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nebroadwe[Reposted here for my own reference; originally written after seeing the December 2003 theatrical release.]
Short take: (no spoilers)
"It is too short." -- J.R.R. Tolkien, Foreword, The Lord of the Rings (2nd ed.)
Long take: (spoilers ho! even if you have read the books)
This is not your father's Lord of the Rings.
Of the three films, The Return of the King most clearly and definitively tells Peter Jackson's story, not J.R.R. Tolkien's -- plots are altered, characters transformed, and themes redefined not merely out of dramatic necessity, but to express a different vision of humanity and heroism. Of that vision I am not wholly enamored, but I don't think it sinks the film as a film. On the contrary, I spent an enjoyable three-and-a-half hours with this movie, and am raring to see it again. As an adaptation of the book, on the other hand ... well, let's say I have more sympathy with the text purists this time around than I did after seeing The Fellowship of the Ring or The Two Towers.
Like the theatrical release of The Two Towers, The Return of the King is too short (a fault it shares with the text, according to Tolkien, so in this at least Jackson and Co. are faithful to the original :-). This is not to say the film is badly edited -- though at its most complex it must handle four different plot strands at once (out of a possible five), I did not find it choppy. Nor does any one strand carry more fat on its frame than needed. For all the hype about the Pelennor Fields being the hugest battle ever committed to celluloid, for instance, it's pretty streamlined; in fact, I felt that the front end, the encirclement and siege of the city, was handled almost too perfunctorily. The same can be said of Frodo and Sam's journey into the interior of Mordor: there simply isn't time to build up the sense of grinding endurance that the film asks us to believe in (although the performances of Elijah Wood and Sean Astin render it quite believable, once we get past the abrupt shift into thirst and dust and exhaustion). In general, however, the editing team does heroic work pulling together a story you can follow from stem to stern without losing track of anything significant. Some excellent use of flashback helps to hook this film into the previous ones: we relive Boromir's death on first meeting his father Denethor, for example, which not only establishes Boromir as the absent presence in the family dynamic between Denethor and his other son, Faramir, but also explains the sense of indebtedness which motivates Pippin to volunteer as a soldier of Gondor. The bones are all there -- what's missing is some of the connective tissue due for reinclusion on the extended DVD.
The featured players suffer most from this lack: Karl Urban's Eomer is a cipher; David Wenham's Faramir disappears from the story after his near-death experience, as does Miranda Otto's Eowyn (although the film throws the cognoscenti a bone by showing them standing together at Aragorn's coronation); Bruce Spence loses his moment to shine as the Mouth of Sauron, the parley at the Black Gate having been dropped on the floor; and Christopher Lee's Saruman has, notoriously, been excised in favor of a throwaway line about his imprisonment in Orthanc. (And oh, what a disappointment that is! Ever since I first heard about his casting back in the late nineties, I have been waiting to hear him deliver some of Saruman's seductive specious rhetoric in that marvelous bass voice of his. Fortunately, his confrontation with Gandalf on the steps of Isengard was filmed and will be included on the DVD, but now I have to wait another six months. Argh!)
The script accommodates the need to keep things moving along briskly at some cost: no confrontation between Gandalf and the Witch-King at the Great Gate, culminating in cockcrow and "horns, horns, horns. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last"; no last stand for Eomer and the Rohirrim interrupted by the sudden appearance of the black ships incredibly flying the banner of the King. But the action is still interspersed with humor (John Rhys-Davies is treated as far less of a butt this time around, thank goodness -- and did anyone else notice that it appears to be a character point with his Gimli always to cadge the best chair in the room? :-) and with the odd reflective moment. Like many critics, I enjoyed hearing Billy Boyd sing a Celtified rendition of the Old Walking Song from the text of Fellowship as the visuals cut between Faramir charging into a hopeless battle and Denethor eating dinner (but why so messily? see rant below). The scene where Eowyn arms Merry and then defends his desire to fight to Eomer worked for me, too: Miranda Otto and Dominic Monaghan have great chemistry as she takes him under her wing as part younger brother and part surrogate self; and Karl Urban gets to be a little elder-brotherly and dismissive, recalling his family moments with Otto from The Two Towers (among my favorites in that film).
