A FILM REVIEW WITH THOUGHTS ON ECO-ART: THE HOBBIT
"The destructive power of mechanized machines are just orders and orders of magnitude beyond anything that ever happened before they came around. There's no doubt that ecosystems on the planet are disappearing much faster than the human race has a capacity to survive."—Michael Fay, ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society
To set the stage for this review of "The Hobbit": I will risk nomination to the Geek Squad by admitting that for a decade I would read the entire of J.R.R.Tolkien's opus, from The Hobbit through The Return of the King, yearly. I even read The Silmarillion (making me Squad Secretary, at least). Short of memorizing all the songs and poems, I am as familiar with the works as a person can be. In spite of a film adaptation's astronomical likelihood to fall short in richness of 1,300+ pages of text, I love Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films.
For one thing, each movie featured memorable characters—my images of Aragorn, Legolas and Éowyn (to name a few) will now forever bear the stamps of Vigo, Orlando, and Miranda. This would not be the case had their look and performances—and, just as importantly, the quality of the filmaking as a whole—not earned this distinction. Although the battle scenes wore on Koplinski and some other critics, I myself did not find them overdone or overly long. Because it had to, because so much story had to be funneled into "the can", and ultimately winnowed from it, the plot's pace clipped along, as it were, briskly.
At times too briskly. Feeling that some scenes had been short-changed, I searched out the extended versions and found more satisfaction there. For instance, I was glad to find that the confrontation with Saruman after his defeat by the ents was at least shot, even if cut in the original release.
That said, the scene was underdone—it hinted at but did not capture the creepy convincingness of "Saruman's voice", the nowadays even more pervasive voice of propaganda and marketing. The voice of shame. A voice to lure whole nations over the cliff. The point is, in LOTR, if anything, some scenes were bled of their completeness by a need to keep up the pace.
Another casualty in LOTR was The Scouring of the Shire. This was the final chapter, the return home bearing a new and liberating power and compassion, a necessary part of any hero's journey. Not to mention that this chapter gave us a down-home look at the war on ecocide, a main preocupation of Tolkien's. Even so, this part received not even the half-baked treatment of Saruman's end. Perhaps part of this (I'm guessing) is that the profound lack of appreciation for Frodo in his home land, despite the staggering enormity of his sacrifice, would seem taboo, verboten, in the shiny-and-happy-ending Disneyfied celluloid monopoly on stories today. Ecological issues were addressed, but—and I think this is important—not in the hobbits' homeland. In place of such bitter truths, the relationship between Aragorn and Arwen was subjected to maudlin Hollywood embellishment. Garn!
Still, all this is very forgivable, given the breadth and scope of the project, the craving of the viewing public for romance, the sheer number of words to transfer from Tokien's manual typewriter to the silver, CGI screen. I absolve thee, Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema. I, certainly, could not have done remotely near as well.
But I wish they'd have called me before making "The Hobbit", a movie which I had been looking forward to for some time. I'd have told them, "Make one movie instead of three, with nine hours of finished product you will be tempted to force a lot of extraneous crap into the story!". But call they did not. Instead of getting billing as creative consultant, watching the premiere in the front row flanked by Miranda Ott, Liv Tyler and Cate Blanchett, I had to buy tickets. For hours, I sat lodged in your average movieplex seat like any schmuck—hating to, but thinking the unthinkable nonetheless: "This actually sucks!"
And it did, at least when compared to my expectations.
The appearances of the movie's stars on Colbert's show helped me onto the bandwagon. I was drinking the Kool-Aid. Certainly the previews gave no warning of the plodding tediousness which was before my eyes taking the place of Tolkien's descriptive verbage and lively plot. But previews are short. And selective.
Critics have made it clear that Jackson and friends have weighed the film down with excessive backstory, spuriously extended subplots involving characters of little mention in the books (when we could really stand to get to know our dwarves better, dammit) and, consequently, mindless CGI. They imply that the violence that flows from these additions is excessive, but it's certainly the other way around: an abundance of bloodshed, desired and required first and foremost by the medium of Hollywood action film, has invaded the tale as given and sought further expression in embellished backstory. To kick a dead cliché (or, perhaps, to stab it with a glowing elven blade): such violence, in what was once upon a time a children's story, is gratuitious….if the term chafes, being hackneyed, well then so be it, because the added and unnecessary villains and fight scenes do, too.
