There is
much to admire and to love in Peter Jackson’s “Return of the
King,” but the high hopes that the second film in the series, “The
Two Towers,” inspired (at least in me) mostly go unfulfilled in the
crucial third and final film. And yet, even where (or perhaps especially where)
I am unhappiest with Jackson’s version of “The Return of the
King,” I find that it has deepened my appreciation of Tolkien’s
skill as a writer and my love for his book.
So it is certainly not my purpose to dissuade any lovers of Tolkien’s
work from seeing Jackson’s films. On the contrary: go see the films,
learn from them, and (admit it!) enjoy them too.
In this
review (which has assumed the dimensions of an essay—long film, long
write-up), I begin with an appreciation, not of Tolkien’s skill as a
writer, but of Jackson’s skill as a film-maker and of some of the many
successes in “The Return of the King.” Second comes a discussion of
some of the alterations of Tolkien’s original that were probably
unavoidable, but that also involved significant losses to the force and meaning
of the story as told in the film. Third is the unpleasant task of analyzing a
number of serious mistakes that I believe Jackson and his fellow scriptwriters
made and explaining what I think they should have done instead. A much briefer
separate review, “`The Lord of the Rings’ and the Trials of
Adaptation,” offers an overview of all three films.
1: Things to Celebrate
My relative
disappointment in “The Return of the King” is certainly not caused
by any falling-off in the strength of the images, taken one by one. Some, like
the huge chunks of stone and masonry hurled by the catapults of friend and foe
alike in the battle for Minas Tirith, or the charge of twelve or twenty mûmakil the size of bridge pylons later in the same battle,
are meant to beat down all resistance in the audience, and do so. Others, like the terrible “fiery
letters” shining, malevolent and lovely, for one last time as the Ring
heats toward the melting point in the magma within Orodruin, or the beacon
fires that leap across the frozen summits of the White Mountains in a few
seconds, spanning hundreds of miles and summoning Rohan to ride to the last aid
of Gondor, have still greater force and far more beauty, quickening, rather
than stunning, our imagination. Others, like the prolonged ascent by Frodo,
Sam, and Gollum up the Straight Stairs, with the haunted city of Minas Morgul
floating below them like a strange nocturnal organism at the bottom of a well,
have a quiet, cumulative power, physicalizing scene-by-scene the treacherous
inner terrain where the characters struggle up the daunting face of their
feelings, hard and edgy as hewn rock, slippery with grief and grievance. To
fall here is to fall much farther than mere flesh can ever fall.
And these
triumphs of the eye, both minor and major, are only a sampling of what the film
gives us. Who could forget (or forego mentioning) the chilling efficiency with
which Shelob, the giant spider, wraps up the anesthetized Frodo in a shroud of
new-spun spider rope, spinning him about with the ease of long practice, a
suggestive ease that adds to the immediate horror the imaginative dimension of
time, in which (as our inner eye opens to the implications of what we are
seeing on the screen) this creature has fed to its fill on uncounted helpless
captives over dark centuries? Or the abrupt change in the mountain troll who
has been trying to pulverize Aragorn in the battle before the Black Gate and
then stops, virtually in mid-stroke, as the Ring’s power over him is
broken and without a moment’s hesitation starts off like a hound on a
scent, looking neither down at the beings whom he has just been trying to kill
nor back at the land where he has been enslaved, abandoning the battle, heading
for home--free at last!? Or (to complete the movement to the other pole of the
film’s spiritual geography) the sudden return of old Bilbo’s vigor
at the Grey Havens when he catches the scent of a new Adventure and the joyous,
loving smile on Frodo’s face as he bids a wordless farewell to his dear
friends—Frodo, happy at last!?
In all these
cases, Jackson (and his co-writers Walsh and Boyens) have built on details or
situations that already existed in Tolkien’s book, though that fact takes
nothing away from their achievement. There are also cases, if far fewer than in
“The Two Towers,” where they have boldly and successfully altered
the original, transposing, translating, or reassigning actions, words, or
objects. One involves the haunting lines describing the landfall off the coast
of Elvenhome at the very end of the book: “The grey rain-curtain turned
all to silver glass and was rolled back, and [Frodo] beheld white shores and
beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.” This description is turned into direct
speech, delivered (most movingly) by Gandalf to Pippin, as a promise of a life
beyond death when it seems that Minas Tirith is falling and they will both very
soon perish and Middle Earth with them. The same passage is used again in the
song over the credits, extending the coda of the story into the
“afterlife” of the film, where there are white words and blackness
behind them, hiding the world into which Frodo, and Bilbo, and Gandalf, and the
High Elves have now passed.
Another,
more complex bit of picking apart a bit of text and then reweaving the threads
involves “The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen,” in Appendix A of the
book. First, the original words:
Arwen remained in Rivendell, and when Aragorn was abroad,
from afar she watched over him in thought; and in hope she made for him a great
and kingly standard, such as only one might display who claimed the lordship of
the Númenóreans and the inheritance of Elrond.
After a few years Gilraen [Aragorn’s mother] took
leave of Elrond and returned to her own people in Eriador, and lived alone; and
she seldom saw her son again, for he spent many years in far countries. But on
a time, when Aragorn had returned to the north, he came to her, and she said to
him before he went:
“This is our last parting, Estel, my son. I am aged by
care, even as one of lesser Men; and now that it draws near I cannot face the
darkness of our time that gathers upon Middle-earth. I shall leave it
soon.”
Aragorn tried to comfort her, saying: “Yet there may
be a light beyond the darkness; and if so, I would have you see it and be
glad.”
But she answered only with this linnod:
Ónen
i-Estel Edain, ú-chebin estel anim,
and Aragorn went away heavy of
heart. Gilraen died before the next spring.”
The linnod (a
one-line verse epigram in Elvish) means, “I gave Hope to the
Dúnedain, I have kept no hope for myself”; the name,
“Estel,” that Aragorn was given as a child before his heirship to
the throne was revealed to him by Elrond, is an Elvish word for
“hope.”
.In the
film, the linnod is re-assigned to
Aragorn, who speaks it during his meeting with Elrond at Dunharrow just before
Elrond delivers the sword Narsil, reforged. It is the last time the king-to-be
expresses the self-doubt and pessimism that has dogged him since he arrived in
Rivendell in “The Fellowship of the Ring.” With Narsil, Hope
recovers hope, and takes up his destiny at last.
. There was no room for Gilraen herself even in the main
body of the text of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, much less in
Jackson’s films, but Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens have managed to make room
in their script for Gilraen’s memorable words. As a lover of the book, I
salute the delicacy of this gesture (while hoping that other, or later, prints
of the film than the one that I saw will be subtitled, so the rest of the
audience can at least understand the literal meaning of what Aragorn says!).