I was impressed by the way some dramatic problems were solved by the simplest of means: Pippin finds the palantir among the flotsam of Isengard, and the question of how it got out of the tower without Wormtongue to throw it is fruitfully ignored as Gandalf swoops it up; two differently-styled groups of Orcs at Cirith Ungol quarrel over Frodo's mithril shirt in a manner reminiscent of their "Meat's back on the menu!" colleagues in The Two Towers, but their providential clearance from Sam's way is not overemphasized to the point of straining belief. On a larger scale, the elimination of the Scouring of the Shire leaves Jackson with a very interesting problem of closure. In the book, the skills and maturity the hobbits have gained on their journey allow them to rescue the Shire -- but in the film, the Shire needs no rescue. So, now what? Again, the film quite simply makes that question itself the focus of the hobbits' homecoming: they sit together at the Green Dragon, uneasily aware of the distance between their recent experience of war and their neighbors' peaceful and parochial lives, until Sam gathers his courage, drains his mug -- and walks over to the bar to chat up Rosie Cotton. There is a way home, after all: you can see the relief on his comrades' faces as they laugh and drink to his success. I find it truly irritating, therefore, that in two highly significant places the script team decided in favor of baroque maneuvers that create dramatic problems rather than solve them.
The first, hugest, and least forgivable of these is the loss of Gollum's moment of near-repentance on the steps of Cirith Ungol in favor of his concocting a bizarre plot to separate Frodo from Sam that shouldn't have worked for a minute. Granted, this scene in the text is a tough one to render dramatically because it's all about an interior struggle -- but it can be done. I know this because the BBC audio drama, of all things, managed it through a wonderfully written solilioquy and a fantastic performance by Peter Woodthorpe as Gollum. Andy Serkis clearly has the chops to pull off a similar coup. (I hope enough members of the acting fraternity have the gumption to get Serkis an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, even if the statuette goes to someone else, like Sean Astin.) His Cain-and-Abel confrontation with Deagol in the film's prologue, besides allowing us to see what Serkis really looks like, could have been used to set up the loneliness and desire for friendship that underpins Gollum's transient near-metanoia in the text. In fact, I was sure that was where the film was going, after Gandalf's "pity and mercy" speech was included in Fellowship and Frodo spared Gollum out of pity in The Two Towers -- but no. Instead, Frodo's pity in Return of the King is a terrible mistake, permitting Gollum to deceive and nearly murder him. Jackson and Company have consistently treated Smeagol/Gollum psychologically rather than morally, and that choice reaches out to trip them up here. Worse, it weakens the sense that Gollum's intervention paradoxically and providentially fulfills the Ring-quest. (It also takes a couple of interesting moments away from Sam -- his suspicious rebuff of Gollum that, however justified in reason, actually prevents Gollum from repenting; and his subsequent realization that he, too, can pity the creature he has despised.) I will be interested to hear how the script team justifies this set of changes on the DVD commentary, although I don't doubt I will be banging my head against the wall as they speak. Frodo's dismissal of Sam as filmed just doesn't work, even on its own terms: Elijah Wood's brief access of paranoia doesn't cut it as a motivation and his order to "Go home!" is ridiculous. ("Get out of my sight!" would have worked better, but "Go home!"? Geez, look down, man! Home is not an option here!)
The other place favoring the rococo over the simple is the culmination of Denethor's character arc, itself perhaps another casualty of the triumph of psychology over theology. I can't work up as much ire about this one: nobody -- not Rankin-Bass, not the BBC, and now not Peter Jackson -- has ever gotten a proper handle on Denethor. They all get seduced by Tolkien's characterization of his final moments as "madness", IMO, and go screaming and cackling over the top. John Noble's Denethor is not the imploded wreck of a proud and intelligent man, but a jerk whose leadership is so appallingly bad you wonder why he's still in charge. The film never misses a chance to undermine his dignity: he's a messy eater; he practically wets himself when he sees the armies massed before his gates; Gandalf whacks him on the head to shut him up (everyone in the theater laughed at this except me); and he can't even burn to death in peace, but has to run flaming out of the Citadel and jump off the wall. Oy. The point of all this being ... ? And yet, there are moments in which Noble manages to hit a true note amid all the clangor and whoopee-cushion exhalations: his acceptance of Pippin's service is almost friendly, his amusement laced with both condescension and warmth; and the exchange with David Wenham that follows is beautifully painful, as Faramir finally learns (or thinks he learns) just how his father rates him. I'll note that fidelity to the letter of the text is not the issue here: the former scene departs from it, while the latter follows it closely, and both work. The real problem is that Denethor as a character seems to have eluded the script team: his pride, rather than leading him to overestimate his not-inconsiderable powers and duel with Sauron as an equal (he has no access to a palantir in the film, as he does in the book), is reduced to pettiness and favoritism; his despair to moral cowardice rather than fatalism and a twisted courage (although Noble, standing on the pyre with his arms spread wide, again makes a better show than the script would allow his character -- before he morphs into the Human Torch. Gandalf's epitaph should have been held until after Denethor falls off the cliff, at least. Delivered while he's running, it's embarrassingly bathetic.)