I don't need to remake the point. But I do have more particular observations. One is that the history of Thorin, which expands the role of a barely-mentioned villain (Azog, in the film a pale giant of an orc), is another facile example of comic book mentality. The pale orc, besides being twice as tall as the dwarves he attacks, also looks (as almost every comic book character, both hero and villain, does) like he spends most of his life in the gym pumping iron. His face is not terribly distinctive; Haven't I seen you somewhere before? He looks like a muscular Voldemort, or a the creepy religious guy from the long ago (and forgettable, despite the tarantula-falling-in-sexy-woman's-mouth scene) "Deadly Blessing". Perhaps, I must reflect, there was a reason that Tolkien made Azog a footnote.
Here, his presence is redolent of something already problematic: evil for evil's sake, of which Azog is now another, even less developed example. With Sauron, the viewer/reader has no idea why he would wish to both rule and lay waste to Middle Earth. Sauron has no personality nor history (even in the appendix to Middle Earth knows as The Silmarillion—here we get some history of his time previous to Bilbo and Frodo, but nothing to indicate how or why he became evil). But this is made up for by the Dark Lord's being present as a constant underlying menace whose will moves through the very actions of the protagonists. As Saruman did in "The Fellowship of the Ring", our filmmakers have now produced an even bigger, badder orc to shudder at. The newly developed Azog appears out of nowhere, a nemesis as two-dimensional as he is convenient, lopping off the head of our heros' kin….Pardon the pun, but this Azog is overkill.
He literally kills Thrór, the grandfather of Thorin, the latter of whom would much later become the leader of the dwarf company setting out to win back their lost kingdom in The Hobbit. In the book, Thorin, the grandson, is proud, suspicious, very long-bearded, and fairly cantankerous. But, passed through the lustful lens of Hollywood, he has features quite human (unlike most of the other dwarves, they did not stick a big prosthetic nose and ears on him), and handsome (but by human standards, not dwarf). Tolkien describes dwarves as making up in stoutness what they lacked in height, but here is Jackson's attitude: “Thorin Oakenshield is a tough, heroic character, and he certainly should give Leggie and Aragorn a run for their money in the heartthrob stakes — despite being four feet tall.”. The movie Thorin is not broad, he doesn't have a huge nose as do the other dwarves, and he is almost beardless. He looks like any young human guy. I guess beards isn't sexy, even for a prominent member of the "Longbeard" tribe of dwarves.
So, if I were to make a cameo foray into "The Hobbit," I would, just as Éowyn told the Witch King, "I am no man!", say to Jackson's heartthrob Thorin, "You are no dwarf!". With the technology at hand, these filmmakers made fully grown adult actors into "halflings"—could they not make dwarves into "broadlings"? I wonder if they will go ahead and throw in a love interest for Thorin, during the next two installments. It wouldn't surprise me. Much. Although, since dwarf women are explicitly described as wearing beards themselves, how to handle it….
Most of the other dwarves look a lot more dwarvish. Kudos to the makeup department. Except for Kili, the archer of the group, who, like Thorin, looks not like a dwarf but only like a handsome young man. Didn't I see this actor in a frat film? Aside from the appearance of most of them, nothing sets the dwarves apart as a race in this movie except a certain uncouthness. I thought for a bit that they would all have Scottish accents, and I thought that fit, roughly, despite the improbable dialectical crossover with Billy Boyd and the hobbits of Tookland. But then Thorin spoke, and he had an English accent, despite the supposed common origin of all—or perhaps, more distastefully to the democratic American, the "English" accent is supposed to denote nobility in both the class-based and general senses? The Irish in me recoils.
Hollywood! I digress, but have to point out its way of whitewashing even the most imaginative work. As hard as Tolkien worked to make his characters distinct and memorable, Hollywood labors to fit them into certain ruts of plot, behavior and look. The imagination, in Hollywood, can only go so far. This is not a technological limitation—with CGI, sky's the limit. No, while watching in dismay as Jackson et al stretched the shortest Tolkien book into the longest movie, and took liberties with character and plot, word and image, I smelled a business plan. It was like looking at really soft-core porn, wherein certain elements and results are always inevitable. Hollywood dresses every character up in loud lipstick and a mini-skirt, arms them with heavy artillery, and makes them grab their ankles—and smile.