In another
change, the Arwen of the film, instead of making “a great and kingly
standard” that is delivered to Aragorn by his fellow Rangers and by
Elrond’s twin sons at the Fords of Isen after the battle of Helm’s
Deep, persuades Elrond to have Narsil reforged at last. (In the book, Aragorn,
who is quite free of the self-doubt he shows in the film, takes Narsil reforged
with him when he leaves Rivendell with the other members of the
Fellowship.) This change continues
the enlargement of Arwen’s “agency” in the film, as compared
to the book: rather than only contributing a banner (important as that is in
the book), she hands him, via her father, the very weapon that he must have to
overcome his own irresolution, to convince the King of the Dead that he is
indeed the true heir of Isildur to whom they owe their ancient oath and who can
at last release them from it, and to claim the throne of Gondor. It also gives
Elrond an appropriately magnificent gift with which to present Aragorn in token
of their reconciliation and of his recognition that if Aragorn fails, Arwen
will die.
But there is
at least one thing more that the filmmakers took from this passage and
transformed, namely, the inability of Aragorn’s mother to “face the
darkness of our time that gathers upon Middle-earth.” I believe that the
“fading” of Gilraen’s life under the influence of the Shadow
in Tolkien’s “Tale of Aragorn and Arwen” suggested the idea
of having Arwen sink towards death as the Shadow spreads out from Mordor in the
final days of the struggle against Sauron. Arwen does no such thing in the
book, but the fact that she seems to be dying makes Elrond’s capitulation
to Aragorn and to fate credible.
Whether or not this last
speculation is correct, there is still plenty of evidence that the filmmakers
meditated intensely and creatively on the passage quoted above. Their re-use of
the materials that it offered to them added significantly to the force of their
reinterpretation of the story of the book, and I think deserves our admiration.
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for most of the other major changes,
voluntary or involuntary, that they have introduced into “The Return of
the King.”
2: Regrettable but (Probably) Necessary Changes
Some of the
changes from the original, however regrettable, should probably be accepted as
necessary (in the earlier films, the most notable example was the deletion of
the Old Forest/Tom Bombadil episode from “The Fellowship of the
Ring”). Audiences can only endure so many hours of watching a film
without an intermission—at 200 minutes, “The Return of the King”
is right at the limits. And the amazing technical feats that contemporary
film-making can achieve, especially as extended by the innovations made during
the creation of Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films, still
have their limits too.
The latter
are probably why the Great Darkness was dropped. Doing the whole battle of
Minas Tirith in darkness or near-darkness would seriously compromise the visual
effectiveness or even the filmability of this crucial sequence. But as a
result, the wind that brings Aragorn’s fleet of ships up the Anduin no
longer also brings the light of the sun back to the world of Minas Tirith after
days of unnatural, heart-sapping night, nor does “the grass flame into
green about the white feet” of Theoden’s mount as the Rohirrim
unleash their great charge “out of doubt, out of dark, to the day’s
rising” (RotK VI.6), and the splendor of the moment when
Éowyn’s “helm of…secrecy…fall[s] from her, and
her bright hair, released from its bonds, gleam[s] with pale gold upon her
shoulders” is diminished (see RotK V.6 and VI.6). A great loss,
but perhaps one that could not be avoided.
The lack of
room, even in a 200-minute film, has still higher costs, however inevitable
they may be. The two chapters, “The Land of Shadow” and
“Mount Doom” {RotK VI.2-3), that vividly portray the trial
of Frodo and Sam by thirst, hunger, and despair between their flight from the
Tower of Cirith Ungol and their arrival at the Chambers of Fire—chapters
that are so critical to the deepening of Frodo’s and Sam’s
relationship and to our understanding of Frodo’s gradual withdrawal from
the physical world into the wraith-world of the Ring—are reduced to a few
minutes of fairly perfunctory privation. In addition, the intercutting with the
decision back in Minas Tirith to mount a diversionary attack on Sauron at the
Black Gate and the ensuing preparations for battle, even though completely
appropriate dramatically, further reduces the impact of Frodo’s via
crucis, so that his great speech to Sam—
“No taste of food, no feel
of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of
moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil
between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes,
and all else fades.”—
is almost wholly robbed of the devastating emotional force
it has in the book.
Another
element that readers of the book will miss is the flowering of the relationship
between Éowyn and Faramir in Minas Tirith when they are brought together
in the Houses of Healing after the great battle has been fought and won (RotK
V.8 and VI. 5). Éowyn lets go of her infatuation with Aragorn; Faramir
puts his own grief behind him, grief for his father, Denethor (who tried to
make Faramir his companion in death), and for his beloved older brother,
Boromir. We see the healing of Middle-earth, of which the royal marriages in RotK
are a potent symbol, beginning even as the outcome of the War of the Ring still
seems (to Éowyn and Faramir) to hang in the balance.
In the film,
by contrast, we are left to infer all this, or something like it, on the
slender evidence of a happy glance exchanged between Éowyn and Faramir
during the coronation scene, when Aragorn, whom Gandalf has just crowned King
of Gondor, and Arwen at last embrace. Éowyn’s reaction might
surprise the attentive viewer, since the last we knew, she was riding off to
Minas Tirith, perhaps suicidally, because Aragorn had just rejected her and
gone to his own death, as she thought, on the Paths of the Dead. Worse, the
whole coronation scene feels hurried, hollow, anti-climactic, like a
conventional happy ending with everyone pairing off, or an improved version
(but not improved enough) of the awards scene in “Star Wars.” One reason for the flatness of this
scene is the lack of adequate emotional preparation for it, so that it might
have its proper significance for the audience. If the virtual erasure of the
Éowyn/Faramir by-story had had no effect on the story as re-told in the
film, then it could be spared, but when the general audience, including those
who have never read a single word of Tolkien’s book, senses that
something is amiss, one is entitled to look at what has been omitted from the
original story and to argue that its omission is at least part of the trouble.
Yet another
factor that contributes to the relative failure of the coronation scene is the
near-absence of “high
politics and strategy” from the film. Such matters are fairly easy to
deal with in a novel, but far harder to make comprehensible or palatable in the
visual medium of film. It is no wonder that the film-makers decided not to load
their movie down with another hundredweight of historical background, given
that the prologue to “The Fellowship of the Ring” took something
like 8 minutes just to deal with the history of the Ring. One shudders at the
idea of trying to educate audiences about the relationship between the North
and South Kingdoms of Gondor, or the chess-game the Elves and the Wizards have
been playing with Sauron for the past few centuries, or the alliances that
Sauron has formed with peoples to the East and the South, or the long
historical background of those alliances over the three millennia that Gondor
has been the dominant power in the Northwest of Middle-earth. Yet, without some
knowledge of these things, the audience is left with very little understanding
of what the “return” of the King of the movie’s title means
to the peoples of Eriador, Rhovanion (where Gimli and Legolas come from),
Rohan, and Gondor, much less to the King himself, or of the heroism of the
Rangers, the royal line of the North Kingdom of Eriador, who endured in the
shadows for a thousand years before Aragorn reclaims the throne.
