The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Okay, I should probably start this special series of posts, on the three extended editions of Peter Jackson’s LOTR trilogy, with some disclaimers. I love these films. I lined up to watch them the night of their premieres. Heck, I lined up to watch the extended editions in the theaters during their very limited runs around their release dates. I am certain I saw each of the theatrical releases at least four times in the theaters, and I’ve seen them on disc enough times afterwards that I can anticipate the tiniest camera angles and facial expressions from memory. I figure I am like many of you in this -- these films are cultural artifacts we know almost as well as our own reflections. So, here’s the thing -- I have never been a Tolkien purist about the films. I’ve been grateful for them, not nit-picky. But this is the end of literally two months of deep, close reads to a richly rewarding, 1,000 page novel. I have probably never in my life been this keenly aware of every little detail in the text, or this finely attuned to the themes present (both the very obvious and the very subtle). So I am about to write three incredibly long, incredibly critical takes on the films, and I’m not doing it to bust PJ’s chops (or yours for liking them). I’m going to be interested in the ways these films work and interested in the ways they don’t -- the ways they improve upon the text (that genuinely does happen, I promise!) and the ways in which they oversimplify the text, muddying its characterizations or reaching for cheap and easy payoffs. I just want to say that at the outset since, again, you’re about to read a very long post and most of it is critical of Jackson’s film -- a film that brought me to tears when I first saw it, and which is still among my most favorite 10-15 films of all time. Okay, enough defensiveness from me -- off we go!
The decision to give Galadriel a Prologue is, I think, a really good one initially -- this is a film that needs female voices, and we get that. Galadriel’s voice will feel more familiar to us later as a result, and given how brief our time is with her, I think that’s a smart investment of time. Unlike the novel, where I think Tolkien assumes we are broadly familiar with The Hobbit, I get that Jackson can’t really make that assumption, so it’s important to give us all the context we need up front. There’s no denying, though, that it shortchanges later conversations a little -- we’ll lose the opportunity to build our trust of Gandalf in particular because he will tell us so little about the Ring and its past, comparatively. It also creates the weird scenario that we know from the beginning how scary and powerful this Ring is, and Gandalf doesn’t -- it works as irony (if we understand that Gandalf doesn't know this yet, which the film implies but never really tells us outright until he is suddenly learning about it before our eyes), but it feels pretty disorienting to me compared with the reading experience. Overall, though, great move.
I missed the chance a couple of weeks ago to write a post about him, but let me say here, as I hit the point where Ian Holm is most fully a presence in the movies, that Ian Holm was an incredible performer and (by all accounts) a kind and encouraging presence to younger actors, and his loss is felt deeply by everybody who appreciated his work. I’m not even sure that this film is my favorite Ian Holm performance (there are so many great ones!), but Jackson takes FULL advantage of Holm, and the casting couldn’t have been any more perfect -- he needed someone who seems both a happy homebody and a restless adventurer, with an impish sense of humor and the ability to project both confidence and a sense of ominous horror, and they’ll have to do it all pretty quickly since the actor will be almost completely out of the film in a matter of about ten minutes. I can’t blame Jackson, therefore, for squeezing every drop he can out of Holm -- as a result, Bilbo is much more of a presence in the early going here, narrating another Prologue in the extended edition, concerning hobbits ("We've had one Prologue, yes. But what about Second Prologue?"), and spending a lot more time actually talking with Frodo than he does in the novel itself. The flip side, alas, is that the time needed to establish Frodo’s friendships/relationships with the other hobbits, Merry and Pippin in particular, is badly stunted. This is a tradeoff -- I get that you have to work quickly to get us out of the Shire and onto the road, and that some sacrifices have to be made. I just lament, as a big Meriadoc and Peregrin fan, that we’ve ended up shortchanging characters who will be with us for hours on screen in favor of a relationship that will be of very little significance after the opening minutes (plus, what, two brief scenes in Rivendell?).
I mean, these are great films, and carefully written -- I’m not accusing them of being sloppy (not at this stage, at least) -- but there’s a massive shift in the opening that really changes the feeling of leaving the Shire. Frodo and Sam believe from the beginning that they are being pursued by enemies and there’s no sense of leisure here at all -- furthermore, Merry and Pippin are just random hobbit jokesters who happen to (literally) run into Frodo and Sam at the wrong time and find themselves dragged off to Bree. Why would they go, rather than returning to The Shire after they’ve gotten Frodo and Sam to safety? What if anything are they told about the quest or its importance? Clearly it works -- the films have worked for a ton of people who never knew the books, and you may be among them! But I think it’s also clearly underdeveloping them as people, and the significance of their relationship to both Frodo and the mission.
