrid.” The nub of “The Return of the King” is a ring of simple design but unrivalled potency, which must be destroyed before it falls into the grasp of Sauron—a character so purely villainous that, under union rules, he is played not by an actor but by a single eye, blazing from the top of a tower. Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) and his sidekick Sam (Sean Astin) are two-thirds through their appointed mission, which is to bear the ring to Mordor and cast it into the maw of Mount Doom, at which point the power will cut out completely in Michigan, Cleveland, and other parts of Middle-earth up to and including New Jersey. At the same time, most of those who, in the first installment, joined together to form the Fellowship of the Ring are still toiling in the service of truth, beauty, and horsemanship. We have Arwen (Liv Tyler), an elven princess, of whom it is written in ancient runes that she must be viewed in naught but soft focus and, if possible, on the brink of tears; Legolas the elf, the most unflustered blond to grace our screens since Veronica Lake; Pippin (Billy Boyd) and Merry (Dominic Monaghan), a pair of slightly annoying hobbits who spent much of the previous film, “The Two Towers,” being hugged by the boughs of enormous trees, and who are now offered the chance to redeem themselves at ground level, in battle; and Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), a dwarf of twofold purpose. First, he is an axeman, hewing cold cuts from the midriffs of selected villains, and, second, he is a funnyman, slicing through the loftiness of the enterprise with his peremptory vows of action. “Certainty of death—small chance of success—what are we waiting for?” he asks cheerfully on the eve of conflict, sounding like a toughened version of Dickens’s Mr. Jingle.
Then, we have men, a solemn race. Tolkien may be charting the victory, familiar from a hundred fairy tales, of good over evil, but such mastery comes at a melancholy price, for it marks the end of one age—that of wizardry, elvishness, and free trips on the backs of giant eagles—and the dawning of another. From now on, men will rule Middle-earth, and one senses, both in Tolkien and in Peter Jackson’s adaptation, a wistful belief that life, though fair and wisely governed, will be much less of a blast. Just inspect the face of Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) at the close of this picture. Over many hours, his startling career path has gone from a quiet drink at the Prancing Pony to the sacred throne of Gondor (he is the King of the title), but does the guy look happy about it? To me he looks taut and burdened, not least by the terrible awareness that, this being Tolkien, he will have to sing a ballad at his own coronation.
How much freer he seemed in the slash and lunge of war, leaping over the gunwales of a longboat. The core of “The Return of the King” is consumed by the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, in which Aragorn hooks up with King Théoden (Bernard Hill), the honorable leader of the kingdom of Rohan, to overthrow the Nazgûl—creatures so mightily equipped in malice that each gets to drive his own personal airborne dragon. Under the Nazgûl’s thumb are thousands of orcs—ugly thugs commanded by what appears to be a giant potato—plus, I am thrilled to report, a herd of mûmakil. These are what the hobbits call oliphaunts, what Piglet used to call heffalumps, and what I would call a good excuse to take the next available flight out of Middle-earth. A mûmak, to judge by the spikes on the ends of its tusks, is made by crossing a double helping of mammoth with a porcupine, and each one bears a company of archers on its back. Legolas, a fit fellow, takes one look and sees his chance for a workout. He shinnies up a back leg, hangs on to the hide, fells half the riders with a ping of his bow, chops a rope holding the rest, shoots an arrow into the presumably tiny brain of the animal, feels it slump to its knees, and then trips lightly down its trunk like Fred Astaire descending a staircase. Unconfirmed reports suggest that this is the coolest single activity ever recorded on film, and the audience around me went into spasms of worshipful hilarity. Somebody to my left actually stood to applaud, as George II is said to have done when he first heard the Hallelujah Chorus.
How does “The Return of the King” differ from its two predecessors? Well, for one thing Gandalf has been spending time at the salon. His hair has grown straighter and whiter with every film, and at times, especially when he is mixing with similarly coiffed elves, we seem to have stumbled into a Rick Wakeman revival tour. Gandalf not only plots the triumph of justice but takes a valorous role in its fulfillment, at one point wielding his staff with an éclat that might stop even Uma Thurman in her tracks. It’s a wonderful part for Ian McKellen, constantly calling upon the high, hard, declamatory style that he refined onstage, and that reappears here in the warnings that Gandalf delivers to his anxious companions. “It’s so quiet,” Pippin says, to which the Wise One replies, “It’s the deep breath before the storm.”
