With how rabid the Lord of the Rings fans can be, a JRR Tolkien biopic seems like an easy way to make a few dollars. Those books inspired one of the greatest movie trilogies (and a mediocre one) of all time. The story of the guy who wrote the books? Simply not as fantastical, sadly. Very British though, so that’s…something.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) was a poor nothing in British society. After his mother dies, Father Francis (Colm Meaney) movies JRR and his brother to Birmingham, where JRR enrolls in a decent school. There, he befriends 3 boys, Geoffrey Smith (Anthony Boyle), Robert Gilson (Patrick Gibson), and Christopher Wiseman (Tom Glynn-Carney), who form a fellowship (though stupidly the movie doesn’t do this) through their love of artistic expression. In addition, JRR finds love with a fellow orphan, Edith Bratt (Lily Collins), who also has a taste for the arts. JRR grows up with these people until he eventually fights in WWI, which helps him get the courage to write the book that inspired fantasy lovers everywhere: The Hobbit.
You would think Tolkien the movie would position the story around how JRR found inspiration in his life and led him to craft the fantasy world he writes about. There are little pieces in there for Lord of the Rings and Hobbit fans, for sure, like the person inspiring Samwise Gamgee or Sauron the Destroyer, and why rings are involved. The major book-based focus of the story is Tolkien’s love for language, which effectively weaves the real JRR’s story into the reasons why someone would want to see a JRR Tolkien Biopic. However, various subplots and other stories take up a majority of the screen time, and the story glazes over how JRR took all the disparate Hobbit inspiration in his life, and pieced together a novel out of it. That type of creative process was set up effectively in Tolkien, but sadly rushed to completion because of the story the movie is trying to tell.
And that story is frustratingly unfocused. I’m guessing the writers wanted to make Tolkien a complete story about the man JRR Tolkien, and tried to take as little creative license as possible. So when telling a story in that way, you need a bullet point list of the main parts of this man’s life: orphaned, had lots of artsy friends, Oxford years, Edith relationship, World War I. So the movie uses WWI as the present and guides us there from the past. Problem is, that doesn’t really add anything to the story, as JRR is inspired, not inspirational, and the movie fails to explain how that experienced shaped him. Lives of real people also don’t fit a general movie storyline: characters go in and out of each others lives, like what happens here when Edith, or hilariously JRR’s brother are just missing for 20-30 minutes of screentime. The storytellers also have to create 4 additional main characters for JRR to interact with and give them 10-15 minutes of story to flesh them out, which might force you to take some creative license leading to the Tolkien estate disavowing your film. Yikes! At this point, you’ve gone so far afield of what you probably wanted to do I’m guess the director quickly gets to the ending and calls it a day at a reasonable runtime of under 2 hours.
I wouldn’t call Tolkien a complete failure. Despite what the family says, I believe there’s a good way to tell the story of this writer who has inspired so many people by completely making up a world with multiple languages. I would love to see JRR now: watching some kids at the University of Wisconsin, University of Toronto, or even an entire online university built around his stories, and how he would not only approve, but probably be sitting in on a course teaching everyone Dothraki.