Tolkien (2019)

Film: Tolkien (2019)
Stars: Nicholas Hoult, Lily Collins, Colm Meaney, Derek Jacobi, Anthony Boyle, Patrick Gibson, Tom Glynn-Carney
Director: Dome Karukoski
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Biopics struggle, in my opinion, to find the right balance of a life.  It's a tough task, admittedly, taking on the story of a single person, oftentimes an extraordinary one, and you have to squeeze that into a two-hour package.  It's such a high-stakes game that while the genre typically does well with Oscar, it generally fails with me; I hold biopics to the same standards of a regular movie, not giving extra points for mimicry or recreating famous events in that person's life, and these are where biopics are most likely to impress.  Their storytelling, because we know the life of this person onscreen, is impossible to upend because you have only one direction to take your tale.

(Real Life Doesn't Need Spoiler Alerts) This is particularly evident when you examine a writer's life, and when that writer is one of the most consequential of the past 100 years, someone synonymous with epic tales and vivid characters, the pressure is on even further.  Tolkien focuses on the earlier aspects of young JRR Tolkien's (played here by Hoult) life, his time in boarding school, Oxford, and as a soldier in World War I, which profoundly changed his life with the death of two of his three close-knit friends (Boyle, Gibson, Glynn-Carney), and informing his work that would later become The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  The movie isn't a complete one, largely shying away from the happier back-half of Tolkien's life as a professor and successful novelist, and focusing on his poor upbringing, his romance to Edith (Collins), and his quest to get out alive during the Great War.

The movie's failures are considerable, but I want to first mention the things I liked about the film.  While movies about the friendships of men are plentiful, I quite liked this one because it's rare that these friendships are centered not on the pursuit of sex or violence, but here on art and family.  The scenes between the four men are easily the best of the picture, to the point where I thought the entire romantic subplot was unnecessary.  You see the way that Tolkien used these men for the inspiration of Frodo, Sam, Pippin, & Merry, and it's the rare film that shows a turn-of-the-century gay man (because that's clearly what they were going for with Geoffrey Bache Smith) falling into unrequited love with his best friend, and combined with the hints of Smaug and Mordor in the fires of the trenches, we see some very fascinating artistry that is trying to pry this movie from the grip of a standard biopic.

But that's about all I can give credit to Tolkien for, as for the most part it fails to be as interesting as its subject.  Hoult, so good in The Favourite, has a tendency to match his persona to the film he's in, and he's rather dull & lifeless as Tolkien, never really capturing any sort of personality in the man, and being overshadowed by the men playing his chums.  Collins, whom I have been so mean to in the past that I desperately wished she was good here, is utterly boring.  She proclaims frequently to want a life like Tolkien's, filled with art & music, but Collins can't bring that sort of passion to Edith herself.  A woman who inspired warrior elves should be more than just a prim inspiration for the author, but that's the way she plays her.  The film rarely finds anything new to say about war, and perhaps more damning, the writing process, and as a result it's a throwaway film that even the most ardent of hobbits couldn't be bothered to celebrate.