As I remarked of The Two Towers, however, The Return of the King survives such near-mortal missteps by, for the most part, remaining true to its own vision. If pity falls by the wayside as a virtue, grit, hope, and comradeship in the face of death do not. Of all things Tolkien, the film is most deeply committed to his idea about the way courage is expressed in Norse myth and saga: "that," as Tom Shippey puts it, "victory or defeat have nothing to do with right and wrong, and that even if the universe is controlled beyond redemption by hostile and evil forces, that is not enough to make a hero change sides." Bernard Hill's Theoden lives and dies by this creed; he's a vigorous presence in this film, and he gets a great death. (His last word, delivered as if his eyes are indeed going dark, is a fine naturalistic touch after the high rhetoric.) Viggo Mortensen incorporates this theme into his address to the troops at the Black Gate, although his tactical considerations are larger than Theoden's, and his approach to kingship consistently more humble. I love the deep breath he takes before turning to face the citizens of Minas Tirith and deliver his first speech as their king. (Not to mention his slightly undignified but obviously heartfelt lip-lock with Liv Tyler's Arwen. :-) This humility has a curious parallel in the diminshed screen time afforded Mortensen and sidekicks John Rhys-Davies and Orlando Bloom: their odyssey to rally the Dead takes them out of circulation for many minutes so that their day-saving reemergence onto the Pelennor Fields can come as a surprise. Fortunately the editors did not truncate the arc of Legolas' and Gimli's relationship, which fittingly concludes with the realization that, however little they might have expected it, they can die friends before the Black Gate, if die they must.
Mortensen's fade from prominence is balanced by the return of Ian McKellen to center stage, a welcome development. I missed Gandalf when he disappeared over the horizon in The Two Towers; McKellen is a very fine actor, lending both gravitas and wit to the proceedings. His work with Billy Boyd's Pippin stood out particularly for me -- all the more so for the fact that, due to the F/X constraints of making hobbits short, they probably weren't in direct contact all that much. I'll quibble about the front end of Pippin's idiot maneuver with the palantir (why was Merry awake to watch? why didn't he interfere physically when things went wrong? why didn't everyone else in the room wake up sooner?), but not the back end, where McKellen meets Boyd's terror and anguish with a great mix of compassion, worry and exasperation. I enjoyed the fact that Gandalf never quite gets over being annoyed with Pippin's immaturity; equally, I was glad to see that annoyance tempered by fatherliness in the scenes where Pippin struggles toward the kind of cold courage needed to hold one's ground in the face of approaching disaster. The two have another fine moment when Gandalf explains the nature of death to Pippin: the script handily lifts the description of Frodo's arrival at Tol Eressea and recasts it as metaphor; McKellen gets across a consoling sense of personal experience; and Boyd's eagerness to be consoled fades superbly back into anxiety -- death is still frightening, even if tempered by the hope of heaven. Bravo! Dominic Monaghan's Merry, though in the spotlight less, makes the most of what he's given. I've already mentioned his work with Miranda Otto; he also gets across both the nerve-wracking tension and the exhilaration of battle (I'd have liked to see a little more of the former before he stabs the Witch-King, but that's another quibble). I'm looking forward to more of his interactions with Theoden in the extended DVD.
All this, however, is B-plot. The heart of the movie is the Ring-quest and, despite my reservations about theme and plot logic, I can't fault the overall execution of the journey to Mount Doom. The acting continues strong, making it easy to care about characters who spend a lot of time crawling through rocks and staring at each other and the blighted landscape. Where the script doesn't let him down, Elijah Wood is adequate to the task of conveying Frodo's downward spiral. (His hallucination/flashback of Galadriel, which I was sure I was going to hate, was surprisingly effective. I loved Cate Blanchett's grin as she hauled him to his feet -- that's the Galadriel who went racketing off to Middle-earth in the First Age! -- and the cut back to Torech Ungol was perfectly timed.) Despite my annoyance with the script's interpretation of Gollum, I have no quarrel at all with Andy Serkis' and WETA's coperformance. Smeagol's dialogue with his Gollum-reflection in the pool is a beautiful piece of work, sinister and funny and pitiable all at once. But this is Sean Astin's moment to shine, and he nails it. The film requires everything of him: hatred and anger near to madness at Gollum and love for Frodo; terrible grief at Frodo's supposed death and sober joy at the completion of their quest; valor that faces down Shelob and the orcs in Cirith Ungol and grim determination that pushes him across Mordor; nostalgia and practicality and humor and humilty and ... I could go on, but I'd simply end up rehearsing the entire A-plot. Give this man a Best Supporting Actor nomination -- he's earned it.