McKellen was the best Uncle Vanya I have seen, and the best thing in his performance, at London’s National Theatre, came after the final line, when Vanya fussed around his study, shuffling papers and tidying the desk. He was trying, however trivially, to assert some order, though both he and we knew that his soul was in disarray. There is little time, even over nine hours of “The Lord of the Rings,” for that kind of casual detail, and one treasures it when it comes—when Gandalf turns to the garrulous Pippin on the threshold of a court, urges him not to mention certain matters when they enter, then pauses and adds, “In fact, it’s better if you don’t speak at all.” McKellen times the advice so beautifully that the audience laughs in relief, as if we helplessly hankered for comedy, however mild, when the fate of civilizations is up for grabs.
All of which confirms that the director of the trilogy, Peter Jackson, has an epic on his hands. The word “epic” is tossed around, in movie circles, with regrettable abandon, being used as a critic’s noun to describe any picture more than two and a half hours long and as a publicist’s adjective to mean “overpaid,” as in, “Didn’t you think Ben Affleck was kind of epic in ‘Daredevil’?” But “The Lord of the Rings” fits the bill, because of the unflagging momentum of Frodo’s quest, because of its rather magnificent indifference to the forces of irony (which would be constantly on the prowl were we watching a mock epic), and because Jackson has revived a grand and unembarrassable quality that sustained moviemakers from Griffith to the heyday of David Lean: he has nerve.
How else can one explain the bracing vastness of the project? Jackson shares with Lean a reckless will to cut from engrossed closeup to a panoramic, Nazgûl’s-eye view of a parched plain or a roiling battlefield—to look his characters in the face, until we can see every wrinkle of their troubles, and then to draw back so far that those troubles melt into near-nothing, into specks on the surface of invented history. When the riders of Rohan—allies of Gandalf and Aragorn—are summoned to the fray, it is not by messenger, still less by magic, but by a line of lighted beacons, as the Romans used to be, and Jackson’s roistering mix of speed and splendor allows us to vault from one mountaintop to the next until we reach the end of the line, where the grim rapture of Aragorn, as he spies the flame, signals that, at long last, the game’s afoot.
Of course, there are times when this elastic manner—Jackson’s wish to encompass Middle-earth by any and every stretch of the imagination—throws the action out of whack. The final tussle over the ring between Frodo and his indispensable nemesis, Gollum, on the verge of a volcano drags on so long that what it means for Middle-earth, as opposed to what it says of our hero’s anguish, is all but lost, and everything that unfurls after that climax feels dramatically blurred, as if Jackson, like Frodo, were so shattered by his undertaking that he finds it hard to concentrate. Tolkien has a tremendous late chapter entitled “The Scouring of the Shire,” in which the hobbits return to their land and find it snarled in petty feuds, a hangover of Sauron’s influence, which they consider it their business to erase. It always makes me think of post-Vichy France, riven with bitter charges of German collaboration, and not a jot of it remains onscreen. Instead, the movie closes in limp bucolic mood; Sam, the staunchest figure in the saga, goes home to a bosomy hobbitess, as he does in the novel, but Jackson, the man who can marshal warriors by the thousand, finds it hard to catch the rusticity—brisk, unsentimental, cider-sharp—of the original.
Perhaps that is as it should be. As I watched this film, an eager victim of its boundless will to astound, I found my loyal memories of the book beginning to fade. It may be time to halt the endless comparisons between page and screen, and to confess that the two are very different beasts. Moments that lurk deep in the body of the novel are brought into the light. I had never fully clocked the subplot of Éowyn (Miranda Otto), King Théoden’s niece, until she turned up in the movie, clad in a man’s armor, and dared to confront the chief of the Nazgûl. He hisses that he fears no man, whereupon she whips off her helmet, shakes her tresses, and utters the Shakespearean cry “I am no man,” following it up with a solid jab on the Naz. I wish Laurence Olivier were alive to see that. It was he who realized that to film Shakespeare was not enough—one had to dig for what was filmlike in Shakespeare, to shock his words into becoming the natural flesh of a movie. And so it is with Jackson; when I watch Legolas scrambling up that mûmak, my mind turns not to Tolkien (who wrote no such scene, anyway) but to Douglas Fairbanks, scaling the side of a ship, in “The Black Pirate,” with monkeyish ease and delight. Peter Jackson has not really made a movie of “The Lord of the Rings”; he has sprung clear of it to forge something new. He has taken a deep breath, and raised a storm.