The near-total loss in the films of the historical and political context
supplied in the book means that the deep time and the wide spaces of
Tolkien’s Middle-earth are gravely diminished.
And by the
third film, they have already shrunk a good deal. Back in the first film, the
“necessary” omission of the Old Forest/Tom Bombadil episode took
with it the high point of horror in the first 200 pages of the book: the
capture of the hobbits by a barrow-wight, an evil spirit sent westward over a
thousand years ago by the Witch-King of Angmar (our old acquaintance, the chief
Nazgûl) to seize and ensorcel the tombs of the petty kings of a
disintegrating North Kingdom. There is plenty of horror in the films, most
would agree, so it would seem that yet another hair-rising encounter with the
dark side of Middle-earth would hardly be missed. But after Tom Bombadil rescues
the hobbits, he gives Merry and the others some very special weapons:
For each of the hobbits he chose
a dagger, long, leaf-shaped, and keen, of marvelous workmanship, damasked with
serpent-forms in red and gold…Then he told them that these blades were
forged many long years ago by Men of Westernesse [i.e., the northern branch of
the Númenóreans who rule Gondor and from whom Aragorn is
descended]; they were foes of the Dark Lord, but they were overcome by the evil
king of Carn Dûm in the Land of Angmar. [FotR I.8]
Merry uses
the dagger that Bombadil gave him to stab the chief Nazgûl in the
hamstring; he drops to his knees, and Éowyn is able to finish him off.
In case we have forgotten where Merry’s weapon came from, the narrator
reminds us a couple of pages farther on:
Then [Merry] looked for his sword
that he had let fall; for even as he struck his blow his arm was numbed, and
now he could only use his left hand. And behold! there lay his weapon, but the
blade was smoking like a dry branch that has been thrust in a fire; and as he
watched it, it writhed and withered and was consumed.
So passed the sword of the
Barrow-downs, work of Westernesse. But glad would he have been to know its fate
who wrought it slowly long ago in the North-kingdom when the Dúnedain
were young, and chief among their foes was the dread realm of Angmar and its
sorcerer king. No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would
have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the
spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will. [RotK V.6]
So, in the
original, it is not Éowyn and Meriadoc Brandybuck alone who bring the
Lord of the Nazgûl to his end—it is also the uncounted, faceless
dead who have struggled and died for thousands of years in the long Resistance
to the Dark Lord and his servants. Éowyn’s and Merry’s
heroism in the film is thrilling, but it lacks the deep note—the note of
deep time, of the dying generations of those who go to their graves with their
courage unrewarded, of the “long defeat,” as Galadriel calls it,
that turns at long, long last to victory—that gives the death of the Lord
of the Nazgûl its full meaning.
3: Regrettable and Unnecessary Changes (aka Mistakes)
a) The Dead.
One might object that “The Return of the Kings” does not
entirely ignore the theme of unfinished business from earlier struggles with
Sauron that is at last brought to a conclusion. There is the destruction of the
Ring itself. And there are the Dead
whom Aragorn leads into battle. They swore to Isildur that they would join the
Númenóreans in the war against Sauron, and broke their oath. Now,
they return to the world of the living a final time, to fulfill their oath and
to be liberated from the wraith-world they inhabit.
But
the way that the film-makers use the Dead in “The Return of the
Kings” causes serious trouble. To understand what went wrong, we first
need to review just how Tolkien uses the Dead in RotK.
In the book,
their power is in terror, not force of arms. Their king does not clash swords
with Aragorn. Instead, they follow Aragorn (along with Legolas, Gimli, the sons
of Elrond, and the other Rangers) out of the darkness of the Paths of the Dead
and across the fields and rivers of South Gonder under the Great Darkness that
has come out of Mordor. For four days and five nights, they ride, Living and
Dead, raising the countryside as they go; many soldiers of Gondor had stayed
behind to defend their homes against the expected attack of the Corsairs.
At Pelargir
on the great river Anduin, the Corsairs turn at bay, and Aragorn sends the army
of the Dead to the attack; witless with terror (“the Dead needed no
longer any weapon but fear”), the Corsairs fling themselves into the
water or flee, and Aragorn and his followers seize their ships. The people of
South Gondor, who have answered the call to gather at Pelargir, and the
Corsairs’ galley-slaves, who have been set free, sail the fleet up Anduin
and arrive on the field of Minas Tirith just as the tide of battle is about to
turn against Rohan and Gondor.
Now consider
the use of the Dead in the movie. No longer does their power lie in fear and
darkness. Instead, they arrive in broad daylight on the field of Minas Tirith
and sweep all before them, flooding up into the city, which the orcs and the
trolls have nearly taken, like an enormous green wave. This spectacular image
is probably why Jackson kept them in the script, and it is a sight to see, but
the costs are high:
1)
the great charge of Rohan, which saves Minas Tirith from
imminent capture in the book, is outdone and undercut by yet another charge,
this time by the Dead, who usurp Rohan’s saving role;
2)
the valor and sacrifice of Rohan and the soldiers of Gondor,
including Éowyn’s and Merry’s victory over the Lord of the
Nazgûl, is trivialized—apparently, if Aragorn had arrived a few
hours earlier, the Dead could have wiped out Sauron’s hosts without any
need for help from the Living.
For me, Jackson’s decision to involve the Dead directly in the battle of Minas Tirith, and to make them the
deciding factor, tipped the story at that point from high epic seriousness into
comic-book heroics (note the three-hero charge against the host of orcs by
Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli when the ships arrive at Minas Tirith).
Specifically, Jackson’s decision made me realize the wisdom of
Tolkien’s decision to keep the Dead well away from Minas Tirith, and to
make their effectiveness a function of a familiar human weakness: fear of
ghosts. In fantasy, the question of where to limit the magical powers that one
confers on one’s “good” characters, lest things become
altogether too easy for them, is always an important one. On this point,
Tolkien generally shows great tact. If Jackson had paid more attention to that
tact before letting himself be seduced by a few seconds of supernatural
spectacle, he might have resisted temptation, and the film would have been
better for it. (And he could still have had the green horde ride across the
waters of Anduin—at Pelargir, not Minas Tirith.)
By itself,
the mistake made in the handling of the Dead is damaging but not crippling to
“The Return of the King,” given the film’s great length and
relentless pace. Other mistakes have more serious consequences.
b) Gollum. In “The Return of the King,”
the scriptwriters go out of their way to lend Gollum an ingenious maliciousness
that he lacks in the book. Among the many unpleasant adjectives that one might
apply to the Gollum of the book (Sam is a good source here),
“clever” is not one that comes to mind. Yet Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens
have added a scene in which Gollum steals Frodo and Sam’s remaining
lembas bread, sprinkles crumbs on Sam’s clothing, tosses the bread over
the edge of the Straight Stairs, and then accuses Sam of greedily devouring the
bread while Frodo slept. In the ensuing wrangle (one of several in which Frodo
or Sam punch Gollum about), Frodo orders Sam to “go home,” and Sam,
understandably devastated, starts back down the stairs, slips, goes sliding
down quite a distance, and fetches up next to the lembas bread. Meanwhile, a
foolish Frodo and a viciously triumphant Gollum continue on toward
Shelob’s lair.
