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Posted on 12/19/2001 11:56:06 AM PST by Texican72

Yes, it's cool. Yes, it's as loyal to the book as a movie can be. Yes, it's loyal to the Tolkien spirit. Yes, the Orcs are awesome. Yes, I will be seeing it again. And, yes, it's cool. Or did I say that already?

These are the things people who spent hours hidden in their own private Bag's Ends reading The Lord of the Rings want to know. The rest, as the Talmudists say, is commentary.

So, here's the rest.

Of all the ingredients for a truly successful escapist movie of any kind — be it sci-fi or fantasy — the most important is that it take itself seriously. That doesn't mean it can't be humorous — Indiana Jones had some hilarious touches, for example. But the moment the actors or director let on that the movie is "just a movie" or, worse, ironic camp, the spell is broken. I remember the exact moment I no longer respected the James Bond series. It was in a scene in the dreadful Octopussy. While swinging from a vine, they had 007 issue a Tarzan yell, at which point I realized that even the producers couldn't take themselves seriously anymore, so why should I?

The best example is, of course, Phantom Menace. Were I czar, the sainted George Lucas would be summoned to my court and asked to explain himself (he would be made all the more nervous, no doubt, by the sight of Alan Dershowitz chained to a post, forced to feed very small bacon bits to a wolverine one at a time, using only his lips). What Lucas did to Phantom Menace would be considered a crime against the throne, the people, and posterity. By riddling the movie with silly jokes — the inane color commentary at the pod race, the ragamuffin's shouts of "yippee!" and of course the excremental Jar-Jar Binks — Lucas punctured the illusion of the entire Star Wars universe. By ladling common expressions and all-too-familiar Saturday-morning cartoon humor into what was supposed to be a galaxy far, far away and a long time ago, Lucas said, "You took this stuff seriously? Ha!"

Well, if I were czar, LOTR director Peter Jackson would get a dacha from me as a reward for his good work. If you have ever said, "If I had enough money, I'd make a Lord of the Rings movie," this is your movie. There is no winking in The Lord of the Rings.

And to switch gears for a moment — there are no midgets either. I have no problems with little people — or whatever the preferred term for them is these days — but, let's face it, the only thing they have in common with hobbits, or even dwarfs, is their height. In the film Willow, George Lucas's attempt at a Lord of the Rings-type movie, he used midgets to play dwarfs, as have any number of lesser films directors of the genre. The problem is that human midgets move like, well, human midgets. Their awkwardness makes them uncomfortable to watch and unbelievable as a separate race.

Jackson solves this problem by casting full-sized actors in the hobbit roles. Elijah Wood plays Frodo (well but a bit too delicately for my tastes) and Sean Astin is Samwise "Sam" Gamgee. Astin is good, but once you realize he's the guy who played the obnoxiously obsessive Rudy Ruettiger in Rudy it's a bit distracting. Even Gimli the dwarf isn't played by a dwarf. John Rhys Davies (one of my favorite actors) takes on the role. I had thought Jackson made the hobbits look small through some expensive digital effects, but apparently he mostly used forced perspective — putting seven-foot-tall Gandalf much closer to the camera to fool the eye. On some of the very wide shots they clearly use a few midgets as stand-ins, but you really have to be looking for them.

I bring this up because, well, the midget thing always bugged me, but more importantly because Peter Jackson clearly spared no expense in trying to make this film believable. Which is why, despite the comparisons to Harry Potter, this isn't a movie for little kids. The Orcs and the Balrog might scare the bejeebers out of any kid younger than, say, 8 or 9 (though I'm terrible at gauging such things and if I were that age and my parents denied me this movie I would go on a hunger strike).

All of this is as it should be, because J. R. R. Tolkien certainly considered the story to be not only believable but as close to real as any sane man could. You see, Tolkien was also a perfectionist. The reason Tolkien couldn't finish The Silmarillion at the end of his life was that he couldn't fully hammer out Elvish metaphysics to his own satisfaction.

Under normal circumstances I'm reluctant to retell the stories of movies when reviewing them, because it tends to spoil the experience for movie-goers. In this case it seems particularly stupid. If you don't know the story already, read the book (or you can read the Washington Post review). And if you have read the book, you don't need me to tell you who Frodo Baggins is.

So let me be a bit more general about the movie, without spoiling things. The film isn't perfect — how could it be? First of all, in order to cut it down to three hours, a few things had to go, including Fatty Bolger, Glorfindel, and Tom Bombadil. Also some members of the fellowship of the ring get pretty short shrift and I'm curious to know whether people who never read the book really get some of the nuances. None of the acting is bad, but little of it stands out, including Ian McKellen's (who often looks like Patrick Stewart for some reason). I wish there were fewer scenes of Frodo staring into the camera like Jodie Foster in Nell (or Contact, or a half-dozen other movies where Foster seems to think that intense, wide-eyed staring is what the academy is looking for). But these are all nit-picks.

Suffice it to say that the movie might have a hard time living up to the absurd hype and it might not conjure up that deeply personal experience that came with reading Lord of the Rings for the first time. But if you can get your heart rate and expectations down to a healthy level, you will have a great, great time.

Now, if you need to go get in line for the movie, you are excused. But I'd like to say a few more words about Tolkien.

Tolkien was one of the great unheralded conservatives of the 20th century. Oh don't worry, I'm not going to try to score ideological points by saying Tolkien opposed nationalized health care or anything like that (though it is hardly insignificant that one of Tolkien's dearest friends and closest colleagues was C. S. Lewis).

No, Tolkien's conservatism was deeper than even the deepest dwarf-mine in the hills of the White Mountains. Tolkien despised modernity and disliked technology. He made a concession to the existence of factories, but only because they collected all the machines in one place and kept them hidden from view in out-of-the-way buildings. A widely respected scholar of the English language who could debate in Greek and Latin and speak fluent Gothic, Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford (he also worked on the "W" section — one of my favorite chapters, far better than the thin gruel to be found in the "L" section — of the Oxford English Dictionary).

A man after my own heart, Tolkien despised the French, but not for their brie-spined capitulation during World War II or any of the usual reasons (though he hated French food). According to his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, the Norman invasion of England in 1066 "pained him almost as much as if it had happened in his own lifetime." In a very nice essay in a recent issue of The New Yorker, Anthony Lane points out that Tolkien's "view of English literature, incidentally, ended more or less where the current view begins; he rarely ventured later than Chaucer, and thought Shakespeare to be pernicious nonsense."

Now, that's a conservative!

As Martin Morse Wooster discusses in the current issue of The American Enterprise, "a lesser writer with Tolkien's ambitions might have produced an unreadable tome." But The Lord of the Rings is complete. It is an intact universe. It is compelling because even though we mostly see mountaintops, the reader knows that there are mountains with deep roots beneath the clouds. Everything — everything — in the Lord of the Rings is there for a reason. The words have pedigrees on top of their pedigrees. There are allusions only scholars catch and there are themes inspired by tales long forgotten by people who are not fluent in Gothic.

But Tolkien violently rejected any suggestion that The Lord of the Ringswas allegorical. The ring of power does not represent the atomic bomb, damn it. Rather, it was an epic novel — originally LOTR was one book, not three, over a thousand pages long, typed with two fingers — about friendship, heroism, and the eternal truths, most especially, according to Tolkien, death and loss. Tom Shippey, in his new book J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, argues that The Lord of the Rings is the most important novel of the 20th century.

I am no literary critic; if I were czar I would keep such people out of sight. And, to be honest, I haven't read Shippey's book. But one thing I know is undoubtedly true: The Lord of the Rings was the most important novel of my life and millions of others', if only for a time. This new movie is, at best, a shadow of that perfect novel. But since a shadow is all we can get, I am grateful for it.

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