Tolkien: Uninspiringly Bland

A good way to measure a movie's quality is always to ask yourself a question while watching it: Does this movie accomplish what it sets out to do? Director Dome Karukowski's Tolkien attempts to narrate the life of the famed writer J.R.R. Tolkien, the mind behind the legendary The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit novels, but its portrayal of The Father of Modern Fantasy is sadly uneven. At times, this movie is graspable and even fleetingly interested in viewing the world through Tolkien's eyes, but only on the occasions it allows itself to be anything other than a passable imitation of other, better biographical films. Even rarer were any flashes of intrigue. I unearthed an unfortunate distance between myself and Nicholas Hoult's portrayal of one of the greatest authors alive, a distance sitting in ironic contrast to Tolkien's lifestyle of creating legendarily immediate storytelling.

In some ways, this distance is understandable, and in others, I wonder if it is due to some fault of my own. The acting in Tolkien, especially when lead actor Nicholas Hoult interacts with his male castmates, is magnetically brotherly and at its undeniable best. In other ways, Tolkien as a whole is at its worst when trying to reckon the continual back-and-forth between Tolkien's time as a young man finding his way in turn-of-the-century Great Britain and his time as a soldier experiencing the horrors of World War I. I hate to use the term missed opportunity, but Tolkien had every chance to embrace the inherent imbalance of these tones and instead tries to minimize the effect instead of exploiting the fact that a peaceful university campus and a war-torn European battlefield are polar opposites. Much of this movie is a conspicuous and second-rate clash of tones when it could have and even should have been a brilliant contrast.

Otherwise, Tolkien is a fairly by-the-numbers biopic. I find myself disappointed by the mediocrity pocking nearly every moment of a movie about the man who wrote one of the greatest stories ever made, because while Tolkien isn't always a terrible movie, it's never entirely worthwhile either, content to draw in the lines rather than create its own picture. I likewise find myself disappointed by this movie's omission of Tolkien's faith. I get that Christianity can be a contentious topic, but making a movie about J.R.R. Tolkien with no mention of his devout faith in God is much like trying to talk about the history of the American Civil War without once mentioning Abraham Lincoln, or trying to make a movie about Tom Brady without so much as acknowledging his love for football.

Tolkien never ignites. It's never truly terrible, either, but nothing about it made me hungry to learn more about J.R.R. Tolkien, a cardinal sin for a biopic. It can't ever seem to settle on a tone or identity to call its own and never seems remotely interested in being remotely interesting, at least more interesting than other genre-mates it should have had a reasonable chance of competing with. And for a movie about the writer of The Lord of the Rings, that doesn't sit well with me. For all its attempts to make me interested in an already-interesting man, Tolkien is remarkably wearisome.

Tolkien - 5/10

Job 19:23-27