In this preliminary assessment of Jackson’s “Lord of the
Rings,” I briefly
describe my general opinion of the “The Fellowship of the Ring” and
“The Two Towers” and then settle in for a close look at “The
Return of the King” in the light of its predecessors, especially
“The Two Towers.”
First, like
Tolkien’s FotR, Jackson’s “Fellowship of the
Ring” is a true Hobbit feast: “rich, abundant, varied, and
prolonged” [FotR I.1]. Discursive in structure, gathering momentum
as it proceeds, it culminates in the Moria episode, deals honorably with the
impossible task of conveying the intense, simple, inward magic of
Lothlórien, and ends strongly, with the moving death of Boromir (hats
off to the scriptwriters for Boromir’s stunning last line!),
Frodo’s rescue of a drowning Sam that sets the seal on their friendship,
and the expressive contrast between the rousing departure of Aragorn, Gimli,
and Legolas, at a run, hot on the orc-trail and the slow, almost meditative
movement of Sam and Frodo toward the labyrinths of the Emyn Muil, with Mordor
menacingly, and promisingly, visible in the distance.
Second, in
sharp distinction to the discursive, linear “Fellowship of the
Ring,” “The Two Towers” is constructed of two highly
organized and contrasting dramatic wholes. West of the Great River, the
organizing principle is the battle of Helm’s Deep, with the rapid events
involving Saruman, Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Théoden,
Wormtongue, Éomer, Éowyn, and the people of Rohan all building
toward it; partly because the main action is so much of a piece, the
Merry/Pippin/Treebeard side-plot seems quite extraneous, though the fact that
Isengard is the mustering-place for Saruman’s Uruk-hai army of course provides
a basic connection between main action and side-plot. The battle of
Helm’s Deep itself is a masterpiece of construction: each step up the
staircase of violence is perfectly clear to the audience, and the intercutting
between exterior scenes of battle, with their cast of thousands, and interior
scenes, where we can focus closely on a small number of characters and their
powerfully realized emotions, prevents us (and the film) from going numb. The
final charge down the wall of Deeping Coomb, led by Gandalf and Éomer,
is one of the great cathartic moments in all film: the Seventh Cavalry, as it
were, died and gone to heaven. (See my review of “The Two Towers”
for particulars.)
East of the
River, Gollum binds everything together, primarily through his interactions
with Frodo and Sam, but also through the sustained tension created by his
dialogues with himself. The picaresque, travelogue-like appeal of “The
Fellowship of the Ring,” with its diversity of landscape and
architecture, is not absent from the Gollum/Frodo/Sam story in “The Two
Towers,” but the visual setting steadily recedes into the background as
the audience enters more and more fully into the shifting emotions of the three
hobbits. And yet, excellent as this essentially separate film is, it is overshadowed
by the “Helm’s Deep” drama across the River. Only the
strength of the characterizations of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum, taken from Tolkien
but enriched by the screenwriters, and of the acting (with the prize carried
off by Gollum as played by Serkis and some amazing software), makes the
competition between the two dramas equal enough for the film to retain at least
a semblance of balance.
The third
film, “The Return of the King,” I have already discussed in some
detail (see “`The Return of the King,’ or, Whatever Became of
Saruman?”). I would like to step back now and consider it in relation to
its two very impressive, but rather dissimilar, predecessors.
As in
“The Two Towers,” the action west of the River centers on a great
battle, with various strands of the plot converging on Minas Tirith. East of
the River, again, the main interest lies with the dynamics of the Frodo, Sam,
and Gollum triad. On both sides of the River, the landscapes that we see have
almost all been seen or at least glimpsed before. The main exception is Minas
Morgul, the Straight Stair, and Spider Pass (Cirith Ungol), but these have more
the quality of an acrophobic and then claustrophobic nightmare than an actual
physical landscape. In any case, there is no room left for the “travelogue”
pleasures of the first film, and the second film seems like the appropriate
standard of comparison.
Unfortunately, “The Return of the King” suffers from such a
comparison.
Measured
against the Battle of Helm’s Deep, the Battle of Minas Tirith is a mess,
though a mess on a very grand scale. To make matters worse, wherever we are
reminded of something in “The Two Towers” (e.g., when the orcs and
trolls are battering away at the last gate to the Citadel, as the Uruk-hai
battered away at the gate of the Hornburg), the scene in Minas Tirith seems
like a perfunctory recycling of a scene that was grippingly effective in
Helm’s Deep. Even the charge of Rohan, though the aerial shots are very
grand, does not provide the same emotional release as the charge down the side
of Deeping Coomb or the same formidable weight as the arrival of the Uruk-hai
before the walls of the fortress of Rohan.
