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Maybe you better read that again. Here ya go!

Lotsa laffs, all at the expense of this pretentious trilogy:

FULL CIRCLE

by ANTHONY LANE

“The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.”

Posted 2003-12-29

This is what happened when a fellow-critic and I emerged, on December 11th, from a screening of “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” It had started well before noon, and the skies were practically dark by the time we staggered out. The movie, the last of a trilogy, runs almost three and a half hours, but, if you factor in the emotional buildup, the crammed ticket line, and the decompression period that will be required afterward, you are talking about an entire day ripped from your mortal life.

So there we were, fresh from the battles of Middle-earth, nursing our punished eardrums, when what did we see? A throng of youth, six or seven deep, caged behind barricades, lining the route from the movie theatre. Like pleading spirits in Dante’s Purgatory, they stretched out their arms, beseeching us to sign their programs, their curling copies of Tolkien, and, for all I know, their naked limbs. Bear in mind that this was a press screening, and that these boys and girls were forcing themselves upon movie reviewers—by and large, a profession that spends remarkably little time fending off the attention of groupies. Indeed, there is a body of opinion which holds that we should carry little bells, like lepers in the Middle Ages, to warn respectable citizens of our foul approach. The question is: If this was the press screening, what the hell were the premières like? Why did a hundred thousand people cram the route to the theatre when the film first showed in Wellington, New Zealand, on December 1st? Did the kids tear the clothes off Orlando Bloom, the svelte incarnation of Legolas? Is Sir Ian McKellen prepared to be mobbed, on a regular basis, on red carpets all over the world? In short, what is going on?

As Alfred Hitchcock said to one of his leading ladies, “It’s only a movie, Ingrid.” The nub of “The Return of the King” is a ring of simple design but unrivalled potency, which must be destroyed before it falls into the grasp of Sauron—a character so purely villainous that, under union rules, he is played not by an actor but by a single eye, blazing from the top of a tower. Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) and his sidekick Sam (Sean Astin) are two-thirds through their appointed mission, which is to bear the ring to Mordor and cast it into the maw of Mount Doom, at which point the power will cut out completely in Michigan, Cleveland, and other parts of Middle-earth up to and including New Jersey. At the same time, most of those who, in the first installment, joined together to form the Fellowship of the Ring are still toiling in the service of truth, beauty, and horsemanship. We have Arwen (Liv Tyler), an elven princess, of whom it is written in ancient runes that she must be viewed in naught but soft focus and, if possible, on the brink of tears; Legolas the elf, the most unflustered blond to grace our screens since Veronica Lake; Pippin (Billy Boyd) and Merry (Dominic Monaghan), a pair of slightly annoying hobbits who spent much of the previous film, “The Two Towers,” being hugged by the boughs of enormous trees, and who are now offered the chance to redeem themselves at ground level, in battle; and Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), a dwarf of twofold purpose. First, he is an axeman, hewing cold cuts from the midriffs of selected villains, and, second, he is a funnyman, slicing through the loftiness of the enterprise with his peremptory vows of action. “Certainty of death—small chance of success—what are we waiting for?” he asks cheerfully on the eve of conflict, sounding like a toughened version of Dickens’s Mr. Jingle.

Then, we have men, a solemn race. Tolkien may be charting the victory, familiar from a hundred fairy tales, of good over evil, but such mastery comes at a melancholy price, for it marks the end of one age—that of wizardry, elvishness, and free trips on the backs of giant eagles—and the dawning of another. From now on, men will rule Middle-earth, and one senses, both in Tolkien and in Peter Jackson’s adaptation, a wistful belief that life, though fair and wisely governed, will be much less of a blast. Just inspect the face of Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) at the close of this picture. Over many hours, his startling career path has gone from a quiet drink at the Prancing Pony to the sacred throne of Gondor (he is the King of the title), but does the guy look happy about it? To me he looks taut and burdened, not least by the terrible awareness that, this being Tolkien, he will have to sing a ballad at his own coronation.

How much freer he seemed in the slash and lunge of war, leaping over the gunwales of a longboat. The core of “The Return of the King” is consumed by the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, in which Aragorn hooks up with King Théoden (Bernard Hill), the honorable leader of the kingdom of Rohan, to overthrow the Nazgûl—creatures so mightily equipped in malice that each gets to drive his own personal airborne dragon. Under the Nazgûl’s thumb are thousands of orcs—ugly thugs commanded by what appears to be a giant potato—plus, I am thrilled to report, a herd of mûmakil. These are what the hobbits call oliphaunts, what Piglet used to call heffalumps, and what I would call a good excuse to take the next available flight out of Middle-earth. A mûmak, to judge by the spikes on the ends of its tusks, is made by crossing a double helping of mammoth with a porcupine, and each one bears a company of archers on its back. Legolas, a fit fellow, takes one look and sees his chance for a workout. He shinnies up a back leg, hangs on to the hide, fells half the riders with a ping of his bow, chops a rope holding the rest, shoots an arrow into the presumably tiny brain of the animal, feels it slump to its knees, and then trips lightly down its trunk like Fred Astaire descending a staircase. Unconfirmed reports suggest that this is the coolest single activity ever recorded on film, and the audience around me went into spasms of worshipful hilarity. Somebody to my left actually stood to applaud, as George II is said to have done when he first heard the Hallelujah Chorus.

