Tolkien review: this perfunctory biopic turns real life into the stuff of fantasy

Dir: Dome Karukoski. Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Lily Collins, Tom Glynn-Carney, Anthony Boyle, Patrick Gibson, Colm Meaney, Genevieve O’Reilly, Derek Jacobi. 12A cert, 112 mins

A zing of excitement shot through the critical corps last week when the family and estate of JRR Tolkien publicly disavowed the new film about the Lord of the Rings author’s younger years. In a brisk statement, both parties noted that they “did not approve of, authorise or participate in” its production, adding that they did not “endorse it or its content in any way”.

Tantalising! Was the cosy image of the pipe-smoking don about to be up-ended? Did this mean that director Dome Karukoski, whose previous film retold the life story of the gay erotic artist Tom of Finland, was about to treat us to a kind of philologically inclined Sid & Nancy, or a Naked Lunch with hobbits?

Reader, it did not. Tolkien the film does not memorialise or re-contextualise Tolkien the man in any remotely interesting sense: instead, it just meekly prods him through the Theory of Everything-iser and hopes for the best. The result feels like a formulaic retread of that 2014 Stephen Hawking period piece – a kind of dewy-eyed biopic for dummies that frames its subject’s genius as the product of a “personal journey”, entailing in this instance three close male friendships, a grim spell in the trenches of the Somme and a mildly tumultuous love-life.

Note that these events aren’t deemed sufficiently interesting in their own right to serve as the substance for a literary weepie in the vein of Shadowlands. All that matters is how they relate to the hits.

Tolkien himself was famously averse to allegorical readings, and noted in the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings that he preferred to think of his writing as a kind of “feigned” history, with “a varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers”. There can be no question that his experience as a battalion signalling officer in the trenches left an unmistakable, if diffuse, mark on his writing.

But here, every life experience, in wartime and peacetime alike, has a Middle-earth equivalent that we’re encouraged to spot. A faithful working-class soldier encountered on the battlefield turns out to be called Sam, while computer-generated visions of dragons and ringwraiths twist through the gun and mortar smoke. Then there is a childhood dressing-down from a bearded and sonorous headmaster, which more or less openly invites the audience to poke one another in the ribs and whisper “Ooh, I bet he turns out to be Gandalf.”

Perhaps the estate’s testy reaction to this film stemmed from their glum realisation that they were about to spend the next however-many years debunking it.

In short it’s a specious, perfunctory exercise, albeit one pieced together with some talent. The picture-perfect period-escapism look is nicely achieved – fans of William Morris wallpapers will find much to coo over – while the lead performances from Nicholas Hoult as the young John Ronald Reuel and Lily Collins as his sweetheart Edith Bratt wring about as much warmth and pathos from the demure, stuffy screenplay as there is to be had.

There is a corny but also oddly sweet sequence where the two quietly drive each other wild in a tearoom by purring the words “cellar door” at each other – a phrase Tolkien singled out for its unusually beautiful sound – before tossing sugar cubes into the hats of fellow customers. (You can tell this is an authentic biographical detail because it doesn’t nudgingly allude to anything in The Lord of the Rings.)

But the scenes centred on his, ahem, “fellowship” of vaguely hobbity-looking school friends, played by Tom Glynn-Carney, Anthony Boyle and Patrick Gibson, are much less credible: “How can it take six hours to tell the story of a ring?” one oh-so-foreshadowingly jokes during a confab on Wagner.

Well-informed, enlightening writing on Tolkien’s life and creative process is hardly scarce. But his genius stems from his scholarship, which doesn’t obviously lend itself to cinema, even with Derek Jacobi on hand as a professor-cum-mentor fruitily declaiming in Gothic as he potters around the quad.

“Myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected,” Tolkien once wrote. This film straps it to the operating table regardless, and as soon as the first cut is made, it conks out.