The Fellowship of the Ring
By James Slone
With the release of “The Fellowship of the Ring” in December 2001, Peter Jackson’s pricy three-part adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rinds” got off to a great start. It was followed by two progressively inferior sequels, “The Two Towers” in 2002 and “The Return of the King” in 2003. Neither of the successors match its balance of storytelling, special effects, action spectacle and mythopoeic resonance. “The Two Towers” has some great battles, a unique special effects creation in Gollum and an inspiring finale, but sags in the middle. “The Return of the King” has some of the trilogy’s best set pieces, but is overlong, with an overindulgent finale and some laughably bad special effects scenes. Peter Jackson’s desire to one-up each film leads to a “more is more” approach that starts to feel like bloat toward the end.
The Story
“The Fellowship of the Ring” is the tightest of the three films because it’s essentially a one-way road movie with few battles and a downer ending. In the first half, we watch the intrepid hobbit Frodo (a big-eyed, elfin Elijah Wood) and his hobbit companions (most notably Sean Astin as his dear, dear friend Sam) flee the pastoral hills of Hobbiton with the One Ring to Rivendell, pursued by the ghastly Nazgul, nine badass undead marauders with accursed blades. Outmanned and outgunned, the heroes can only run. It plays more like horror than high fantasy.
Once they get to Rivendell, the hobbits are joined by wizard Gandalf (the great Ian McKellen), the heir of Gondor, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), the stout dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davis), the graceful elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and the conflicted warrior Boromir (Sean Bean), arguably the most complex character in the trilogy besides Gollum.
With this team assembled, the film enters the trilogy’s best stretch as the kick ass band of warriors take the ring to the more powerful elf kingdom of Lothlórien, overcoming a series of disastrous obstacles: the plotting wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee at his most deeply sonorous), goblins, trolls, and the demonic, whip-cracking Balrog deep in the Mines of Moria. Setbacks are constant, and Jackson keeps the movie moving at a white-knuckle pace until the end, stopping only for a mellow interlude with the elf queen Galadriel (an ethereal Cate Blanchett) before diving headlong into the action-packed and ultimately tragic finale.
The Men
“The Fellowship of the Ring” is more focused than its companions, less reliant on obvious effects (the hobbits and the Balrog are probably the best effects in it). As soon as the Hobbits leave the Shire, the film moves at the breakneck pace of a 1960s Ford Mustang, occasionally stopping to party with beer and song along the way. But the pace doesn’t preclude strong, standout performances, and there are several. Elijah Wood’s Frodo is sympathetic, but Sean Astin’s Sam is better, a goofy companion with a serious crush on his master. Viggo Mortensen is extremely well case as the ultra-competent and kingly Aragorn. Sean Bean brings a real hurt, weariness and duplicity to the tragic and put-upon Boromir, a man who really wants what’s best for this people. And Ian McKellen’s Gandalf is a revelation, playing a wise but paradoxical sage, super powerful and painfully vulnerable. The other companions are well cast to type (pretty boy and boisterous tank).
The Woman
Less inspired is Aragorn’s love interest, the elf princess Arwen. Played by Liv Tyler, Arwen speaks from a dreamy, faraway place, always just out of focus and airbrushed to softcore perfection. She fits in with the hokey aesthetic of Rivendell itself: Pre Raphaelite by way of Thomas Kinkade, gauzy, pastel, boring. Arwen’s father Elrond is played by Hugo Weaving, who brings a solemn authority to the role, a feeling of power and grace the pretty but immobilized Tyler never quite musters. I can’t blame her though, it’s an underwritten role. Jackson and his longtime collaborators, writers Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens, have a more progressive sensibility than Tolkien when it comes to girl power, and give the character some action sequences and the infamous taunt “If you want him, come and take him!” But it doesn’t really gel with the doe-eyed hausfrau she’s expected to play the rest of the time. To be honest, I’m never quite sure what the rugged, independent Aragorn is supposed to see in her.