How does “The Return of the King” differ from its two predecessors? Well, for one thing Gandalf has been spending time at the salon. His hair has grown straighter and whiter with every film, and at times, especially when he is mixing with similarly coiffed elves, we seem to have stumbled into a Rick Wakeman revival tour. Gandalf not only plots the triumph of justice but takes a valorous role in its fulfillment, at one point wielding his staff with an éclat that might stop even Uma Thurman in her tracks. It’s a wonderful part for Ian McKellen, constantly calling upon the high, hard, declamatory style that he refined onstage, and that reappears here in the warnings that Gandalf delivers to his anxious companions. “It’s so quiet,” Pippin says, to which the Wise One replies, “It’s the deep breath before the storm.”

McKellen was the best Uncle Vanya I have seen, and the best thing in his performance, at London’s National Theatre, came after the final line, when Vanya fussed around his study, shuffling papers and tidying the desk. He was trying, however trivially, to assert some order, though both he and we knew that his soul was in disarray. There is little time, even over nine hours of “The Lord of the Rings,” for that kind of casual detail, and one treasures it when it comes—when Gandalf turns to the garrulous Pippin on the threshold of a court, urges him not to mention certain matters when they enter, then pauses and adds, “In fact, it’s better if you don’t speak at all.” McKellen times the advice so beautifully that the audience laughs in relief, as if we helplessly hankered for comedy, however mild, when the fate of civilizations is up for grabs.

All of which confirms that the director of the trilogy, Peter Jackson, has an epic on his hands. The word “epic” is tossed around, in movie circles, with regrettable abandon, being used as a critic’s noun to describe any picture more than two and a half hours long and as a publicist’s adjective to mean “overpaid,” as in, “Didn’t you think Ben Affleck was kind of epic in ‘Daredevil’?” But “The Lord of the Rings” fits the bill, because of the unflagging momentum of Frodo’s quest, because of its rather magnificent indifference to the forces of irony (which would be constantly on the prowl were we watching a mock epic), and because Jackson has revived a grand and unembarrassable quality that sustained moviemakers from Griffith to the heyday of David Lean: he has nerve.

How else can one explain the bracing vastness of the project? Jackson shares with Lean a reckless will to cut from engrossed closeup to a panoramic, Nazgûl’s-eye view of a parched plain or a roiling battlefield—to look his characters in the face, until we can see every wrinkle of their troubles, and then to draw back so far that those troubles melt into near-nothing, into specks on the surface of invented history. When the riders of Rohan—allies of Gandalf and Aragorn—are summoned to the fray, it is not by messenger, still less by magic, but by a line of lighted beacons, as the Romans used to be, and Jackson’s roistering mix of speed and splendor allows us to vault from one mountaintop to the next until we reach the end of the line, where the grim rapture of Aragorn, as he spies the flame, signals that, at long last, the game’s afoot.

Of course, there are times when this elastic manner—Jackson’s wish to encompass Middle-earth by any and every stretch of the imagination—throws the action out of whack. The final tussle over the ring between Frodo and his indispensable nemesis, Gollum, on the verge of a volcano drags on so long that what it means for Middle-earth, as opposed to what it says of our hero’s anguish, is all but lost, and everything that unfurls after that climax feels dramatically blurred, as if Jackson, like Frodo, were so shattered by his undertaking that he finds it hard to concentrate. Tolkien has a tremendous late chapter entitled “The Scouring of the Shire,” in which the hobbits return to their land and find it snarled in petty feuds, a hangover of Sauron’s influence, which they consider it their business to erase. It always makes me think of post-Vichy France, riven with bitter charges of German collaboration, and not a jot of it remains onscreen. Instead, the movie closes in limp bucolic mood; Sam, the staunchest figure in the saga, goes home to a bosomy hobbitess, as he does in the novel, but Jackson, the man who can marshal warriors by the thousand, finds it hard to catch the rusticity—brisk, unsentimental, cider-sharp—of the original.

Perhaps that is as it should be. As I watched this film, an eager victim of its boundless will to astound, I found my loyal memories of the book beginning to fade. It may be time to halt the endless comparisons between page and screen, and to confess that the two are very different beasts. Moments that lurk deep in the body of the novel are brought into the light. I had never fully clocked the subplot of Éowyn (Miranda Otto), King Théoden’s niece, until she turned up in the movie, clad in a man’s armor, and dared to confront the chief of the Nazgûl. He hisses that he fears no man, whereupon she whips off her helmet, shakes her tresses, and utters the Shakespearean cry “I am no man,” following it up with a solid jab on the Naz. I wish Laurence Olivier were alive to see that. It was he who realized that to film Shakespeare was not enough—one had to dig for what was filmlike in Shakespeare, to shock his words into becoming the natural flesh of a movie. And so it is with Jackson; when I watch Legolas scrambling up that mûmak, my mind turns not to Tolkien (who wrote no such scene, anyway) but to Douglas Fairbanks, scaling the side of a ship, in “The Black Pirate,” with monkeyish ease and delight. Peter Jackson has not really made a movie of “The Lord of the Rings”; he has sprung clear of it to forge something new. He has taken a deep breath, and raised a storm.




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