Tolkien (2019)

(On Cable TV, June 2020) J.R.R. Tolkien’s reputation as a major twentieth-century fantasy writer has been secure since the mid-1970s, but it really took the success of The Lord of the Rings’ film adaptation to transform him into a semi-mythical figure, a process that biopic Tolkien works hard to complete. The narrative spends time in English schools, in a pleasantly intellectual courtship and, obviously, in the trenches of World War I, as he undergoes a traumatic experience that would shape the rest of his life. Tolkien intercuts between two timelines, going from the trenches to flashbacks to English academia and spending time with Tolkien and his ill-fated friends. The film’s mythological goals attain a climax of sorts during harrowing battle sequences in which Sauron-like supernatural flair is added to heighten the horrors of war. Tolkien bets its success on transforming the writer into a grander-than-life figure through his wartime experiences, and generally succeeds despite many moments being melodramatically overdone. As is usual for these kinds of origin story films, multiple call-forwards are designed to make the audience feel smart, while at the same time serving simplistic one-to-one equivalents between the life of the author and the most distinctive elements of their fiction. Tolkien is clearly not anything more than a hagiographic, sensationalistic, surface-deep attempt to mythologize someone made grander-than-life by the movies, but it’s going to find an audience.