One film to rule them all
Peter Jackson's "Fellowship of the Ring" pleases both Tolkien nuts and "Lord of the Rings" virgins. How did he pull off such an unlikely feat?
Editor's note: The following article contains some plot discussions that readers who have not yet seen "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" may wish to avoid.
By Scott Rosenberg
Feb. 6, 2002 | During the months of lead-up to the release last Christmas of "The Fellowship of the Ring," Peter Jackson's remarkable film adaptation of the first volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," one question kept pushing to the fore. Jackson, we kept reading, needed to please the fanatical devotees of Tolkien's fantasy classic -- people who had (like me, I freely and proudly admit) been weaned on his saga of Elves and Dwarves and Rings of Power -- or he'd never get his movie the approving buzz it would need. But he also needed to make a film that would reach beyond the cadres of Middle Earth-lovers to people who'd never cracked Tolkien's tomes -- or he'd never sell enough tickets.
As movie critics and feature writers and online scribes weighed the fate of Jackson's project, they regularly set these two goals at odds with each other. If Jackson satisfied the hobbit-heads by showing proper deference to Tolkien's work, the conventional wisdom went, he'd never get the masses into the theater. But if he did the necessary surgery on Tolkien's saga to make it a movie with mass appeal, he'd surely piss off his core audience.
Once the movie opened and the critics began raving, the common explanation for the project's success continued to parrot this perspective: Jackson had managed an extraordinary balancing act. He'd made the right trade-offs. He took the conflicting demands of fans and the general public and somehow found the perfect compromise.
This interpretation has the advantage of fitting conveniently into people's preconceptions about the inherent differences between literature and cinema, art films and box-office bonanzas, smart moviegoers and crude mass audiences. But it's wrong.
Anyone who watches "The Fellowship of the Ring" with a deep knowledge of the text on which it's based can see -- moment by moment, scene by scene, image by image -- that what's best in Jackson's film is directly drawn from what's best in Tolkien's prose. The film is filled with visual tours de force -- from the way the face of Ian Holm's Bilbo tightens into orcish ferocity when he glimpses the ring he once possessed, to the way the whitecaps on a river flood-tide turn into galloping white stallions as they crest (a scene my colleague Stephanie Zacharek wrote about beautifully in her review of the movie). And every single one of them is a direct screen translation of some special effect that was already present in Tolkien's writing.
It turned out that there was no conflict between satisfying Tolkien's fans and catering to everyone else. What Jackson and his collaborators did right was to trust Tolkien, to draw virtually all of their movie straight from the book -- understanding that the same visions that had captivated millions of readers for decades could, if transferred to the screen with respect and imagination, equally well captivate millions of viewers. Such trust is so rare in Hollywood today -- and, when it's found, it's so often misplaced, in source material that doesn't merit it -- that the coherence and quality of "The Fellowship of the Ring" lands in our laps like an unexpectedly generous gift.
The sheer faith "Fellowship" places in its text is something many critics -- who either hadn't read the books or, let's give them the benefit of the doubt, hadn't read them in a long time -- simply missed. Here's Elvis Mitchell, writing in the New York Times: "Mr. Jackson has exploited the anecdotal nature by turning 'Fellowship' into an escalating group of cliffhangers." Well, no: Those cliffhangers are Tolkien originals, one and all, beautifully re-created by Jackson but already present on the page in their full nail-biting glory.
Consider how Jackson's "Fellowship of the Ring" presents what is probably the action climax of Tolkien's story: the confrontation, deep in the mines of Moria, between the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and the Balrog, a mysterious "demon of the ancient world." Now, the word "Balrog" doesn't mean anything to the average moviegoer; it doesn't mean anything at first to the reader of Tolkien's book, either. All the reader knows is that this mysterious force of evil causes even Gandalf to quail ("What it was I cannot guess, but I have never felt such a challenge") -- and sends the hordes of lesser foes that have been assailing the story's heroes skittering away in terror.
Tolkien's description of the Balrog is somewhat vague: "It was like a great shadow, in the middle of which was a dark form, of man-shape maybe, yet greater; and a power and terror seemed to be in it and go before it ... Its streaming mane kindled, and blazed behind it. In its right hand was a blade like a stabbing tongue of fire; in its left it held a whip of many thongs."
A writer can use words to evoke images without having to spell out every detail; the reader's imagination can be left to fill in a general outline. Gandalf's declaration that "there are older and fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world" (words that roll meatily from McKellen's Shakespeare-seasoned mouth) leaves us free to imagine what those things might look like. Indeed, a filmmaker adapting a book like "The Lord of the Rings" is forced to compete with millions of readers' mental pictures -- the movies that unspool through our minds as we turn Tolkien's pages. My Balrog isn't the same as your Balrog; Tolkien's blurry portrait left each of us free to draw one of our own.
Next page: To understand how great "Fellowship" is, just consider David Lynch's "Dune"