The Environment
One of the film’s great strengths is that it’s the only one in the trilogy that establishes the stakes involved. We see the good life of the Hobbits, smoking and drinking their lives away in provincial isolation, at the beginning of the film. And we later see a possible outcome in Galadriel’s divining pool: the industrialization and enslavement of the Shire, an actual event in the books excised from the movies for pacing. For all of Tolkien’s much-lauded, much-condemned conservatism with respect to women and races, when it comes to war and the environment, Tolkien’s anarcho-pastoralism more closely resembles Earthfirst! than the GOP. Recall that this is a man who famously endorsed firebombing factories. There is an undercurrent of radicalism in his work, and it’s a testament to their loyalty to his ideology that the film’s creators left most of it in.
The things that grow and the creatures who till the land are the good in Tolkien. The elves, the long-lived race that’s supposed to be closest to nature, live among trees, crafting their houses to meld with the organic elements. The Hobbits live among rolling hills and simple agriculture, individualistic but ultimately communal farmers to till the land by day and consume its bounty at night, down at the pub or during festivals. They’re always shown working the land or celebrating. Tolkien intended the Hobbits to represent his simplistic, romantic view of rural English life, and the filmmakers honor him, even decking out the hobbits in Edwardian country dress.
Their annihilation at the hands of industry represents the ultimate evil. Jackson does a good job of showing that visually, especially in the scenes at Isengard, Saruman’s tower. In order to raise an army of orcs suitable to the task of carrying out Sauron’s directives, Saruman engages in some sketchy genetic experiments (expunged from the film are Tolkien’s more loaded racial crossbreeding), using the miracle of pseudo-science to create a race of super orcs. In order to arm this force, he chops down the lush (conscious) forest around the tower for wood and fuel, and then strip mines it for metals, leaving a deep, ugly scar in the land. In the later films, we see the results: a giant mechanized army right out of the Third Reich. This nightmarish image of crude rationalization is seen in a more advanced forum in the gutted, lifeless and volcanic wasteland that is Mordor.
Why it Resonated
“The Fellowship of the Ring” is a film of considerable artistry–consider the beautiful costumes, the ensemble cast, the spectacular special effects, the ornately crafted weapons and tools, the architecture (the Mines of Moria are particularly impressive), the inspiring New Zealand locations, and the tense action sequences. The sheer amount of work that went into it and the rest of the trilogy was only possible because Jackson and his collaborators believed in the project. Every frame is a love letter to Tolkien’s world, even those that deviate for storytelling purposes and political correctness. But I don’t think that that alone accounts for the huge response it generated or why mass audiences were so moved by it.
The film was released only three months after September 11, when the United States was wrangling with the existential questions raised by the attack on the World Trade Center. The economy was in the toilet, the United States had already invaded Afghanistan to hunt down the perpetrators, and the national mood came in three flavors: hopeless, hysterical and violently jingoistic. The” Lord of the Rings” trilogy unwittingly became a propaganda reel for the War on Terror, taking us from the post-911 mourning period to the war in Iraq in 2003.
“The Fellowship of the Ring” resonated with American audiences because of its tragic ending. The outnumbered warrior Boromir is dispatched by a hoard of orcs, finally realizing his moral folly as he’s pierced by a hail of arrows. This is actually the film’s second death after Gandalf falls in Moria. Two of the hobbits are abducted. Frodo and Sam flee with the ring into an uncertain future. There’s a pervasive feeling of sadness and despair at the end of “Fellowship,” but there’s also the hope that the hobbits will successfully destroy the ring in its place of origin, and the determination of the remaining heroes to track down the other hobbits.
This ending, both mournful and optimistic, struck a chord with so many people because the national mood was at a very low point and the idea that we might prevail after taking what felt like a powerful blow was both satisfying and seductive to American audiences. By time you get to “men of the west” speechifying in the second film, the writing is on the wall. The evil of Mordor would soon be vanquished, and light would come at our darkest moment. The war in the final film plays out like the ideal version of the war in Iraq, the Western forces greeted by the happy people of Gondor as liberators.
The film’s creators obviously never intended this. It was a fluke, the purely coincidental historical joining of Tolkien’s older, rustic conservative values with G.W. Bush’s statist neo-conservatism. Never has the mythical past so effectively blurred into modernity. The “Lord of the Rings” trilogy was the defining film cycle of that short, heady, bloody-minded era.