I will say, going into my first viewing of this film, I was a little unsure about Jackson as a director -- he shaped his craft in low budget horror, and he’s got a real love for unsettling closeups, etc., that was visible in his previous work. I’d watched his one non-horror movie, Heavenly Creatures (well worth watching, by the way), and it has those trademarks, and I’d thought “this won’t work for LOTR, but what will he do instead?” Well, it turns out I was twice wrong -- he didn’t do anything “instead”, and the horror thing does in fact work. I don’t always love the changes here -- panicky Gandalf is a character moment that never really felt right to me, for instance -- but I don’t really need to love them to admit that they work great to give the film energy. Bree feels like one long tense wait for the appearance of a serial killer, and that’s honestly a great way to explain how it is they end up trusting Aragorn (who comes with no bona fides here); the attack of the Nazgul on the Inn is baffling technically (wait, where are they when the attack occurs? Why don’t the Nazgul just start killing everyone in the inn once they’re frustrated?) but wonderfully evocative and super memorable. Jackson knew what he was good at, and he did it.
If I’m seeming too negative, I can certainly pause here to point out some excellent changes made by Jackson and Co. Showing us the full Gandalf imprisonment sequence is probably the right call -- we do lose the wonderful moment where Frodo wakes up asking where he is, and he gets the shocking answer from Gandalf himself, but this is a tradeoff worth making. We establish Saruman’s threat early on, and we start to plant seeds that will pay off in story terms all the way through to The Two Towers. The inclusion of Arwen -- and you know you’re hearing this from a BIG Glorfindel fan -- is an even better decision: again, it promotes a woman into greater prominence, it solves the novel’s inability to create Arwen as a three-dimensional character and it gives her some actual dialogue. Arwen in this situation becomes our iconic elf -- glowy, musically voiced, fearless of the dark servants of the Enemy -- and even if she does come across as a little too magically empowered (the movie makes it basically canonical that SHE calls a stampede out of the river, without much explanation of how that happens or whether she even knew it would), we do need somebody to be super magical in Gandalf’s absence and I’m glad it’s her. She also does some good dialogue work with Aragorn after nightfall in Rivendell that helps along the exposition in a way that doesn’t feel plodding or tangential.
The Council itself feels weirdly rushed -- I get it, a lot of the exposition has happened already, but there’s very little sense here of a “Council”. Elrond tells people what has to be done and they mostly agree immediately, other than one petulant dude from Gondor who spends seven minutes getting into arguments with everybody (and touching off an ancient race war by accident) until Frodo just agrees to take the darn thing. Boromir does need development, I guess, but he’s so clearly “the loose cannon” who disrupts the Council that it really does make it hard to believe that Elrond and Gandalf want him in the Fellowship. It would have been nice to give him a better moment or two, or else to have more of the tension on the Council stem from elsewhere, I think. Aragorn’s weird reluctance to be king is a total Jackson invention -- I get why he (and Walsh and Boyens) write Aragorn this way, to create a more natural arc in Hollywood terms, but it’s just a little weird for me to try to see 80 year old Aragorn as this guy who is worried about picking up Elendil’s sword (the sword that he, as we know from the novel, carries with him everywhere in actuality).
I think I like the changes that lead to Gandalf’s death -- Gimli being insistent about Moria makes him responsible in a larger way than he is in the novel, Pippin’s screw-up with the well is the immediate cause of attack here rather than some slow payoff as in the novel, even Aragorn here hesitates when the bridge collapses (when I think it’s clear that they had time to save Gandalf, who actually manages to climb halfway back onto the bridge, without a whip curled around him, before falling) and misses the chance to save the wizard. Collectively they create a much larger space here for guilt, and we can feel the weight of it on the company. It’s not a great fit, though, for Aragorn in particular -- the guy who’s been reluctant to lead, etc., is just suddenly, perfectly in charge once they get out the eastern doors of Moria, and we never see any burden or bobble in that transition. Given the Aragorn we’ve been shown in the films so far, it would have made a lot more sense to see him struggle, or at least feel a little haunted or uncertain, since this kind of leadership is not what he asked for or expected for himself, and he’s certainly not seemed like this expedition’s “second-in-command” in the way that he was in the novel.