The
immediate purpose of all this seems to be two-fold: 1) to separate Sam and
Frodo so Frodo will encounter Shelob alone, and 2) to add dramatic interest to the
Frodo/Sam/Gollum triangle by letting Gollum drive a wedge between Frodo and
Sam. But there is no real point (that I can see) to sending Frodo into
Shelob’s lair by himself, with time-wasting, standard horror-film
flailing about in conventionally sticky spider webs followed by yet another
uninteresting punch-up (this time, it’s Frodo vs Gollum). The handling in
the book (Frodo and Sam face the spider together; Frodo loses his head and
tries to rush on through the pass into Mordor, crazy with joy at their
unexpected escape from the monster; Gollum attacks Sam, and the spider stings
Frodo while they fight; Sam defeats Gollum and then attacks the spider and
drives it off) is far more powerful, not to mention consistent with
everybody’s character, and just as easy to film. As for adding dramatic
interest to the Frodo/Sam/Gollum triangle, there was already plenty of tension
among the three hobbits in the book, and the division Gollum has sown turns out
to be barren. Sam rescues Frodo (twice); the second time, Frodo is conscious
and very happy to see Sam, and off they go, fast friends again.
To me, this
particular series of alterations seems the work of the imp of the perverse, a
mischievous spirit that just does not know when to leave well enough alone. In
themselves, the changes would merely be annoying, but unfortunately, their
effects do not end when Frodo knocks Gollum over a cliff and drags himself off
to his second rendezvous with the spider.
The problem
is, the Gollum that we saw in “The Two Towers”—tortured,
riven, a pitiable victim of the Ring—has now been replaced by a cruel,
cunning Gollum who seems to have room for other motives than “pleasing
Master” or recovering the Ring. By the time Gollum plays his nasty trick
on Sam in the movie, there is no imaginable reason, given Gollum’s one
goal in life, why he should bother. Indeed, since he is well aware that he is
leading both Hobbits to their death, and he particularly dislikes Sam, he has
every reason to keep Sam at Frodo’s side and to be sure that BOTH hobbits
go to the ugly death he has arranged for them. A Gollum that can gratuitously
torment Sam is no longer a Gollum that is merely a victim. And that means that
he has forfeited the pity, not only of Sam and Frodo, but (worse) of the
audience.
We next see Gollum as Frodo and Sam are
about to enter the Chambers of Fire. Most of the struggle that follows is
strictly “by the book,” up till the point when Frodo, instead of
collapsing once his finger is bitten off, springs up and grapples with Gollum
for (re)possession of the Ring. Apparently, the scriptwriters did not like
Tolkien’s ending, in which Gollum, brandishing Frodo’s finger with
Ring attached and shrieking “My precious!” in a delirium of joy,
topples over the brink into the waiting magma. One reason for this may be
related to a problem that I have already commented on: the failure of the film
to make real to us the slow debilitation of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum during the
almost waterless week that all three of them endure as they cross the desert
between the western mountains of Mordor and the Mountain of Fire. In the book,
given the near-skeletal condition of the three hobbits, it is quite believable
that Gollum could lose his physical balance (his mental balance went over the
side centuries ago) and fall to his death. In the film as it stands, such an
ending might seem forced. Another reason (a less creditable one, also already
commented on) is Jackson’s predilection for having his characters come to
blows as frequently as possible—probably a concession to the groundlings
out there in the darkened theaters, or at least his notion of what they like.
In any
event, I am not greatly troubled by (even though I do not welcome) the final
wrestling-match between Frodo and Gollum, or the literally cliff-hanging
aftermath in which Sam rescues Frodo—especially since the latter includes
a visually effective and dramatically appropriate reversal of Frodo’s
rescue of Sam at the end of “The Fellowship of the Ring,” when
Frodo reaches down into the water and his hand and Sam’s close round each
other’s wrists.
No, what
troubles me is the emotional emptiness of what should be the climactic moment
in all the many hours of the three films. Just a moment before, I had been
deeply moved when Sam (in a line right out of the book) tells Frodo, “I
can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you and it as well,” and
indeed carries him the last few feet up the steep side of the volcano to the
surface of Sauron’s road leading from the Dark Tower to the Chambers of
Fire. Why then, did I feel nothing as I watched Frodo put on the ring, lose it
to Gollum, and live while Gollum dies?
I believe it
was because I no longer felt anything for Gollum. One might suppose that this
would hardly matter—after all, Frodo and Sam are our heroes, are they
not, the hobbits whose sufferings we share, whose perils we tremble at? Who
cares what happens to the ruined hobbit, Gollum!
Well, the
experience of watching Jackson’s film has taught me otherwise. What
Gandalf told Frodo hours (or hundreds of pages) ago, in an exchange that the
film-makers abridged and transposed from Bag End to the depths of Moria, turns
out to be just as crucial for the audience as for Frodo himself:
“But this is terrible!” cried
Frodo…”What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that
vile creature, when he had a chance!”
“Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and
Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be
sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because
he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.”
“I am sorry,” said Frodo. “But I am
frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum.”
“You have not seen him,” Gandalf broke in.
“No, and I don’t want to,” said Frodo.
“I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the
Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he
is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.”
“Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live
deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do
not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot
see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but
there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart
tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end;
and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many—yours
not least…” [FotR I.2]
The film does not alter the letter of Gandalf’s
prophetic words (“the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many—yours
not least”), but the spirit is gone. The “Pity” for Gollum
that Gandalf enjoins on Frodo (and by extension, us) has fled from the film-makers’
hearts, from Frodo and Sam’s, and from our own. For on the Stairs of
Cirith Ungol, Gollum became merely a villain.
Looking back
at the book through the lens of the film, I have realized that (after all), it
is Gollum who dies, not Frodo or Sam, and who dies completely, body, soul, and
mind. That it is Gollum, that great and insignificant sinner, who dies for
Frodo’s sin of presumption—at the test (after all), Frodo fails,
and puts on the Ring, and Gollum, his substitute, takes away his burden and
goes into the Fire for him. But if this is not felt, if it remains a purely metaphysical conception, if
we can no longer feel in our bones that what Gollum is, so Frodo (and we too)
would become in time, if the light-and-shadow pairing of Frodo and Gollum is
broken into mere Victim and mere Villain, then we fail at the test, and the film fails too.
