Writer: David Gleeson & Stephen Beresford.  

Director: Dome Karukoski 

Critics have to walk along the thin, often spiked tightrope between subjective and objective judgements. Whether you like or dislike a film is subjective, but you try your best to use objective reasoning as to why that is. While watching Tolkien, I saw more than a few things wrong with it; cliched score, monotone direction, by-numbers plotting, which on any other day may have made me hate it. But on this day, I just watched and smiled at a sweet film about a sweet man falling in love with a sweet girl. 

Tolkien, as you would expect, follows the early life of J.R.R. Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) who would go onto write The Lord of the Rings, told mainly from his perspective of him thinking over his life in the trenches during the Battle of the Somme. Ronald, as Tolkien is known in the film, is raised as an orphan in a pre-war England presented with lush, saturated colours by director Dome Karukoski. After moving to Birmingham to live in an orphan boarding house, Tolkien attends a private school, where he forms the T.C.B.S. literary society with his friends Robert, Christopher and Geoffrey. There’s is a life of privilege, but one ultimately weighed down by the iron-clad fist of upper-class British social rules. Also at the boarding house is Edith Bratt (Lilly Collins), a fellow orphan and keen piano player. Her character is under-developed, and we learn little about her life previous to meeting Tolkien, but Collins is excellent at portraying her rage at the gendered codification of her existence, which falls well short of dreams of being a great pianist rather than a wife.  

Hoult and Collins are good in their respective roles and bring a real sense of warmth to the romantic arc of their characters. The film is also excellent in showing the insane levels of reservation people had to show during budding romances, the tightness of the corsets and waistcoats reflecting the social mores of the time. The film struggles by virtue of its cumbersome plot, which moves slowly and predictably – with the narrative framing of Tolkien in the trenches looking back never quite working, as there seems to be no link between him in battle and the past memory the film switches to. The scenes of trench warfare, while nicely executed, seem rather timid and hollow compared to Peter Jackson’s WWI documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which I think at some level has destroyed the WWI biopic, as nothing could ever compare to seeing the real thing in brutal wide-screen colour.  

Tolkien has received rather negative reviews and I can understand why – it’s often understated to the point of non-existence and does the usual bad biopic mistake of forcing the main character to say something that defines their later life, in this case having Tolkien say the word ‘fellowship’ during a self-important close-up. But I just found it charming, I liked the two main characters and the whole film was obviously made with great deal of warmth for Tolkien’s life. When Tolkien leaves for France and war, Edith says to him ‘stay alive and come back to me!’ It could be cliched and cloying, the sort of line to raise to bile to throat but it just made me break out in a big grin.  

7/10