Tolkien: Does Fiction Trump Fact?

Tolkien (2019)

Directed by Dome Karukoski

Fox Searchlight, 112 minutes, PG-13 (some war violence)

★★★

With the staggering financial success of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, how can anyone miss with a film about J. R. R. Tolkien? Director Dome Karukoski managed to do so, though it’s not entirely his fault. Nonetheless, Tolkien was a box office bomb that recouped just $9 million of its $20 million budget.

It’s not a bad movie, even though it’s flat in places. The problem is simpler. When a writer builds an elaborate fantasy world with a life of its own, it’s often the case that viewers care more about the fictional characters than the man behind the curtain. Karukoski is handicapped by a script from David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford that covers Tolkien’s life before he became a fantasy writer. It helps enhance enjoyment if you simply think of this as a coming-of-age film about someone who just happens to be J.R.R. Tolkien.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1971) was born in the Orange Free State, now part of South Africa. His father died when he was just 3, forcing his widow, Mabel, to take “Ronald” and his infant brother back to England, where they lived in the Midlands. It was exceedingly hard for a single woman to raise two young boys on her own, and the Tolkiens relied upon the Catholic Church for assistance. The movie opens with quick vignettes of their travails, as well as the largess of Ronald’s benefactor: Father Frances Morgan (Colm Meaney). The children were home schooled, but young Ronald proved precociously brilliant and Father Morgan both nurtured his talents and acted as a stern surrogate parent. When Mabel died when Ronald was 12, Father Morgan helped place him in a boys’ school and, eventually, as a scholarship boy at Oxford.

The film closely follows Tolkien’s life during his final years at boarding school, his time at Oxford, and his service during World War I. The British class system was very much in evidence, which meant Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) was tormented by his upper-class peers, though he eventually fell into a close friendship with three of them: Christopher Bache Smith (Anthony Boyle), Robert Gilson (Patrick Gibson), and Christopher Wiseman (Tom Glynn-Carney). They bonded over ideas, books, spirited hijinks, and an elevated sense of their own cleverness. They even formed their own secret group, the T.C.B.S. Club: the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, Barrovian” a play on Barrows, their favorite café. This part of the film plays a bit–perhaps too much–like something out of Dead Poet’s Society. We also meet Edith Mary Bratt (Lily Collins, Phil’s daughter), also a lodger in Ronald’s Birmingham boarding house, with whom 16-yar-old Tolkien falls in love and introduces to his intellectual circle.

Things don’t go as well at Oxford, where Tolkien is foundering at classics. Father Morgan intervenes in ways Ronald dislikes but must yield. Even then he is on the verge of being booted out when he meets Professor Joseph Wright (Derek Jacobi), who agrees to take on Tolkien as one of his literature students. Wright mentors Tolkien’s command of languages and his love of philology (the structure of and relationships between languages).

Interspersed with the linear narrative are snapshots of Tolkien and his mates during World War I. Neither Karukoski nor the scriptwriters could possibly exaggerate the war’s horrors; they do a credible job of showing just how grisly and idiotic it was. Tolkien probably would have died in conflict had he not contracted trench fever–a serious infection carried by lice–and was evacuated to England. The only historically dodgy thing Karukoski does is use foggy shots of warhorses and their riders to suggest that Tolkien’s balrogs derived from them. It’s also not entirely clear what Tolkien actually experienced and what was fever-induced delirium. We next meet Tolkien as a morose married man with children who teaches at Oxford, wrestles with survivor’s guilt, and struggles to write something about which he cares. Gee, wonder what that might be?

Perhaps you see the reason why the hordes avoided this film. Karukoski’s is a reasonably accurate account of what happened to young Tolkien, though a boyhood spider bite and an adolescent trip to Switzerland had greater impacts on The Hobbit than hanging out with his witty friends. Again, we must go back to the question of how much we want to know about a writer’s biography, especially in a movie that ends as the author is about to pen his masterworks. There is the additional obstacle of casting a film in which the only actors known outside the U.K. are Jacobi and Meaney, and their roles are essentially extended cameos. Tolkien ultimately calls to mind the 2017 A. A. Milne biopic Goodbye Christopher Robin. It too was a perfectly competent movie, but at the end of the day, there are way more people who want Winnie the Pooh and Hobbits than a pair of starchy British scribblers.

Rob Weir