Rounding out the main cast, Liv Tyler's Arwen and Hugo Weaving's Elrond have little to do in this film except finish their argument and reforge the Sword of Elendil. Some nice touches here: another flash-forward, this time to the existence of Eldarion, Arwen and Aragorn's son; Arwen's cold hands signalling her choice of mortality; a nod to the text with her holding a banner at Aragorn's coronation. This particular plot thread didn't really grab my interest, however: mostly I noticed that all the slow motion camerawork made it drag. Jackson is a splendid purveyor of spectacle, but the trick of underlining Significant Moments (TM) with slo-mo began to pall after a while. I wasn't quite as blown away by the battle scenes as many reviewers seem to have been, but they certainly passed the grip test (i.e. the harder I find myself clasping my hands together, the better the action sequence), and Eowyn's confrontation with the Witch-King passed the "favorite moment from the book -- don't screw it up!" test as well. Her victory got a huge round of applause from the audience, more even than Legolas's mumak-killing run, although Gimli's line -- "That only counts as one!" -- got the biggest laugh of the showing. Howard Shore's score continues to be wonderful, if a touch overstated in places: Sam carrying Frodo up Mount Doom is sufficiently heroic in the performance not to need a boy choir underneath it. I'd also have appreciated getting the Nazgul's fantastic eldritch scream further forward in the sound mix -- they were a bit too much close-air-support and a bit too little weapons-of-mass-despair for my taste.
But Richard Taylor and the design wizards at WETA and environs are to be commended, again, for getting the look of things exactly right in so many places: the stains on the roof of Aragorn's tent at Dunharrow; the there-and-not-there presence of the Dead army; Minas Tirith in all its glory; the Witch-King's helm; the series of prosthetics that turn Andy Serkis from Smeagol into near-Gollum; Ian Holm's prosthetics as an extremely aged Bilbo; and Shelob. Whoa. That spider is one bloody impressive effect, all the more so for looking less like an effect that just about any monster the F/X team has put up on screen, including Gollum. A special commendation is due the unit director and editor responsible for Shelob's second entrance: movie monsters don't frighten me, but I jumped right on cue anyway. :-) I would also like to applaud the digital graders, the guys who make great cinematography look even better. The first thing I noticed as the film opened was the return of the gorgeous greens and browns of the Hobbiton scenes in Fellowship to frame Smeagol's murder of Deagol; Minas Tirith, by contrast, looks bright and spacious but also somewhat wintry and sterile -- a good choice. (My only complaint is that the battle of the Pelennor Fields didn't take place under a gray, dim, lowering sky, as in the books. It was awfully bright out for the Forces of Darkness to be holding such sway.) Then there were all the little touches designed to catch the eye of the alert fangeek, like Narya on Gandalf's finger at the Grey Havens or the number 3 on Sam's gate. Excellent.
Overall, a good film and a decent adaptation, well worth the investment of money and time to see on a big screen with a THX-certified sound system. It's sobering to contemplate the fact that I've spent the last six years or so (almost as long as I worked on the dissertation!) watching this film trilogy turn from a gleam in the eye of Wingnut Films into an international blockbuster. It's been an education: the process was so closely watched and reported that just about everything I know about filmmaking I discovered by tracking this project. Even my yen to invest in a DVD player arose from the conviction that Fellowship of the Ring would look much better in that format. What am I going to do now?
Oh, yeah ... read the books again. :-)
Short take: (no spoilers)
"It is too short." -- J.R.R. Tolkien, Foreword, The Lord of the Rings (2nd ed.)
Long take: (spoilers ho! even if you have read the books)
This is not your father's Lord of the Rings.
