Shire Impressions

I'd gradually been getting into the mood to watch Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring for a couple years. In the two years before leaving the U.S., I read The Lord of the Rings twice, first in my hardback and then as an audiobook in the last month before I left the country. At that point I wasn't at all in the mood for Jackson's movies and it'd become clear to me just how tonally different the book is to them. It may be that I was identifying with book Frodo in ways I couldn't with movie Frodo, too. Elijah Wood was a smooth-faced boy while the Frodo of the book was a hobbit of fifty years when he left the Shire. I felt closer to the stage of maturity and age Frodo is shown to have in the book but I think, even more than that, the process Frodo went through before leaving the Shire, of gradually selling or giving away his home and possessions, over the course of months before leaving, seemed to mirror my own experience. I was listening to that audiobook in my car while I drove to places where I could sell my books or donate a lot of my clothes. And there was the sense of doom hanging over everything. Corona was just gaining traction but I'd had an impression of incremental decline in my home city of San Diego for years.

I did love the Peter Jackson movies when they came out twenty years ago. I remember watching Fellowship of the Ring before driving to Seattle, my first big road trip, and it calmed my nerves a lot. The film presents more of a young man's adventure rather than an unseasonable exile.

But Japan is no Mordor. Frodo was going towards a bleak and horrible destination while I was fleeing to someplace I'd always longed to visit. And I found the good impressions I'd had of Japan not only proved to be true but better than I'd cautiously imagined. Maybe it's working with kids, too, that got me in the mood for the films again, though Lord of the Rings is sadly not popular or even well known around here.

I could watch them on Australian Netflix if I used my VPN but only the theatrical cuts and that just seems pointless. I was pleased to find HBOMax has the extended editions.

As with Labyrinth, I marvelled at what a feast Fellowship of the Ring is in terms of production design. But of course it's even more ambitious than that. What a miracle this movie was financed, a movie that's so many things. What other movie has scenes like the boys reuniting in effervescent Rivendell along with scenes of the billowing black smoke creature in Moria? A movie with an amusing birthday party and also heads being lopped off? Few movies dare to devote so much time to such disparate tones, at least in Hollywood now. The closest analogy I can think of is the old biblical epics or certain Bollywood films. Films designed for audiences who plan their whole day around one very long movie.

It begins all wrong, with a history lesson, Cate Blanchett dumping exposition on us. Everyone knows you're not supposed to do something like that. The book doesn't start that way, every movie that imitated Jackson's was just shooting itself in the foot. In itself, the info-dump in Fellowship isn't good cinema but when taken as part of the whole it works very well. It really is a history lesson so when you start to get little call-backs throughout the film, new little snippets of Isildur or Sauron, it feels like encountering some real, physical evidence of something you heard about in a history class long ago. It gives you a nice, creeping feeling of having been warned, but not having appreciated the warnings, far in advance.

The film's excessive closeups, that were so refreshing at the time, haven't aged well. My opinion may change on that in ten years. But they don't hold up like Sergio Leone's famous long closeups primarily because of the pace of the editing. Leone lingered on closeups but he also lingered on wide shots more.

The performances and casting are all pitch perfect, though I might quibble over Elijah Wood and Sean Astin. I've always felt British or Irish actors would've been better in the roles and I still do. But they're not really bad. Ian McKellen has the perfect combination of warmth and wisdom and a genius for subtle but clear expression. Viggo Mortensen has that cagey stillness about him moderated by subtle, sensitive quirks of the eyebrow or a faint grin. He really comes off as self-possessed, someone perfectly suited for leadership. Sean Bean, jockeying for time among everything else in this movie, believably establishes Boromir as a man torn between resentment and respect for Aragorn.

Jackson generates terrific excitement. The Moria sequences have a real swashbuckling sense to them. Gandalf's apparent death is still gut-wrenching.

I just realised December this year will mark the 20th anniversary of the film's premiere. Twenty years is a long time but it's recent enough to still seem like a miracle of modern cinema. To me, anyway. To plenty of kids, it's as ancient as the Great Depression or World War I.