Tolkien's The Hobbit was the innocent prelude to The Lord of the Rings, and rightly so. It was aimed at children, for one thing, and it took place before any character in it knew—before even Tolkien himself knew—that the titular piece of jewelry was in fact a nuclear arsenal for a supernatural Hitler. But Jackson tries to make it match LOTR in darkness of tone, and outpace it in length. He tries to force it to mesh with the movies set later but made first, with klunky results. In a reprise, the actor who'd played Frodo in the LOTR trilogy appears here even more wooden than his surname, as if he, too, had been wondering "What the hell am I doing here?" as the scenes were being shot.
It sounds like I'm saying that Jackson et al should not have attempted any of these meshings or fleshings out. Not true. It's only that, in most cases, they just didn't pull it off very well. Another example of this is an inserted bit of narration about the spread of evil, which ended up with words to to shame a middle-school English class: "where creatures of the Enemy are found—bad things follow (emphasis mine)!" Few wordings could have carried the "ring" of Tolkien's vivid and eloquent prose less successfully.
Liberties were taken, I said earlier. One particularly repugnant example was the outsmarting of the trolls, in the book undertaken mostly by Gandalf, who inserted inflammatory statements into the giant oafs' conversation by perfectly imitating each of them in turn, turning them on each other to distract them from the rising sun, which then strikes them into stone. This is a charming and lovely scene worthy of any trickster, one that increases the depth of character and mystery floating around the enigmatic wizard (why does he care?). But Jackson instead has Bilbo stall them a bit, followed by Gandalf's dramatically striking a huge boulder in half with a burst of explosive light from his staff, thereby revealing the sun behind it with predictable results for the hapless trolls. This was OK eye-candy, but to the mind it was predictable, lame, and more-of-the-same. Gandalf with his super-powerful rock-breaking staff. Woo-woo.
I don't mean that this movie is trash. A few things stood out as quite wonderful, even one or two of the insertion-expansions penned by Jackson and crew. I thought that the goiterous, saggy-fleshed goblin king was deliciously revolting (and, ironically, demonstrated more personality than most). And Gollum in the scene "Riddles in the Dark", could not have been better, in my opinion. Also, Martin Freeman stands out among many one-dimensional performances as an engaging and multifaceted Bilbo Baggins. What's more, the song that the dwarves sing in Bilbo's hobbit house is a haunting but stirring anthem-dirge, up there with "Éowyn's Lament" sung with beauty and pain in Old English by Miranda Otto during "The Two Towers" (and cut from the original edition). Additionally, the dragon Smaug, in contrast to much of the rest of the film, is at least for now handled in an understated way. And, last but not least, Radagast the Brown in his upgrade from secondhand mention in the books to major player in this movie, is a scene-stealer with his frenetic movements, bird-shitten hair, and sledge pulled by leaps and bounds (thanks to a team of large rabbits).
So I agree with most reviewers in giving this movie a C or C+. It's not a total stinker. But, make no mistake: compared to the books, to the hype, to the first three movies made, it is a resounding disappointment. It's just that Jackson has big shoes to fill—Tolkien's, his own—but on his "Hobbit" feet, they flop and fall off, often. This very unfortunate mishandling of a seminal literary creation is like a small town murder—we have got to know, and know now, who dunnit? Can we lay this at Jackson's smial-step? Did he, personally, just get overly ambitious? Did he himself slip on the Ring of Hollywood power with its attendant corruption? And/or did someone have a gun to his head, the hidden Man with the plan, the man with the money who makes the dark days…darker? Was Jackson, in fact, playing Saruman to the tune of some cash-hungry dark lord? MGM did have money troubles, leading to vast delays and thereby to the departure of original director Benito Del Toro. One gets the impression that Jackson had to step in and mop up the mess. But it's hard to blame an overly long movie on money troubles—unless, like the dwarves of Kazad-dûm, who in their greed delved too deep, those troubles fuel the desire to overreach in hopes of making even more money.