Of the three films, The Return of the King most clearly and definitively tells Peter Jackson's story, not J.R.R. Tolkien's -- plots are altered, characters transformed, and themes redefined not merely out of dramatic necessity, but to express a different vision of humanity and heroism. Of that vision I am not wholly enamored, but I don't think it sinks the film as a film. On the contrary, I spent an enjoyable three-and-a-half hours with this movie, and am raring to see it again. As an adaptation of the book, on the other hand ... well, let's say I have more sympathy with the text purists this time around than I did after seeing The Fellowship of the Ring or The Two Towers.
Like the theatrical release of The Two Towers, The Return of the King is too short (a fault it shares with the text, according to Tolkien, so in this at least Jackson and Co. are faithful to the original :-). This is not to say the film is badly edited -- though at its most complex it must handle four different plot strands at once (out of a possible five), I did not find it choppy. Nor does any one strand carry more fat on its frame than needed. For all the hype about the Pelennor Fields being the hugest battle ever committed to celluloid, for instance, it's pretty streamlined; in fact, I felt that the front end, the encirclement and siege of the city, was handled almost too perfunctorily. The same can be said of Frodo and Sam's journey into the interior of Mordor: there simply isn't time to build up the sense of grinding endurance that the film asks us to believe in (although the performances of Elijah Wood and Sean Astin render it quite believable, once we get past the abrupt shift into thirst and dust and exhaustion). In general, however, the editing team does heroic work pulling together a story you can follow from stem to stern without losing track of anything significant. Some excellent use of flashback helps to hook this film into the previous ones: we relive Boromir's death on first meeting his father Denethor, for example, which not only establishes Boromir as the absent presence in the family dynamic between Denethor and his other son, Faramir, but also explains the sense of indebtedness which motivates Pippin to volunteer as a soldier of Gondor. The bones are all there -- what's missing is some of the connective tissue due for reinclusion on the extended DVD.
The featured players suffer most from this lack: Karl Urban's Eomer is a cipher; David Wenham's Faramir disappears from the story after his near-death experience, as does Miranda Otto's Eowyn (although the film throws the cognoscenti a bone by showing them standing together at Aragorn's coronation); Bruce Spence loses his moment to shine as the Mouth of Sauron, the parley at the Black Gate having been dropped on the floor; and Christopher Lee's Saruman has, notoriously, been excised in favor of a throwaway line about his imprisonment in Orthanc. (And oh, what a disappointment that is! Ever since I first heard about his casting back in the late nineties, I have been waiting to hear him deliver some of Saruman's seductive specious rhetoric in that marvelous bass voice of his. Fortunately, his confrontation with Gandalf on the steps of Isengard was filmed and will be included on the DVD, but now I have to wait another six months. Argh!)
The script accommodates the need to keep things moving along briskly at some cost: no confrontation between Gandalf and the Witch-King at the Great Gate, culminating in cockcrow and "horns, horns, horns. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last"; no last stand for Eomer and the Rohirrim interrupted by the sudden appearance of the black ships incredibly flying the banner of the King. But the action is still interspersed with humor (John Rhys-Davies is treated as far less of a butt this time around, thank goodness -- and did anyone else notice that it appears to be a character point with his Gimli always to cadge the best chair in the room? :-) and with the odd reflective moment. Like many critics, I enjoyed hearing Billy Boyd sing a Celtified rendition of the Old Walking Song from the text of Fellowship as the visuals cut between Faramir charging into a hopeless battle and Denethor eating dinner (but why so messily? see rant below). The scene where Eowyn arms Merry and then defends his desire to fight to Eomer worked for me, too: Miranda Otto and Dominic Monaghan have great chemistry as she takes him under her wing as part younger brother and part surrogate self; and Karl Urban gets to be a little elder-brotherly and dismissive, recalling his family moments with Otto from The Two Towers (among my favorites in that film).
I was impressed by the way some dramatic problems were solved by the simplest of means: Pippin finds the palantir among the flotsam of Isengard, and the question of how it got out of the tower without Wormtongue to throw it is fruitfully ignored as Gandalf swoops it up; two differently-styled groups of Orcs at Cirith Ungol quarrel over Frodo's mithril shirt in a manner reminiscent of their "Meat's back on the menu!" colleagues in The Two Towers, but their providential clearance from Sam's way is not overemphasized to the point of straining belief. On a larger scale, the elimination of the Scouring of the Shire leaves Jackson with a very interesting problem of closure. In the book, the skills and maturity the hobbits have gained on their journey allow them to rescue the Shire -- but in the film, the Shire needs no rescue. So, now what? Again, the film quite simply makes that question itself the focus of the hobbits' homecoming: they sit together at the Green Dragon, uneasily aware of the distance between their recent experience of war and their neighbors' peaceful and parochial lives, until Sam gathers his courage, drains his mug -- and walks over to the bar to chat up Rosie Cotton. There is a way home, after all: you can see the relief on his comrades' faces as they laugh and drink to his success. I find it truly irritating, therefore, that in two highly significant places the script team decided in favor of baroque maneuvers that create dramatic problems rather than solve them.