Really read it. Especially the last paragraph ("an eager victim of its boundless will to astound"). Some people can love a film, warts and all..kinda like loving one's spouse.AL just has a tough time coming straight out with his geekdom. But at least he does have a sense of humour about his guilt.
BTW, no need to cut and paste, I have that NYer issue in my possession - I've subscribed since 1978.
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a
I got a lot of laughs (as usual) but would hardly say he "loved" it.
Literary adaptaion to the cinema is a tricky business under the best of conditions, but especially when dealing with revered works such as trying to adapt a complicated series of books like Tolkien's Ring trilogy.That's very true, but none of the changes criticized in the above article have anything to do with the differing requirements of film.
Many of Jackson's choices were obviously made because they made more sense in terms of dramatic rhythm.
It's not obvious to me and I don't see the argument. How did his changes improve dramatic rhythm exactly?
While some of the critic's comments might appear justified at first glance, they just don't hold up under close scrutiny.
I really don't think you've demonstrated that at all.
Examples: Merry and Pippen were more believable in a filmic sense as reluctant warriors transformed into heroes by circumstances and cleverness. Their vulnerability and the gentle comic relief of their fish-out-of-water adaptation to their dilemma is more appealing cinematically than the literary version, because the audience identifies more with them.
I saw nothing "gentle" in their comic relief, and their "fish-out-of-water adaptation" I thought was grossly overplayed. How were they more clever in the films than in the books, exactly? I saw no appreciable difference between Tolkien and Jackson in the manner in which Merry and Pippin were transformed by their experience. Characterization wasn't among Tolkien's strong points and Jackson didn't improve on him much--a feat in itself when the very fact of a human actor can hardly help but invest a Tokien role with life. This was an erea in which the original could have been greatly improved upon and Jackson blew it. Her gripe against the removal of the Tolkien's homeric ending is off base. I don't think there was space enough for it and in terms of dramatic rhythm on film, it would have rung as anticlimax.
The distrust over missing food arising between Frodo and Sam through Gollum's deception is entirely believeable when one takes into account the influence of the ring on Frodo as he approaches Mount Doom.
Sure it's believable, but so what? Why do it? To me it seemed a contrivance to separate Sam from Frodo so that Jackson could overdraw the confrontation with Shelob by giving Frodo his time alone against her and the false "oh when will Sam come to save him?" drama.
Again, this works cinematically because it allows the pace of the story to flow naturally through evolving tension.
Again, I'm not sure this does work cinematically, and how anyway would sticking with Tolkien have prevented the story from flowing naturally and why wasn't the tension Tolkien provide good enough on its own? So many of Jackson's changes seem to me to have been born from a series of ill-advised and self-indulgent wouldn't-it-be-cool-if conversations. I think the tension he introduced was a shortcut for him around the challenge of more subtle options.
You got that right, bub!Also thanks for the detailed refutation of A's rather amorphous criticism of the article. Notably he chose to demean the Boston connection rather than analyze intelligently.
clark
It's as if you're dying to garner everyone's opinion on it here while still pretending you're far too sophisticated to enjoy it yourself. Are you afraid the folks here who pretend to eschew any movie that isn't a long-forgotten subtitled black and white slice-of-life psychological drama from Eastern Europe will think less of you? There are plenty of older folks who enjoy the "childish" LOTR movies, even if they've never read Tolkien as a kid. Why not just admit you're a Ringnut, and that you find Frodo to be a little too uncomfortably adorable?
"Garner"?clark
hmmmm
I love these books, and the purloined lembas bread/banishment of Sam scene in ROTK and the wholly invented battle with the Warg riders/Aragorn falling off the cliff scene in TTT were the 2 scenes that bothered me the most in what I still regard as an impressive and monumental achievement by Peter Jackson and his crew. The treatment of Faramir in TTT(particularly the theatrical version) bothered me as well, although the extended version mitigated these concerns somewhat (both FOTR and TTT are substantially improved in the expanded versions, and I expect the same will be true of ROTK as well). The commentary tracks on these DVD's are highly recommended for the candid remarks of Peter Jackson and screenwriters Frances Walsh and Philippa Boyens on this issue.
For those interested, I highly recommend the link below for the excellent survey of the differences between the films and the book-look for the FOTR/TTT/ROTK links at the bottom.
"A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them".
-P. J. O'Rourke
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