King of the North,
Oh, boy! Don't get me started on this.
I agree with you. I felt the movie presented Frodo in a wholly different light than how Tolkien approached him in the book.
For the most part I enjoyed and appreciated the movies. PJ did a fabulous job with his visual depiction of Middle-earth, and I understand the need to cut out and rearrange certain episodes in the book. What bothered me more were those instances when I felt the film "tampered with" the basic nature of the characters in the book, giving them different personalities or motivations. This was true with Faramir and Denethor, and also with Frodo Baggins.
You might want to take a look at an earlier discussion of this topic, a thread that I started several years ago called
Two Frodos. For another interesting discussion on similar lines, see this
review of movie Frodo.
PJ's Frodo was one-sided. PJ sketched a portrait of a victim who had little will to combat the power of the Ring, but was constantly swooning and keeling over. We never see the Frodo who made a conscious decision to stay and try to rescue his friends at the Barrowdowns or the Hobbit with "perky cheeks" who danced and sang on top of a table in the Prancing Pony. Neither do we see the Frodo who struck out with Sting against the Ringwraith at Weathertop or who escaped on Glorfindel's horse, crying out his defiance: "By Elbereth and Luthien the Fair,....you shall have neither the Ring nor me!" Instead we get the gratuitous scene at Osgiliath that really bothered me with Frodo offering the Ring to the Nazgul rider.
Equally frustrating, I found nothing in the later scenes suggesting that there was an active struggle going on inside Frodo. The side that was under the domination of the Ring was certainly growing, but so too was the other side: specifically, his growth in wisdom and understanding, and the Elven light in Frodo's eyes that Samwise commented on with such affection. Frodo was a victim in PJ's movie, pure and simple.
Frodo's relationship with Gollum is even presented in a different light. The movie Frodo's sympathies for Gollum seem to stem from a personal fear that he too could end up that way. It is a decision motivated primarily by self interest. That is not what Tolkien emphasized in his own narrative. While Tolkien was certainly aware that Frodo's own situation would have made him more aware of what Gollum had gone through, the author emphasizes morality rather than psychological motives or the desire for self preservation. The Frodo of the book grows to understand that "pity" and "mercy" must lay at the heart of our decisions. Again, in the book, the events of the Scouring emphasize Frodo's role as a peacemaker in insisting that as little blood as possible be shed. But this too is swept away, since the Scouring did not make it into the movie.
If this sounds like I "hated" the movies, I did not. I have seen the films several times in the theater and on my EE dvds. I truly enjoyed them. But I did have to accept the simple reality that PJ's fanfiction changes the characters in some rather important ways.
We live in a time when people have trouble accepting "goodness" as someone's true motive. Instead, we have anti-heroes, or good folk who are tormented by self-doubts, individuals whose actions are motivated by inner psychological struggles. For this reason, we see a conflicted Aragorn or lose the nobleness that stood at Denethor's core before the madness struck. We have a Faramir who is motivated by conflicting feelings about his father and a Frodo who is addicted to the Ring from the first moment of the movie on, in the same way that a junkie would be addicted to dope. This may make interesting film....it may even be a logical extension of some things Tolkien set down on paper. But it is not the story that Tolkien told.