All the marching pixels (more! more! more!), giant flaming steel wolf-heads,
shrieking Nazgûl, pterodactyl-plesiosauroid Nazgûl mounts picking
up knights (horses and all) or plucking away pieces of Minas Tirith, all the
fluorescent green Dead flooding ectoplasmically to the city’s rescue, all
the rampaging mûmakil with
Éowyn slashing at their legs and Legolas ascending their cliff-like
sides—all that eye-candy cannot hide the inner emptiness of great battle
#2. Without Éowyn’s triumph over the Witch-King of Angmar, it
would be pure spectacle, and zero drama.
Even the
episodes in the rising action, like Elrond’s interview with Aragorn or
Aragorn’s encounter with the King of the Dead, rarely have the intensity
of comparable episodes in “The Two Towers” (think of the dialogue
between Elrond and Arwen, where Arwen is made to foresee Aragorn’s death
and her own bereavement, on the one hand, or the jolting attack of the Wargs,
on the other).
In contrast
to “The Two Towers,” where the intimate Frodo/Sam/Gollum story
provides a foil to the main theme of epic martial action, the relative weakness
and heterogeneity of the action west of the River in “The Return of the
King” means that the dramatic interest shifts east. This shift is abetted
by the fact, far more apparent in “The Return of the King” than in
the previous two films, that the destruction of the Ring is of infinitely
greater moment, in the end, than the battles of Helm’s Deep, Minas
Tirith, and the Black Gate all put together. But the Frodo/Sam/Gollum action in
“The Return of the King” is too frail and, as I have already
argued,
too badly mishandled by the scriptwriters to support the weight that the
emotional structure of the film puts on its shoulders. It not only comes off a
poor second to its counterpart in “The Two Towers,” it ends in
anti-climax—and if the destruction of the Ring is an anticlimax, as I
believe it is, there is a real problem. It does not mend matters that both
“The Two Towers” and Tolkien’s TT and RotK
deliver catharses of wonderful power—in the case of “The Two
Towers,” at Helm’s Deep and again in the visual repetition of the
scenes of the final charge and of the Ents’ cleansing of Isengard that
accompanies Sam’s hopeful words to Frodo about fighting for what is good
in the world; in the case of Tolkien’s book, at Minas Tirith and at Mount
Doom.
Happily, the
scene that follows the anticlimax at Mount Doom is a
triumph—Frodo’s return to life in the Perfect Bedroom, I mean, with
Gandalf standing at the foot of the bed, and, after Merry and Pippin romp with
Frodo, the rest of Frodo’s Companions (save for Aragorn, and poor dead
Boromir) entering the room, in the right order emotionally, each with the exact
nuance of love on their face that expresses their particular nature, the camera
lingering on each face for just the right amount of time, and Sam last, and
most important, of all, with a look on his face, and an answering look on
Frodo’s, that shows just how far they have come since they left the
Shire, a little over 6 months ago.
Despite the
excessively warm sunset colors of the scene at the Grey Havens (Grey?!), I
found the final farewells of hobbits, High Elves, and Wizard almost as
satisfying as the reunion scene in Gondor. And even though the scenes in the
Shire were all too short, the pleasure of seeing Sam transformed from
tongue-tied yokel into confident man of action and of feeling the abiding love
between Sam and Frodo was very great. But I am not sure how far the success of
these scenes, for me, was due to the reflected glow of the same scenes in
Tolkien’s book, rather than their own virtues. The response from those
who have not read the book seems to be quite different, and much less
favorable, than mine.
Perhaps the
relative literalness of the translation of these scenes to the screen allows
people like myself to transfer our emotions rather too easily from our
experience of the book to our experience of the film. Significant changes put
us on our mettle—we may like or dislike a scene as changed, but at least
we are forced to respond to it, and not bask in fond memories of beloved pages
of prose.
But that is
only to say that I may be overpraising the final scenes in the film. I doubt
that my disappointment with “The Return of the Ring” or my sense of
the superiority of “The Two Towers” will diminish with time. There
are several possible explanations (all of which probably apply) for why the
earlier film is better. One is the fact that much of the force of RotK
depends on the “pay-offs” that it delivers, and that those pay-offs
in turn depend on long and careful preparation in the book (Merry’s sword
and the death of the Witch-King is one good example). Cuts or lost dimensions
of the story that did not significantly impair the dramatic force of the first
two films come home to roost in “The Return of the King.”
Another
explanation resides in the strong similarities between the situations in
“The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King.” In the
book, these similarities are not a problem, because so much of the strength of
the book lies in the variety, depth, and solidity of its characterizations and
in the long-breathed unfolding of its themes. In the film, where the visual
element necessarily predominates, and the emphasis on spectacular special
effects increases that predominance (a choice in which commercial motives and
Peter Jackson’s personal tastes are probably at one), the similarities
are quite troublesome. It was not really possible to “outdo”
Helm’s Deep—greater scale only means less impact. The sight of
Gollum, so devastating in “The Two Towers,” has grown familiar by
the time we watch “The Return of the King.” And (to reach back
beyond “The Two Towers”) after we have seen the Balrog, we are
unlikely to take more than a clinical interest in Shelob, when what gives the
Shelob episode in RotK its power is not a purely physical horror, but
the pause as the omniscient narrator recounts the spider’s wicked
history, the direct experience that the narrator gives us of her gloating
malice, and the intense feelings of the terrified and then triumphant hobbits,
very little of which can be transferred to the screen.
