Tolkien Bio-pic

[William Cloud Hicklin]

I really can't blame Christopher for not wanting to give his seal of approval to a fictionalized biopic of his own parents, one which almost certainly is going to get almost everything from their appearance to their speech to their mannerisms to their personalities, wrong.

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

I really can't blame Christopher for not wanting to give his seal of approval to a fictionalized biopic of his own parents, one which almost certainly is going to get almost everything from their appearance to their speech to their mannerisms to their personalities, wrong.

No. Tolkien expressed disdain for the prospect of being "an object of fiction while still alive", but I don't think he'd have been all right with it ante mortem either.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Well, I've seen it. It's a pretty thing, but very slight. Lovely sets and costumes, competently acted (except by Jacobi, who phoned it in)... but really pretty empty. Most significant, I think, isn't really whether or not this incident or that was "real" but rather that the film gave us absolutely nothing of Tolkien as a person or as a mind. We have Nicholas Houton doing a reasonable job playing a man to whom the same life-events happened as happened to Tolkien- but it isn't Tolkien, and that goes beyond looking nothing at all like him (why for the love of God couldn't they at least put a mustache on him for the wartime bits?), but extends to not speaking or thinking like him (or much like anyone at all; the character is written as a cipher). The man we know from his letters, his essays, from anecdotes by those who knew him- he simply isn't there. Instead we have an earnest young man who can recite bits of texts in dead languages and who really likes his chums.

Even where the film makes an attempt to link up its ostensible subject to his writing, it gets it wrong. The discussions of sound and meaning with Edith and then with Wright* completely misrepresent Tolkien's own clearly expressed views, which were themselves heavily dependent on comparative philology as it was understood in his day: languages need peoples to speak them, because the history of a language is inseparable from the history of its speakers. The proto-Silmarillion, already during WW1 (something which the movie denies ever occurred!), could I think be fairly said to be Tolkien answering the question, "How did Eldarissa and Goldogrin come to be different?"

--
The battlefield scenes were palpable nonsense (as almost always in the movies). Cavalry? Seriously? Charging across no-man's land into machine guns? That lesson was learned the hard way in August 1914 and wasn't repeated.** For that matter, if a bunch of Tommies was going over the top, then the entirety of Tolkien's journey along the trenchline would have been thunderously drowned out by the preparatory bombardment, which by 1916 doctrine would have gone on for days.

(Incidentally, Smith was killed well after JRRT had already been invalided home, and it happened behind the lines as he was organising a football match. CL Wiseman did not as the movie suggests suffer from "shell shock" or PTSD, since aside from being present but not engaged at Jutland, he spend the war at anchor in Scapa Flow, or conducting event-free patrols)

________________________
*The writers apparently have no clue how academics work at Oxford, either: professors then and now don't have "classes" in the American sense; and Tolkien would have had no "grades" at all until Trinity (spring) term of his second year, after taking Honour Moderations.

**During the opening phases of the Somme the British maintained a cavalry force well in the rear in reserve, anticipating a breakthrough that never happened; by October it had been dispersed. There was no German cavalry at all in France at the time, since there was no use for it.

[Inziladun]

Thanks for that, WCH.

I have not seen it. I honestly forgot about it, as a lot of RL stuff has been going on the past few months. I wasn't all that enthused about it anyway, obviously.

I wasn't expecting any real insight into the man, that I didn't already possess. I thought style over substance would be the direction, and the main effort toward reflecting a Tolkien that would fit in with the recent LOTR and Hobbit films.

I am curious as to how Catholicism was treated. Was there any mention Tolkien's stance on "dramatisation" of his works?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Catholicism was basically omitted entirely. I'm not entirely sure if it even pointed out that Fr Francis was RC and not Anglican. As to Tolkien's stance on 'dramatisation' - well, the film ends in 1916 but for a flash-forward epilogue ca 1930, so it's not an issue. But the film basically doesn't present Tolkien's stance on anything.

[Galadriel55]

Originally Posted by William

The battlefield scenes were palpable nonsense (as almost always in the movies). Cavalry? Seriously? Charging across no-man's land into machine guns? That lesson was learned the hard way in August 1914 and wasn't repeated.** For that matter, if a bunch of Tommies was going over the top, then the entirety of Tolkien's journey along the trenchline would have been thunderously drowned out by the preparatory bombardment, which by 1916 doctrine would have gone on for days.*

Were they also wearing red trousers?

As for the cavalry. Heh.
Come WW2 though and the opinion on the usefulness of cavalry is completely reversed again because unlike motorized forces they don't require fuel. I still can't remember the specific incident I was referring to earlier in the thread - it was a (retrospectively) funny story of how the motorcycles that were supposed to play a critical role in a large scale operation ran out of fuel or engineers or something like that and the horses had to step in last minute, and they did way better than what the motorized unit was expected to do. I'll post it here is I come across it again. It's bugging me.


Thanks for the summary and the impressions. I will now neglect to watch it with a completely clear conscience.

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Catholicism was basically omitted entirely. I'm not entirely sure if it even pointed out that Fr Francis was RC and not Anglican. As to Tolkien's stance on 'dramatisation' - well, the film ends in 1916 but for a flash-forward epilogue ca 1930, so it's not an issue. But the film basically doesn't present Tolkien's stance on anything.

Par for the course, I guess.

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

Come WW2 though and the opinion on the usefulness of cavalry is completely reversed again because unlike motorized forces they don't require fuel.

The US army's last cavalry charge was in the Philippines in early 1942. I don't know about the British forces or the Japanese, but the Wehrmacht used horses extensively in Russia.