Tolkien...bored, with a ring

One of the lessons I learned in many years as a celebrity interviewer is that appearances are deceptive; star power was often inversely proportional to any levels of interest and engagement.

Harrison Ford, for example, frequently displayed the persona of a grumpy carpenter and was often as interesting, whereas the ineffably modest Richard Farnsworth – look him up – turned out to have been a cowboy who was pals with Wyatt Earp. Who knew?

My point is that people who do memorable things are not necessarily memorable in and of themselves and that, for me, is the big issue with Tolkien. J.R.R. Tolkien may have written some remarkable books in his Middle Earth novels but, compared to others of his generation and background, his life was fairly unremarkable.

Certainly looking on with a century’s worth of hindsight the Battle of the Somme would be a terrifying and nightmarish experience for us but the tragic reality is that it was the lived reality of hundreds of thousands of young men of Tolkien’s generation. What separates him is that he was lucky enough to survive, and he went on to write best-selling books.

The film goes to enormous lengths to hammer home the influences from his life that pop up in Lord of the Rings and others. He is plucked from a poor but idyllic rural childhood (The Shire) and then unceremoniously transplanted to the dark satanic mills of Mordor, or Birmingham as they have it here.

He finds a wealthy benefactor who funds his fees at a good school where he falls in with three other like-minded young men. It’s almost like a fellowship, or something like that. The formative experience of his life however is the Somme, and the film is largely told in flashback as he wanders through the trenches in a fever dream spotting ringwraiths, and Sauron and all manner of narrative Elvish breadcrumbs.

It’s all a bit predictable but entirely necessary because at heart Tolkien was a philologist, someone who studied the origins and structures of language. There is a lot of philology in this film which is even less dramatic than it sounds, hence the need for those Middle Earth allusions.

Tolkien is earnest and good-hearted which is how you might also describe the performance of Nicholas Hoult in the title role. Lily Collins is a little vapid in a lightly written role as the love of his life, and no one else in the film is really allowed to have much of an internal life. Perhaps it’s their own fault for not having written door-stopping fantasy novels too.

Finnish director Dome Karukoski handles the material as deftly as anyone might but the real stars are Lasse Frank Johannessen’s lush cinematography and Harri Ylonen’s deft editing which keep the story visually interesting.

Tolkien isn’t necessarily a bad film, neither is it an especially good one. It’s just a workmanlike effort at a tale which didn’t really need to be told.