If I am
right—if our Pity for Gollum must follow him all the way into the
Fire—, then it makes sense to look in the book for evidence that Tolkien
took pains, especially after Gollum’s dreadful betrayal of Frodo and Sam
to Shelob, to keep the flickering light of sympathy for an extremely
unsympathetic character alive in our hearts—ready, like Galadriel’s
glass, to shine forth at need. Before the scenes at Cirith Ungol, we had the
steady contrast between Sam’s uncomplicated detestation of Gollum and
Frodo’s complex, painfully sympathetic insight into Gollum, reinforced by
Frodo’s verbal corrections of Sam, to guide us—to keep us, in fact,
from becoming like Sam and rejecting Gollum out of a canine loyalty to
“Master Frodo.” Here is what we find after Frodo and Sam go on by
themselves toward Mount Doom, pursued by Gollum, apart now, yet still bound
together by privation and by the Ring. First, the view of the prosecution:
“We shan’t win
through by fighting,” [says Frodo].
“But we may have some to
do,” said Sam. “And there’s knives and stray arrows. That
Gollum isn’t dead, for one thing…” [RotK VI.2]
Even the orcs despise Gollum, it seems:
“All right, all
right!” said the tracker [orc]. “I’ll say no more and go on
thinking. But what’s the black sneak got to do with it all? That gobbler
with the flapping hands?” [loc. cit.]
Now for
Frodo’s view—his silence about Gollum is what is eloquent, as well
as the delicacy of his application to himself and Sam, as well as Gollum, of a
term (“slinking”) taken from Sam’s Gollum-vocabulary:
Sam spoke into Frodo’s ear all that he could find
words for of Gollum’s treacherous attack, the horror of Shelob, and his
own adventures with the orcs. When he had finished, Frodo said nothing but took
Sam’s hand and pressed it. At length he stirred.
“Well, I suppose we must be going on again,” he
said. “I wonder how long it will be before we really are caught and all
the toiling and the slinking will be over, and in vain…” [RotK
VI.2]
During the
rest of the journey to Mount Doom, Sam’s and Frodo’s attitudes do
not change: Frodo sees Gollum as a fellow creature, caught in the same snare as
himself; Sam feels only hatred. In the end, though, in a turn of events that is
crucial both to the plot and to the meaning of the book, they change places.
Sam has
carried Frodo up the steep slopes of the volcano. At last, he struggles up onto
Sauron’s road to the Chambers of Fire. As he carries Frodo along it,
Gollum leaps down upon them in a cutting. Sam sees him out of the tail of his
eye, falling “like a small piece of black stone.” Notice how Gollum
changes in this passage from inanimate object (“black stone”) to a
“voice” and then to a fully seen, three-dimensional reality, a
“creature” (however “ruined”) at last outside the
distorting influence of Sam’s detestation of him; notice too the Pity
that Sam now feels and that Frodo spurns:
…Above him as he lay [Sam]
heard a hated voice.
“Wicked master!” it hissed. “Wicked master
cheats us; cheats Sméagol, gollum. He musstn’t go that way. He
musstn’t hurt Preciouss. Give it to Sméagol, yess, give it to us!
Give it to uss!”
With a violent heave Sam rose up. At once he drew his sword;
but he could do nothing. Gollum and Frodo were locked together…Frodo
fought back with a sudden fury that amazed Sam, and Gollum also. Even so things
might have gone far otherwise, if Gollum himself had remained unchanged; but
whatever dreadful paths, lonely and hungry and waterless, he had trodden, driven
by a devouring desire and a terrible fear, they had left grievous marks on him.
He was a lean, starved, haggard thing, all bones and tight-drawn sallow skin. A
wild light flamed in his eyes, but his malice was no longer matched by his old
griping strength. Frodo flung him off and rose up quivering.
“Down, down!” he gasped, clutching his hand to
his breast, so that beneath the cover of his leather shirt he clasped the Ring.
“Down, you creeping thing, and out of my path! Your time is at an end.
You cannot betray me or slay me now.”
Then suddenly, as before under the eaves of the Emyn Muil
[when he, and we, first saw Gollum clearly], Sam saw these two rivals with
other vision. A crouching shape, scarcely more than the shadow of a living thing,
a creature now wholly ruined and defeated, yet filled with a hideous lust and
rage; and before it stood stern, untouchable now by pity, a figure robed in
white but at its breast it held a wheel of fire. Out of the fire there spoke a
commanding voice.
“Begone, and trouble me no more! If you touch me ever
again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom.”
The crouching shape backed away, terror in its blinking
eyes, and yet at the same time insatiable desire.
Then the vision passed…
Frodo has now gone beyond (or sunk below) Pity, onto a
level of spiritual power far greater than Sam’s or Gollum’s, but
also deeper into the power of the Ring—indeed, it is not clear in the
text whether the “commanding voice” that cows Gollum is his or the
Ring’s. He casts away the shield of Pity that he had long held in front
of Gollum, protecting him from Sam, and he turns away—from Gollum, from
Sam, from the Quest—and walks, “slowly but erect,” toward his
Marriage with the Ring (for after all, an unadorned gold band, in the world we
know, is a wedding ring).
And Sam
picks up the shield of Pity that Frodo has cast away, though that is not his
immediate impulse:
“Now!” said Sam. “At last I can deal with
you!” He leaped forward with drawn blade ready for battle. But Gollum did
not spring. He fell flat upon the ground and whimpered.
“Don’t kill us,” he wept.
“Don’t hurt us with nasty cruel steel! Let us live, yes, live just
a little longer. Lost lost! We’re lost. And when Precious goes
we’ll die, yes, die into the dust.” He clawed up the ashes of the
path with his long fleshless fingers. “Dusst!” he hissed.
Sam’s hand wavered. His mind was hot with wrath and
the memory of evil. It would be just to slay this treacherous, murderous
creature, just and many times deserved; and also it seemed the only safe thing
to do. But deep in his heart there was something that restrained him: he could
not strike this thing lying in the dust, forlorn, ruinous, utterly wretched. He
himself, though only for a little while, had borne the ring, and now dimly he
guessed the agony of Gollum’s shriveled mind and body, enslaved to that
Ring, unable to find peace or relief ever in life again. But Sam had no words
to express what he felt.
“Oh, curse you, you stinking thing!” he said.
“Go away! Be off! I don’t trust you, not as far as I could kick
you; but be off. Or I shall hurt you,
yes, with nasty cruel steel.”
This is precisely the right balance of reluctant empathy
and visceral loathing, a balance that is both morally exact and psychologically
convincing—one that Sam at last achieves, after great inner struggle,
standing together for a moment with the narrator and the reader.
