Latter-day thoughts: On the one hand...but, on the other hand...

Rating: 7/10 (29 January 2007)

I recently watched the LOTR films consecutively for the first time, and at the same time began re-reading the books. Having experienced the films together as a single work, I now believe I was wrong to label the first two films good and the third bad. What's wrong with them is wrong all the way through, from the first one on, and only becomes more obvious in the third. It's true that Fellowship entertained me more than the others, and that The Two Towers satisfied me more completely, in being more of a piece. But I now think that what pleased me in them was the obverse of what was lacking. And so every time I see Fellowship it palls on me before the end, and Towers hardly seems worth re-seeing.
For me to criticize this first film unfavorably feels unfair, because in doing so I seem to be discounting the real pleasure it gave me. Seeing the places and incidents and characters from the books more or less faithfully reproduced up there on screen for the first time produced a series of little explosions of wonder and delight. They were fewer in Two Towers, and absent altogether from Return of the King. In part, this was to be expected--one can't have the same experience three times--but it was also because those momentary delights, in order to amount to something in the end, would, as they subsided, have had gradually to reveal a continuous and coherent narrative and drama underneath. This is what was lacking, and nowhere more than in this first and most entertaining film.
As a basis for adaptation LOTR most nearly resembles Gone with the Wind, another long novel set in a world which the author has inhabited in imagination for so long that it has taken on a reality of its own. The difference between the two works is this: Gone with the Wind would have made a good film no matter in what period it had been produced, because it has colorful, dynamic characters and strongly dramatic scenes, and LOTR does not. It has all the other makings of a good film (probably not three), but not those. An able screenwriter could have made it into a good script, but would have needed the acuity to know which ingredients to cull from the books and the skill to transform them. An opening example: the first two facts we learn about Frodo in the books are that he likes to wander the woods of the Shire, and that on observing his uncle Bilbo's odd behavior at his farewell dinner he becomes worried for him. Neither of these characteristics fits with the Frodo of the films.
Frodo is not a very deeply drawn character, in conventional terms. Most of what there is to be learned of him must be gleaned indirectly from incidental observations, from the words and rhythms of the language that describes him. More can be gleaned from his occasional exercises of will, such as the decision that sets the story going: his volunteering, before the assembled council, to take the Ring. This scene can serve as an example of how the films fall short of the books.
In re-viewing Fellowship, almost the first thing that struck me was that this act seemed completely unmotivated, though it hadn't in the book; and in re-reading the book, it still didn't. So I went back to it to see why.
In principle Frodo has made this decision long before, almost accidentally, after learning the Ring's history. Gandalf says, "If you want to destroy the Ring--" which seems just a manner of speaking, but Frodo answers, in more or less these words, "I do want to destroy it!...or, well, I want to see it destroyed." He has committed himself almost without knowing it. When he leaves the Shire it is with this purpose in mind, though he has no idea how it is to be realized. When he adds to his declaration, "...though I do not know the way," he's only re-stating what his position has been all along.
In addition, before he makes his offer Bilbo has done the same, and after he's turned down someone else asks, in so many words, "Then who is it to be?" Verbally, Tolkien leads the scene to a point where it can only be Frodo who responds, and the reader hopes and knows he will rise to the occasion. Tolkien has planted the clues, or cues, so cunningly that the reader has to search for them.
In scripting the film, Jackson failed to note them or, where they couldn't be communicated cinematically, to supply substitutes.
And with rare exceptions, this remains the case throughout his trilogy.