Whew...okay, Lothlorien. Where do I start? Each one of Jackson’s films has one segment I just find myself cringing through, and here it’s absolutely Lothlorien. The three screenwriters, who are so good at reading Tolkien under normal conditions, fumble the ball in their own end zone here -- this should be easy-peasy. The Fellowship has just lost their ancient guide/friend, and in Lothlorien, though they have to overcome a frosty reception, they discover this idyllic beating heart of Middle-earth in which another ancient guide/friend (maybe a little more cryptic, even a little unnerving, but also somehow reassuring and loving) gives them a last moment of respite before the adventure gets turned up to 11. And instead it’s just sideways from the moment they reach Lorien -- Haldir comes across as a snotty maitre d’ instead of a wary guardian, there’s a weirdly disjointed quality to the scenes flipping between day and night without a sense of how much time has passed or where they are, it’s never clear how they actually secure entrance. Galadriel is scary in unpredictable ways and there’s really no sense at all of relief or happiness in her presence, and the only other scenes we get in Lorien are elves singing way too sadly to be translated and Galadriel scaring the crap out of Frodo by exposing him to the Eye of Sauron in a mirror. There’s no explanation for why Frodo would offer her the Ring, and no real sense of how it is this "elf witch" passes the test she apparently passes. Suddenly then it’s a sunny day on the riverbank and she’s handing out gifts and Gimli’s totally besotted with her, and honestly it feels more like Stockholm syndrome than anything else. I know some people love the Lorien sequence, and I can love very, very isolated moments here, but overall it just feels like such a waste to me -- one instance in which Jackson following his horror instincts HURT the movie by trying to create yet another set of gloomy/shadowy reaction shots and jump scares, etc., rather than just giving the moment the time it needs and merits.
Isengard’s scenes, by contrast, are honestly great -- the threat’s being established, and there are gross or ominous moments but they’re totally in keeping with who these characters are and what they want. The Fellowship novel ends in a weirdly unfinished way, and just moving Boromir’s death up isn’t enough to resolve that -- Aragorn gets no satisfying “victory" after all -- so creating a super-Uruk-hai captain for him to duel and then behead gives the audience the applause line we need. The Isengard sequences also give us a much richer sense of where Merry and Pippin might be taken, and will be there for Jackson to keep drawing from in The Two Towers, so high marks for them by contrast.
Every decision connected with the Ring at the Falls of Rauros is just a little perplexing -- Boromir is set up as so obviously a bad man by now that it’s not clear to me that Frodo or Aragorn would ever turn their backs on him. (Huge credit has to go to Sean Bean's charisma as an actor for helping us see the good in a character that the screenplay wants so badly to make a villain.) Jackson wants Aragorn to be a potential threat also….but somehow he’s already made the decision to go across the river and take Frodo to Mordor? I don’t understand why he doesn’t -- especially because he “passes Frodo’s test” and doesn’t grab for the Ring. It would have made a lot more sense for him to be keen on Boromir’s plan, so that it’s Frodo who’s torn and doesn’t know if he can trust Aragorn, who seems so buddy-buddy with Boromir now that Gandalf is dead. All the character decisions here are a little puzzling -- Aragorn sends Frodo to Mordor alone, intentionally. Merry and Pippin functionally make the same decision. But, this is madness. He’d be defenseless every time he laid down to sleep, and the Fellowship is clearly very aware that there are orcs on the farther shore AND that Gollum has been tailing them. Frodo at a minimum needs one other person to keep watch while he sleeps. Frodo doesn’t think of this in the novel because he’s running scared, of course, but here the decisions feel much more intentional in a way that confuses me.
Overall, the finale is well-realized -- Sam committing again to his promise to Gandalf, and Aragorn making a new promise to Boromir, who hears (and responds to) his comrade call the people of Gondor “our people” and knows in that moment what it means. It’s a weirdly subtle moment for a film that has largely ditched the book’s subtlety where it can, but I do love it for that reason. I don’t know that I can explain to myself, though, what it is about seeing the Fellowship fall apart that makes Aragorn ready for the first time in his life to be king of Gondor and Arnor. I mean, as I’ve been saying, a lot of this doesn’t fully make sense if I think about it. But that’s the beauty of the film, and of films in general - you get the right acting and the right score and editing, and the decisions DO make sense, in film terms, even if they won’t hold up quite as well to later scrutiny. And here there’s some excellent acting and a fantastic Howard Shore score (the first of three outstanding orchestral scores, of course) and a really well edited finish, and the logic of it feels undeniable as you watch.
Enya singing “May It Be” might be my favorite closing credits song ever. That is, it might be, if not for an even better song that's coming. In 2001, it topped my personal list, that’s for sure. In general, again, my hat’s off to Shore and the musicians - the music is beautifully realized and supports the storytelling almost without exception. The production team, too, deserve endless praise: the settings were very well chosen, the costume and prop work feels authentic and lived in, and the constructed sets successfully make you feel like you’re in another world (or in another age of this world). The whole look and feel of the movie -- right down to this poster http://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/d/d2/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_-_The_Fellowship_of_the_Ring_-_Ensemble_poster.jpg -- takes me back to the excitement I felt as a college student getting hyped for these movies before they ever came out, and I still can tap into that emotional space pretty easily.
So, again, I love this movie, even though it finds all sorts of ways to let me down a little here and there, when I think about what it’s done to the story Tolkien originally wrote. Adaptations of beloved literary classics are nearly impossible, though, and if there’s a better adaptation of a classic novel than this film trilogy, I can’t think of it. Despite its flaws, it really does approach perfection, and I’m so glad it exists. Now on, in a couple of days (I expect) to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers!