Wired Mesh

Who Shot J.R.R.?

My freelance gig with the Pulse has afforded me the opportunity to review a handfull of films over the last month: "The Missing" and "Something's Gotta Give," both of which I generally hated, and "Mona Lisa Smile," which I enjoyed even though I tried very hard not to. I wrote about 700 words on each of these movies; you can examine my opinions for yourself, along with many other articles from talented individuals, by seizing a free copy of Pulse at your local hipster coffee shop.

I have not, however, written anything on Peter Jackson's "Return of the King." There have been so many reviews of the movies, so many angry arguments over them, and so many people who understand the source material more comprehensively than I do, that I decided there was nothing else to be said.

Turns out I was wrong. There was something more to be said, and, as is often the case, Anthony Lane has said it. Notice, Josiah and Steele, how he notes the ways that Jackson fails to grasp Tolkien's vision, and then in the very next sentence brushes aside these concerns as perepheral to the task of cinematic vision.

"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."

What Lane has done here -- and done so effortlessly it makes me sick -- is to resolve the tension between Tolkien purists and Jackson fans, by conceding that the films miss the books' original spirit, then arguing that the movies have crafted an entirely new spirit, one more in the tradition of Douglas Fairbanks than J. R. R. Tolkien. This is criticism at its finest: simultaneously unsparing and uplifting, and making me want to dash away from my desk and go to the movies.