[Bêthberry]

Indeed, Essex, I have no quarrel if you are happy with Galadriel's presentation in the movie. Beauty, it is said, and interpretations too, are in the eye of the beholder and I do not write here to persuade others to take my view.

Your quotation is well taken, and I suppose too one could point to the passage in the Lothlorien chapter that in Rivendell there was the memory of ancient things but that in Lothlorien the ancient things still lived on; the last remnant of the elven world was Lothlorien alone and that this was Galadriel's power and doing, so it is fitting that Elrond appear older than she. Perhaps. But I read your quotation in the context of all that Tolkien has to say about Lothlorien in LOTR.

I did not wish to see her a wizened old crone but I had hoped for some of the authority and wisdom in her that Gandalf made me feel. Her perilous terror was missing, too, relegated to the pyrotechnics of the special effects, which said to me "modern movie special effect" rather than "power of the character." When reading of Galadriel, I had a vision of great sense of loss, of the passing of the elven life, which for me Blanchett did not catch. That quotation does indeed say that Galadriel and Celeborn are immune to the passage of time. (To be honest, that line has always reminded me of Dorien Grey's pact--at totally irrelevant remembrance I admit). But the depth of the eyes and the profundity of deep meaning is what I wanted to see and, despite the technical details you mention, that exists not for me.

I don't wish to belabour this point, but to me the aching beauty in the chapters on Lothlorien is the poignancy that this is something soon to be gone from this world, lost, a place of rest and restorative powers which is to be savoured in part because it is not like the rest of Middle-earth. Tolkien gives to Galadriel that line about "the long defeat." For me, the movie lacks the redeemable sense of fairy or sub-created world which hovers over Lothlorien and Galadriel. There is still too much hopeful potential of life still to be, unlived, in Blanchett's performance. She is not "a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time." The seeming contradiction of Tolkien's "present and yet remote" was missing; Blanchett and Jackson's Galadriel was merely very lovely.

In this I likely remain in the minority.