Of course,
Gollum, being as irredeemable as he is pitiable, attacks again, from behind,
and returns (for Sam) to his previous status as a faceless threat. But Sam has
already made his crucial decision, to let Gollum live, and it makes sense that
he would not hold onto his hard-won insight into Gollum’s dreadful
condition for long:
Then Frodo [who is standing “black against the
glare” at “the very Crack of Doom,” some distance ahead of
Sam] stirred and spoke with a clear voice, indeed with a voice clearer and more
powerful than Sam had ever heard him use…”I have come,” he
said. “But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do
this deed. The Ring is mine!”…
Something struck Sam violently in the back…a dark
shape sprang over him. He lay still and for a moment all went black…
Sam got up…He groped forward, and then he saw a
strange and terrible thing. Gollum on the edge of the abyss was fighting like a
mad thing with an unseen foe…And all the while he hissed but spoke no
words…
Suddenly Sam saw Gollum’s long hands draw upwards to
his mouth; his white fangs gleamed, and then snapped as they bit. Frodo gave a
cry, and there he was, fallen upon his knees at the chasm’s edge. But
Gollum, dancing like a mad thing, held aloft the ring, a finger still thrust
within its circle. It shone now as if verily it was wrought of living fire.
“Precious, precious, precious!” Gollum cried.
“My precious! O my Precious!” And with that, even as his eyes were
lifted up to gloat on his prize, he stepped too far, toppled, wavered for a
moment on the brink, and then with a shriek he fell.
Notice how Gollum no longer hisses. Notice how language
for him has shrunk to his word for the Ring (and himself), to the first person
possessive pronoun, and to a cry of satisfied desire. And notice how, as was
said earlier in the book, the Ring gives power according to the stature of its
wielder—in Gollum’s case, the wielder has so little
“stature” left that the Ring cannot even protect him from a simple
slip-and-fall. Indeed, now that It has fallen back into the hands of its old
victim, whom It ruined, It cannot even protect Itself.
In the aftermath,
with death staring both hobbits in the face, but with the burden of the Quest
and the Ring at last taken from them, the thoughts of Frodo and Sam turn to
Gollum. Sam’s voice has a new tone now as he speaks of his old nemesis;
Frodo’s voice recovers the tone that it had maintained from “The
Taming of Sméagol” till the moment, only moments ago, when he
became “untouchable by pity” under the spell of the Ring:
“Your poor hand!” [Sam] said. “And I have
nothing to bind it with, or comfort it. I would have spared him a whole hand of
mine rather. But he’s gone now beyond recall, gone for ever.”
“Yes,” said Frodo. “But do you remember
Gandalf’s words: Even Gollum may have something yet to do? But for him, Sam, I could not have destroyed the
Ring. The Quest would have been in vain, even at the bitter end. So let us
forgive him! For the Quest is achieved, and now all is over. I am glad you are
here with me. Here at the end of all things, Sam.”
Why, oh why,
did the screenwriters throw away all this delicately wrought dance of deep
feelings and precise moral discriminations in the book, when they had gone to
such pains to preserve the audience’s empathy for Gollum in “The
Two Towers”? Why, if they had decided to destroy our Pity for Gollum on
the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, did they go out of their way to open “The
Return of the King,” unexpectedly, with a prologue showing how the Ring
ensnared Déagol and Sméagol and brought the murderer
Smeágol/Gollum, step by step, to the “nasty furtive eating,”
“resentful remembering,” and “empty night” of the
virtual tomb under the Misty Mountains where Bilbo found him, hundreds of years
later? I confess, I simply do not understand. It seems so senseless to me.
I have
similar feelings about several other decisions made by Jackson, Walsh, and
Boyens in “The Return of the King.” Most of them can be dealt with
far more briefly than the mishandling of Gollum.
c) Gandalf. Reducing Gandalf to yet another of the
martial artists in “The Return of the King” was not a good idea. There
are at least two reasons why not. The first is a question of consistency: those
who remember “The Two Towers” will perhaps not have forgotten what
happened to the weapons of Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli when they tried to
attack Gandalf, thinking he was Saruman. The second is Gandalf’s standing
as a Wizard and as a figure of great moral authority (in the first two films,
at least): it lessens him in our eyes to see him whacking away at orcs. His
warfare should be reserved for a different plane, the one on which his fellow
wizard Saruman, or the Nazgûl, operate. They are his peers in spiritual
power: what business does he have with swordplay after he has defeated the
Balrog and come back from the dead? Similarly, what business do the
screenwriters have giving Aragorn Gandalf’s plan to distract Sauron
through an attack on the Black Gate [RotK V.9] and putting doubts about
the success of the plan into Gandalf’s mouth, especially since the plan
immediately goes off like clockwork? No doubt they are trying to give Aragorn
more importance, but at the price of making Gandalf look like a dithering old
fool?
d) The Lord of the Nazgûl.. Another bad idea
was carrying over the theme that the orcs are out to destroy the race of man
from “The Two Towers” into “The Return of the King.” It
worked well enough in the earlier film, where the scriptwriters put it into
Saruman’s mouth, a place where it at least belonged. It made sense, as I
argued in my review of “The Two Towers” a year ago (see elsewhere
on this website), that a power-mad wizard with a “mind of metal and
wheels” [TT III.4] would want to replace human beings with his
vat-bred biological killing machines, the Uruk-hai, who are imprinted at
“birth” with the sign of his White Hand on their foreheads. It is
consistent with this idea that the entire army that marches against
Helm’s Deep consists (in the film) of Uruk-hai. Since the Uruk-hai are
annihilated at Helm’s Deep by the men they wished to supplant (with some
help from the Elves of Lothlórien and Gandalf), it would have been
perfectly possible to let the idea die with them.
Instead, in
the next film, “The Return of the King,” we have a particularly
pug-ugly orc commander-in-chief at Minas Tirith spouting the same line, as he
finishes off Faramir’s right-hand-man in Osgiliath. Perhaps we are
supposed to get some satisfaction out of seeing the miserable orcs repeat the
error of the Uruk-hai in the last film, with the same result. We must also
assume that the orcs keep this orc-supremacist stuff to themselves when they
are around their human allies, the Haradrim (the ones riding the mûmakil). To me, it all seemed like a pointless repetition
of an idea that had already served its purpose. As such, it would not deserve
attention in this review, since it would be just another experiment by the
screenwriters that miscarries (there are quite a lot of them, but then, there
is quite a lot of everything in these films, most of it good).
But if you
put an orc in charge of the army of Minas Morgul, it means that the Lord of the
Nazgûl is no longer commander-in-chief, guiding Sauron’s attack
with his superior military craft, born of approximately 5000 years of
experience. Worse, that dread commander is no longer available to ride
inexorably through the flame-shot darkness, the Black Rider returned but with
menace increased ten-fold, toward the Gate of Gondor:
Over the hills of slain a hideous
shape appeared: a horseman, tall, hooded, cloaked in black. Slowly, trampling
the fallen, he rode forth, heeding no longer any dart. He halted and held up a
long pale sword. And as he did so a great fear fell on all, defender and foe
alike; and the hands of men drooped to their sides, and no bow sang. For a
moment all was still.
For this, the black comedy “lite” of the
self-important orc commander-in-chief is no substitute.