The most likely explanation for the greater success of the
earlier film, however, is the simplest. It is the amount of the material that
the screenwriters attempted to adapt in “The Two Towers,” on the
one hand, and in “The Return of the King,” on the other. “The
Two Towers” starts precisely at the start of TT and covers a total
of about 245 pages (in my edition), stopping long before the end of both Book
III and Book IV of TT. “The Return of the King” begins, of
course, where “The Two Towers” leaves off, over 400 pages from the
end of the story. In “The Two Towers,” there are no omissions of
entire chapters; by contrast, in “The Return of the King” three
full chapters of the original (VI.6-8), totaling 50 pages, are cut, and
virtually no use is made of chapters V.8-9. Even with these deletions and
compressions, however, the screenwriters were left with well over 330 pages of
material to accommodate in “The Return of the King”—almost as
many as for “The Fellowship of the Ring,” but distributed across a
complex, many-stranded narrative structure that is far more resistant to
compression than the straightforward, linear structure of FotR.
The fact that “The Return of the King” runs more
than 3 hours long is already a sign of trouble. There was simply too much plot
to handle. The choice to end “The Two Towers” just over two-thirds
of the way through TT meant that there was no need, in that film, for
wholesale cuts. It also meant that there was breathing-room for the
screenwriters’ imaginations—room to alter the story for dramatic
reasons, rather than for lack of time; room even to make additions that add
breadth to the physical dimension of the story and to its human dimension as
well.
There is a sense of easy mastery in the handling of the story in “The Two
Towers” that is missing from the relentless pelting of events in both
“The Fellowship of the Ring” and “The Return of the
King.”
The decision to end “The Two Towers” long before
the end of the volume of the same name meant, unhappily, that “The Return
of the King,” despite its name, had to deal with much of TT as
well as all of RotK. Wholesale cuts, with the damaging effects I have
already described, were therefore necessary. Even the chapters that were not
deleted often suffered an excessive compression—the journey from Cirith
Ungol to Mount Doom is a major victim of this process, and careful comparison
of the script of the movie to Tolkien’s novel will show that the
battlefield of adaptation is strewn with other bodies. All of this havoc, which
I believe is ultimately responsible for the repeated failure of crucial scenes
in “The Return of the King” to have their proper effect in the
theater, flows directly from the choice to handle less material in “The
Two Towers.” Ironically, then, one could say that the artistic (and
emotional) successes of “The Two Towers” were purchased at the
price of the artistic (and emotional) failures of “The Return of the
King.” Gandalf, who knew, and reminded anyone who would listen, that no
victory is total or free of cost, would nod sagely at this point if he were
here, and if he took an interest in film criticism, which is perhaps unlikely.
In the end, though, despite the unevenness of these three
films, the not infrequent lapses in judgment, the excessive reliance on
spectacle, the repetitive resort to simulated physical violence, I think it
would be very ungrateful and unreasonable not to emphasize what is good, and
often excellent, about Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings,” rather
than what is not so good. I never expected to see even a passable film version
of LotR in my lifetime. If anyone had claimed just ten years ago that a
version half as good as Peter Jackson’s would be standard fare on cable
TV by the year 2004, I would have laughed in their face. And for all my
criticisms, I still sat riveted to my seat through each of the films, laughing,
cheering, and weeping along with my fellow mortals in the audience, and
thrilling to the spectacle when (as in the battle at the foot of Mount Doom in
the Prologue, in the Mines of Moria, in the armories and forges of Isengard; at
the Gate of the Kings, the Black Gate, or Helm’s Deep; or as a galloping
Shadowfax carries Gandalf and Pippin up the precipitous levels of Minas Tirith
to the Citadel, seen from far above in an intoxicating sustained tracking shot,
or as the beacon fires bring word of war to Rohan) the spectacle bore up the
story as on the wings of eagles.
So, I am in fact very happy, on the whole, with what the
passion and dedication of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and thousands
of other artists and craftspeople and software engineers, including a splendid
cast of actors and actresses, have given us all.
Strange as it may seem, though, I am also happy that what
they have given us is NOT the definitive film version of Tolkien’s book.
Instead, there will be room, one day (but probably after mine), when the
expensive special effects of our day have become the common coin of the realm
of cinema, and when new technologies have ended the tyranny of time that still
constrains our movies, and LotR has entered the public domain, for other
versions of the book, both more faithful and much less. When that happy day
arrives, the Jackson films will still be held in honor as the pioneering works
they are and watched, much as we now watch Fritz Lang’s
“Metropolis,” for instance, with great admiration for what could be
achieved in the primitive circumstances of the close of the Twentieth Century
and the dawn of the Twenty-First.
