Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Lily Collins, Pam Ferris, Adrian Schiller, Colm Meaney, Owen Teale, Derek Jacobi, Craig Roberts, Harry Gilby, Laura Donnelly, Guillermo Bedward, Nia Gwynne, Kallum Tolkien, Tony Nash, Michael Bryceson, Andrew Bissell, Patrick Gibson, Anthony Boyle, Tom Glynn-Carney, James MacCallum.
Subconsciously driven by the exotic use of imagination or shaped by the events we observe, there is a tale in each of us that demands to be told, and in which regrettably few of us choose to pursue.
“ wish I was a writer”, is the opening gambit of many who corner one who finds solace in the conversational gaps, “but I don’t have the time.” is usually the follow up, the personal kick in the teeth to their own soul and one that sometimes affirms in the writer’s mind all that they have neglected, birthdays, social occasions, friendships, in pursuit of creating an art that few will ever recognise as having torn a whole in the fabric of their being, and in which the nightmares and dark places in which they travelled through leave them scarred and feeling war-weary.
Perhaps it is not time that plagues us when contemplating the dedication it requires to imagine a new world, it is the fear of what it will show us about ourselves, a fear that the magic will consume, especially in the pursuit of fiction, a world with dragons, where the trolls carry weapons and not just drunken spite, a world into which the writer will ever be associated with the characters in which they have brought to life.
Whilst the film Tolkien could be seen as being heavily romanticised, placed within the sphere of looking at the life of the author of The Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings as if he was somehow destined to capture the uniqueness of imagination; there is no doubt that from a young age he was single-minded in his ability to frame what he observed and set other’s aflame with passion as they drank in every word.
There will always be those that see no point in fantasy, in the epic, relegating it in some way as if born out of the class structure they perceive, not real life, not reflecting the trials and hardships of their own existence. They may have a point themselves with such arguments, but to completely dismiss a writer of such renown as Tolkien, of someone who shaped an idea of comradeship out of his youthful experiences of having lost both his parents and the evil and madness in which Europe and the wider world descended into during the second decade of the 20th Century, on the basis of politics is to play a dangerous game, one that could be considered born of envy.
Tolkien wasn’t perfect, a man of his time and of the institutes he sought to preserve, but like Mallory who brought to life the tales of King Arthur as a prisoner inside the Tower of London, circumstances dictate that new worlds be forged, even languages born.
With exceptional performances by Nicholas Hoult and Lily Collins as Tolkien and his future wife Edith Bratt and Anthony Boyle as the tragically heroic poet Geoffrey Bache Smith, Tolkien captures the period in which the writer’s ideas were beginning to form, the credibility of being allowed the space to breathe and think rather than be illuminated by the post Victorian hangover of seeing such pursuits as a waste of time and vanity driven.
A film of inspired imagination, in which magic flows through those that seek it and who see life through their dreams.
Ian D. Hall