Tolkien on film:The good,the bad the ugly

The successes and failures of Tolkien on film can be summed up as the good, the bad and the ugly.

Admirers of Tolkien's mythical epic, "The Lord of the Rings," must have approached Peter Jackson's film production with an uneasy trepidation, an anxiety born of a queasy combination of hope and fear. Would their hopes be realized and their fears unfounded; or, on the contrary, would their fears become reality and their hopes simply dissolve into disappointment and disillusionment? Would Jackson's vision of Middle Earth be vindicated or vilified?

The ultimate difficulty that Jackson had to overcome arises from the creative conflict between the media of literature and film. The former, at its best, probes psyche-deep in vivid detail and with an eloquent expressiveness that it is simply not possible to convey on film; the latter, at best, shimmers on the psychological surface, offering a vague impression of the truth and a suggestive sense of the spirit conveyed in its literary source of inspiration.

Handicapped by the limitations of his chosen medium, there was never any prospect that Jackson's film version of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of the trilogy, could capture the richness and depth of Tolkien's book. If this is so, it is clearly unfair to expect Jackson to achieve the impossible. Since we are dealing with an impressionistic medium we should only expect the film to convey an impression of the truth and the spirit of Tolkien's myth.

Does the film achieve this? For the most part, and emphatically, it does.

Jackson has resisted the temptation to take too many artistic liberties and has generally adhered closely to Tolkien's text. He is not foolhardy enough to stray too far from a proven winning formula, though he does employ a degree of license which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. When it works it is good, sometimes very good, occasionally masterful; when it fails to work it is bad, sometimes very bad, and occasionally downright ugly!

To begin with the good, Ian McKellen is an inspired Gandalf, exuding mystery and mysticism but also, and of equal importance, merging mirth with mysticism in equal proportion.

Similarly, the characterization of the hobbits blends a keen sense of humility with an equally keen sense of humor. This blend of humor and humility becomes a paradoxically potent cocktail, the secret ingredient that makes the hobbits so lovable, both in Tolkien's tale and in Jackson's film. Viggo Mortensen is a convincingly mysterious Strider who metamorphoses into a suitably noble Aragorn. Sean Bean shines faultlessly as the faltering and all-too-fallible Boromir. A lesser-known Sean (Astin) shines -- and perhaps even outshines Bean -- as the lovable and huggable hobbit, Samwise Gamgee.

So much for the good. What of the bad?

Unfortunately, the film fails miserably in its efforts to depict the elven characters. The elves, arguably the most sublime and most beautifully evocative of all Tolkien's creations, are either shown as outrageously effeminate or as provocatively feminine. The male elves are as trans-sexually impotent as their female counterparts are sexually charged. Elven "males," as seen in Lothlorien, are so neutered that it is impossible to determine their sex. Are they supermodels or transvestites? Either way, they are unconvincing as elves.

The choice of Cate Blanchett and Liv Tyler to play, respectively, Galadriel and Arwen, could have worked well if the demands of crypto-feminist and sexist/sexual stereotyping had not dictated that their roles be beefed up.

Galadriel, whom Tolkien likened to the Blessed Virgin, becomes a slightly disturbing white witch, while Arwen teeters on the brink of becoming a reincarnation of Xena, the warrior princess. Seldom has the abyss between modern romance and its mediaeval namesake appeared so wide and unbridgeable. Whereas the mediaeval heroine remained chaste, her modern counterpart is merely chased. Tolkien, the mediaevalist and Anglo-Saxon scholar, would have been horrified at this deflowering of his maidens. And thus the mighty have fallen. The elves, in whose immortal eyes could be perceived glimpses of eternity, are reduced to a hybrid of Marilyn Monroe and Marilyn Manson.

If the good is really good, and the bad is really bad, the ugly is really ugly.

The orcs are veritable masterpieces of ugliness. These relentlessly hateful servants of the Dark Lord, the products of infernally inspired genetic "modification," are the visible, and visually violent, incarnation of evil. Genetically engineered in Tolkien's imagination, via the perverse will or Sauron and Saruman, the orcs are brought sensationally and horrifically to life by computer-generated images and the ingenuity of make-up artists. The successful recreation of the orcs in Jackson's film represents the perfect marriage of ancient inspiration and modern technology.

Ultimately, however, Tolkien's book is not merely the product of ancient inspiration but of ancient wisdom. It is not the evil that can be seen in the eyes of an orc that is most hateful to the forces of good, but the invisible evil that lurks in the heart of each of us. The visualization of this invisible Evil, and the equally potent visualization of Good, was Jackson's greatest challenge. On occasion, he succeeds triumphantly. The scene at the end of the film, when Frodo, weary and frightened, wishes that the Ring, his Cross, could pass him by, is a moment of true brilliance. None but the most blind or most hard of heart could fail to perceive parallels with the Gospel. The scene, quite clearly, is the hobbit's 'Agony in the Garden'.

There are other moments also. Aragorn's reverence. Arwen's 'prayer' for grace. Gandalf's wisdom and his hints that the hidden hand of Providence is invisibly but omnipotently guiding events. Amidst the good, the bad and the ugly, it is these magic, or miraculous, moments that represent the film's saving grace.

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(Joseph Pearce, Writer-in-Residence at Ave Maria College in Michigan, is author of "Tolkien: Man & Myth," and "Tolkien: A Celebration." He also edits the Saint Austin Review, a trans-Atlantic cultural journal, the January edition of which is a Tolkien special issue.)