Nor is it a
substitute for the confrontation which the book gives us between the Lord of
the Nazgûl and Gandalf, after the Gate of Gondor has fallen—fallen
not simply to the brute force of the wolf-headed battering ram, Grond, but
because the “Black Captain…cried aloud in a dreadful voice,
speaking in some forgotten tongue words of power and terror to rend both heart
and stone.”
In rode the Lord of the Nazgûl. A great black shape
against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair…
There waiting, silent and still in the space before the
Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of
the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath
Dínen.
“You cannot enter here,” said Gandalf, and the
huge shadow halted. “Go back to the abyss prepared for you. Go back! Fall
into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!”
The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a
kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone
between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there
came a deadly laughter.
“Old fool!” he said. “Old fool! This is my
hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!’
And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade. [RotK
V.4]
The words of
this confrontation obviously recall the great confrontation between Gandalf and
the Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-Dûm. In the hurly-burly of RotK
and the competition among its various plot-lines, Gandalf’s ultimate
dominance of the action is
threatened. This scene re-establishes it. Even though the horns of Rohan
sound just as the Lord of the Nazgûl lifts his sword and actual battle
between Gandalf and himself does not occur (it would be anticlimactic after the
fight with the Balrog), we see that the Gandalf we have known from the early
chapters of the book, the “Enemy of Sauron,” the organizer, the
counselor, the strategist, and (yes) the warrior-wizard, is still with us. The
commander of the West and the field commander of Mordor are face to face,
equals and opposites, for a brief but indispensable moment.
The only
explanation I can see for the deletion of this magnificent scene (especially
since its spooky grandeur would normally be just Jackson’s cup of tea) is
that the screenwriters are determined to keep Aragorn at the center of the
story and push Gandalf to the edges. If that is the case, I can only say that
Aragorn didn’t need their help, and that the price the film paid for the
diminishment of Gandalf is very high.
e) Denethor. Gollum, debased; Gandalf, diminished;
the Lord of the Nazgûl, demoted. How could Denethor escape the
devastation? And indeed, he does not. In the book, we have the complex, kingly
Steward of Gondor, a lord of men who indeed resents the loss of his favorite
son, but who has also been led into despair by Sauron during long nights spent
gazing into the Seeing-Stone of Minas Tirith, gathering intelligence about
political and military developments in Middle-earth, but only such intelligence
as Sauron allows him to gather [RotK V.7, end], and who fully
understands Gandalf’s grand plan to replace himself and his heirs with
the Northern line of Gondor. In the film, by contrast, we have Denethor the
Human Torch plunging off the prow of the Citadel of Minas Tirith, a bitter
madman whom his people would likely have turned out of office months ago,
caring only for dead Boromir and nothing for Gondor, or for Faramir, despite
Gandalf’s unconvincing assertion to Faramir that “your father loves
you.” Denethor is also apparently unaware that Faramir denied him the
Ring, even though in “The Two Towers” Faramir’s
second-in-command warns Faramir that under the laws of Gondor Faramir’s
release of the hobbits is punishable with death. Denethor’s apparent
hatred for Faramir could have easily been explained by having him rail at his
son for letting the Ring escape. (And the warning that Faramir received would
no longer be left dangling, with no plot follow-up.)
One wonders
why the scriptwriters kept Denethor in the story at all. He refuses to light
the beacons to call Rohan—but the beacons are lit anyway. He tries to
burn Faramir alive with himself—but his suicidal egotism has no function
in the plot of the movie. (In the book, it calls Gandalf away from the field of
battle, opening the way for the Lord of the Nazgûl to attack
Théoden and, ironically, to bring about his own doom.) Even Faramir is
of no importance in the film, except as a (possible) mate for Éowyn (see
my comments, above, on the glance the two exchange at Aragorn’s
coronation).
Of course,
Denethor does serve as the hook on which to hang a ridiculous pseudo-medieval
Charge of the Light Brigade, led by poor Faramir and lent ersatz pathos by
Pippin’s neo-Celtic, a capella
song as Denethor dines with disgusting deliberation on grapes and roast fowl,
but the film is not improved by this stagy set piece—one that was
especially disappointing after the genuine understanding of the feudal ethos
shown in “The Two Towers” (again, see my earlier review). In fact,
I wish that the audacity the scriptwriters showed in the previous film had not
deserted them here. Rather than retain bits and pieces of the book that have lost
their dramatic necessity and their meaning, better they had dispensed with
Denethor entirely.
f) Saruman. This is not to say that I endorse any
and all deletions of large pieces of Tolkien’s story. The deletion of the
homeward journey of the Hobbits and their brave retaking of their damaged
homeland is probably the biggest of several big mistakes made in the re-forging
that produced “The Return of the King.” Friends of mine who have
never read the book nonetheless sensed something wrong when it turns out (in
the film) that the Shire has been completely untouched by the savage struggle
against Saruman and Sauron. Indeed, it does not make sense at any
level—political, dramatic, or symbolic—that a land where the Ring
was hidden for decades, and a land that the Black Riders invaded in pursuit of
“Baggins,” would feel no taint of the violence and power-lust that
wracked the rest of Middle-earth. Tolkien’s “scouring of the
Shire” is much more plausible, and it also makes Frodo’s apartness
from his fellow Hobbits real to us. Without some story-time devoted to showing
how Frodo cannot enter back into the life of the Shire, his crucial line,
“I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me,”
is unconvincing, and his departure for Elvenhome, at the Grey Havens, seems
like a reward, rather than divine compensation to someone who has been torn up
by the roots and robbed of the ordinary happiness for which he once seemed so
eminently suited.
The worst
result, however, of the deletion of chapters 6-8 of Book VI of The Lord of
the Rings (about 50 pages) is that Saruman never gets to re-appear again on
the stage of the films’ action. In the book, he is released from the
tower of Orthanc in Isengard by Treebeard and makes his way on foot toward the
Shire, encountering Gandalf, the High-Elves, and the hobbits north of Dunland
as they ride toward their several destinations [RotK VI.6].
Unfortunately, Gandalf’s assessment—“All the same, I am not
sure that Treebeard is right: I fancy he could do some mischief still in a
small mean way.”—is borne out by events, as Gandalf’s
assessments tend to be. During the weeks that Frodo and company spend visiting
Bilbo in Rivendell and then riding back along the East Road (a considerable
detour), Saruman assumes control of the Shire, murders Lotho Baggins in Bag End
(Lotho’s mother, Lobelia, had bought the place when Frodo left last
year—yes, only last year!), and sends his half-orc enforcers on a
rampage, cutting and burning in his grand old tree-hating style. Sam, Pippin,
and Merry, with Frodo there to counsel restraint, defeat the interlopers and
confront Saruman at Bag End. As Saruman and Wormtongue (Théoden’s
ill-councilor from “The Two Towers”) are shown the gate, Saruman
takes out his anger once too often on Wormtongue, and Wormtongue cuts his
throat. In a lesser version of Sauron’s passing (as described in the
book), a “shrouded figure” rises up “to a great height like
smoke” and then passes away. Before it does, however, “it waver[s],
looking to the West”—and the West is where Saruman came from, long
ago, as did Gandalf and all the Wizards who were sent to oppose Sauron.