It doesn't matter. As an unheralded success, LOTR on film surely had a certain creative leeway. But we who have lived a fair number of years putting up with it know that the occasional creative triumph bursting through the back door of its status quo does NOT make Hollywood a truly creative beacon of artistic ways and means. It isn't personal—it's a business. As such, it always has the temptation—hell, the habit—of choosing flash over substance with the aim of filling more seats and bank accounts.
Sometimes, that's an enjoyable or even necessary diversion from "real" life. Most times, it's just more schlock.
...Sometimes, you have few to no expectations. Other times, there's a legend to live up to. There's the memory of absolutely needing to find out what happens next, and the how, and the staying for hours on the couch or in the bed reading and reading on, fighting off sleep for the sake of arriving at denouement. Which was my experience with The Hobbit (the book). With The Hobbit (the movie), the opposite: I was unconsciously wanting to leave my seat while consciously keeping my butt planted, stubbornly hoping for a comeback, for some redemption. In the case of this (one-third of a) movie, I want my ten dollars back, I want my three hours back, I want Jackson to take the hint and pare down the remaining two films for this one story to something more bearable. Most of all, I want Bilbo, and Thorin and his company, to live on the screen, faithful to themselves and the spirit of the story. But it seems that, thanks to the business plan, they have joined the ranks of the "living dead" category of characters puppeted through sequel after sequel (and prequel before prequel) long after the original spark of inspiration in them has been snuffed out.
Reader, I recommend caution as to the issue of whether to see the next two installments or not. At the least, I recommend an expectations adjustment, because as you know expectations can make or break a movie experience. As for myself, the geek in me is dying to see the bear-man Beorn on screen, hoping that a high-budget artistic engine will do him justice. Even so, even and especially if it does do him justice, to see him embedded in the fabulous tale, made tiresome, might be too much even for me. But still, the boy in me might never forgive my boycotting the middle and the end, even of this forced trilogy—but he must know that if he sees it he will have to endure the nagging criticisms of the adult ego.
What to do? I even have given some thought to the good people of New Zealand, and how buying a ticket indirectly supports them financially. But then again, I also think that they—and we—should all just return to our forests (in our case, replanting them first) and stop supporting the technologically overbloated film industry, with its plane trips and transport and heavy-metal laden machinery….In the case of the trips, it's staggering to consider how many must have been undertaken from the States and Europe to the Island Down Under, at maybe 200 gallons of fuel per person, per trip, while at this writing Australia is on fire (very literally) from the effects of global warming. Ironically indeed, the mainstream success of the green-minded LOTR series has required, as must any blockbuster, a relatively huge carbon footprint, a footprint that surely has J.R.R. Tolkien's eco-friendly bones banging violently against the box, in protest.
Once upon a time, we told each other big stories around tiny campfires, and imagination in the form of dreams and visions and, well, imagination were our own personal CGI projectors for those myths and stories. The storytellers did what he and she could with tone and pace and body language, the imagination sculpted it out of thought-forms and emotion, opening the mind to archetypal energies, to heroism and miracles. I do believe that movies can fulfill the same function—but only to a point: in the absence of a fully developed personal imagination to give its own form and meaning to tales, memorizing them and infusing them with emotion in the re-telling, movies are a poor substitute.
Not only that, but lacking a truly fertile world which is "green and good," the movies might serve to keep us distracted from the desolation around us and/or unwilling to get up off the couch and fight—we are worse than ents before their conversion from shepherds to warriors. And, as I've said, via their footprint, in the meantime they worsen the disaster even if, like LOTR, they purport to be raising consciousness about it.
My point here is that, if "The Hobbit", the movie, is a bit lame, that's OK. Many of us can read it to our children--hell, many even know the story well enough to just tell it, albeit in a bare-bones fashion. Bilbo lives! Radagast the Brown is real. Storytelling is, in its way, more powerful than film anyway. And our own personal, innocent adventures can lead, beyond "back again", to the tooth-and-nail fight against the looming catastrophes of our day.
Mr. Tolkien would not expect any less of us. Let us, finally, call him "Sir" Tolkien, and take up arms, and take up our imaginations, and really, truly, follow his saddened, luddite self to a greener tomorrow.