“But out of the West came a cold wind, and it [Saruman’s wraith]
bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing.” So the West rejects
its emissary, as it must in Saruman’s case, but the author (and the
reader) nonetheless feel Pity at Saruman’s end, as they did at
Gollum’s, to see a fellow being perish, utterly ruined.
In the film,
after the prologue involving Déagol and Sméagol, there is a brief
scene at Isengard. Its plot function is to let us know that Treebeard is
holding Saruman captive and to let Pippin discover the palantír under the waters with which the Ents have flooded
Saruman’s stronghold. There is some more business (rather gaudy) involving
the Seeing-Stone, but the excursion to Isengard, which is a mere vestige of TT
III.8-10, is the last we hear of Saruman in “The Return of the
King.”
This is
extremely unsatisfactory, not only because of the intrinsic interest of the
material involving Saruman which I have just summarized, but also because of
Saruman’s great prominence in the first two films. Indeed, he is far more
important a character in “The Fellowship of the Ring” and in
“The Two Towers” than in the first two volumes of Tolkien’s
book. His near-total absence from the last film leaves the audience hanging and
the three films badly out of balance, dramatically. Tolkien knew better than to
just drop the Wizard-Who-Went-Bad; instead, as I have described, he gives him a
central role in the long, complex coda of the book, which brings so many
strands of the story to such a satisfying dramatic and thematic resolution.
I have
already acknowledged that a film 200 minutes long is quite long enough. I also
am aware that the screenwriters had a great deal of material to deal with when
they sat down to write “The Return of the King.” They had to make
choices. The question, then, is, did they make the right choices? Some of their
choices, in my view, damaged the story and also failed to save time. The choice
of deleting virtually the whole coda of the book, by contrast, saved lots of
time. But I believe, for the reasons just given, that it was the wrong choice.
At least, the parts of the book’s coda involving Saruman should have been
retained—one benefit, so far unmentioned, would have been that the coda
in the film would not have been quite so domestic, and the descent from the
intense action of the rest of “The Return of the King” would have
been much less abrupt.
To keep the
Saruman-related sections of RotK VI.7-8 would have meant deleting other
things. I have already suggested that the screenwriters would have done well to
drop the Denethor/Faramir subplot entirely, rather than butcher it as they did.
Let Denethor die from an orc-arrow while on a stewardly visit to Osgiliath, and
Faramir be wounded (as he is in the movie, though hopefully in a less hokey
way). Minas Tirith could then be leaderless, or led only by a group of its
princes (such as Imrahil of Dol Amroth, for instance, a minor figure in the
book, absent from the film). Gandalf could arrive just after the disaster of
Denethor’s death and work with the princes of Gondor to lead the defense.
The way would be clear for Aragorn to assume the throne.
Even this
would not be enough, however. Another possible cut, saving several minutes,
could come from the ascent of the Straight Stairs. As I have already said, the
film would be better off in any case without the “clever Gollum”
business that the screenwriters introduced into that episode. Still another cut
would remove the palantír that
Pippin finds—it serves no vital function in the story of the film (in
contrast to the book’s), and the “hot potato” scene with it
is second-rate horror-film stuff. More minutes, or fractions of minutes (these
things add up), could have been saved by shortening the scenes of physical
combat—Frodo’s battle with Shelob, for instance, goes on much
longer than necessary. Heaven knows, even with 10-15 minutes less of the
illusion of violence, the film would still have spectacle enough and to spare
for even the greediest of groundlings.
Wherever the
precious minutes came from, though, my point is that the screenwriters needed
to find them. “The Return of the King” needs Saruman. The coda of
“The Return of the King” needs the battle for the Shire and at
least a minute or two of the Shire’s healing—how one misses (for
instance) the loss of the Party-Tree, and its wonderful replacement by a
mallorn whose seed Galadriel herself gave to Sam, and which he carried all the
way to Mount Doom and back! The audience needs to see Saruman die, not just as
a way to resolve an important strand in the story, but also because Saruman is
the anti-Gandalf (or the shadow-Gandalf, as Gollum is the shadow-Frodo), and
his death, rejected by the West, adds a bracing poignancy to Gandalf’s
parting for the West at the end of the film—and, on a more practical (but
important!) level, because it reassures the audience that the threat of Saruman
is forever removed.
Conclusion
In
“The Return of the King,” then, several characters of the first or
second rank are seriously mishandled, in ways ranging from subtle alteration to
significant debasement to near-total deletion: Gandalf, Denethor, Saruman, the Lord of the Nazgûl
(demoted to head of Sauron’s air force), and, worst of all, Gollum. The
mishandling of Gollum is especially harmful because his role (as I have argued)
is just as critical to the delicate emotional and spiritual balance of the
culmination of the whole long story as it is to the book’s and the
film’s plot machinery. Leaving aside a brief and improbable rejection of
Sam, however, Frodo’s character emerges relatively unscathed, and
Sam’s is handled very well, as is the relationship between himself and
Frodo. Aragorn and Théoden had their flowering in “The Two
Towers”; there are no lapses, but also no revelations, in their
portrayals in “The Return of the King.” The screenwriters’
rejection of the “high style” for Aragorn means that there is no
place left for his character to go, or grow, no belated revelation of an
inherent royalty at his coronation.
Even Éowyn, however satisfying her heroism in “The Return of the
King,” offered more dramatic interest in “The Two Towers,”
when her wooing of Aragorn looked as if it might succeed. It is significant, I
think, that some of the best moments in “The Return of the King,”
in terms of characterization, involve the important supporting characters Merry
and Pippin: their friendship deepens, and it lends a badly needed warmth to the
busy action west of the River (on a smaller scale, the same thing happens
between Gimli and Legolas, in a two-line exchange just before battle is joined
before the Black Gate). With these supporting characters, there was still a
little room left for growth, or at least for setting the capstone in the arch
of their relationships, and the screenwriters take full advantage of it.
I dwell on characterization because it is what gives
action meaning, and because the characters in the “Lord of the
Rings” must command our interest and our belief if a balance is to be
struck with the lavish spectacle. Their relative failure to do so in “The
Return of the King” is the main reason, in my opinion, for the slight
hollowness of the film, and for the sense of anti-climax, even exhaustion, in
what should have been the triumphant finale to a long, careful development of
powerful themes.
But “The Return of the King” is only one of
the three films, and its flaws, however damaging, are not fatal to “The
Lord of the Rings” as a whole. We are now in the fortunate position of
having the entire work, in three parts, before us. For some first impressions
of how that work looks at this point, and for a close comparison of “The
Return of the King” to “The Two Towers,” the reader should
now turn (perhaps after a short rest) to my overview, “`The Lord of the
Rings’ and the Trials of Adaptation.”