The first, hugest, and least forgivable of these is the loss of Gollum's moment of near-repentance on the steps of Cirith Ungol in favor of his concocting a bizarre plot to separate Frodo from Sam that shouldn't have worked for a minute. Granted, this scene in the text is a tough one to render dramatically because it's all about an interior struggle -- but it can be done. I know this because the BBC audio drama, of all things, managed it through a wonderfully written solilioquy and a fantastic performance by Peter Woodthorpe as Gollum. Andy Serkis clearly has the chops to pull off a similar coup. (I hope enough members of the acting fraternity have the gumption to get Serkis an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, even if the statuette goes to someone else, like Sean Astin.) His Cain-and-Abel confrontation with Deagol in the film's prologue, besides allowing us to see what Serkis really looks like, could have been used to set up the loneliness and desire for friendship that underpins Gollum's transient near-metanoia in the text. In fact, I was sure that was where the film was going, after Gandalf's "pity and mercy" speech was included in Fellowship and Frodo spared Gollum out of pity in The Two Towers -- but no. Instead, Frodo's pity in Return of the King is a terrible mistake, permitting Gollum to deceive and nearly murder him. Jackson and Company have consistently treated Smeagol/Gollum psychologically rather than morally, and that choice reaches out to trip them up here. Worse, it weakens the sense that Gollum's intervention paradoxically and providentially fulfills the Ring-quest. (It also takes a couple of interesting moments away from Sam -- his suspicious rebuff of Gollum that, however justified in reason, actually prevents Gollum from repenting; and his subsequent realization that he, too, can pity the creature he has despised.) I will be interested to hear how the script team justifies this set of changes on the DVD commentary, although I don't doubt I will be banging my head against the wall as they speak. Frodo's dismissal of Sam as filmed just doesn't work, even on its own terms: Elijah Wood's brief access of paranoia doesn't cut it as a motivation and his order to "Go home!" is ridiculous. ("Get out of my sight!" would have worked better, but "Go home!"? Geez, look down, man! Home is not an option here!)
The other place favoring the rococo over the simple is the culmination of Denethor's character arc, itself perhaps another casualty of the triumph of psychology over theology. I can't work up as much ire about this one: nobody -- not Rankin-Bass, not the BBC, and now not Peter Jackson -- has ever gotten a proper handle on Denethor. They all get seduced by Tolkien's characterization of his final moments as "madness", IMO, and go screaming and cackling over the top. John Noble's Denethor is not the imploded wreck of a proud and intelligent man, but a jerk whose leadership is so appallingly bad you wonder why he's still in charge. The film never misses a chance to undermine his dignity: he's a messy eater; he practically wets himself when he sees the armies massed before his gates; Gandalf whacks him on the head to shut him up (everyone in the theater laughed at this except me); and he can't even burn to death in peace, but has to run flaming out of the Citadel and jump off the wall. Oy. The point of all this being ... ? And yet, there are moments in which Noble manages to hit a true note amid all the clangor and whoopee-cushion exhalations: his acceptance of Pippin's service is almost friendly, his amusement laced with both condescension and warmth; and the exchange with David Wenham that follows is beautifully painful, as Faramir finally learns (or thinks he learns) just how his father rates him. I'll note that fidelity to the letter of the text is not the issue here: the former scene departs from it, while the latter follows it closely, and both work. The real problem is that Denethor as a character seems to have eluded the script team: his pride, rather than leading him to overestimate his not-inconsiderable powers and duel with Sauron as an equal (he has no access to a palantir in the film, as he does in the book), is reduced to pettiness and favoritism; his despair to moral cowardice rather than fatalism and a twisted courage (although Noble, standing on the pyre with his arms spread wide, again makes a better show than the script would allow his character -- before he morphs into the Human Torch. Gandalf's epitaph should have been held until after Denethor falls off the cliff, at least. Delivered while he's running, it's embarrassingly bathetic.)
As I remarked of The Two Towers, however, The Return of the King survives such near-mortal missteps by, for the most part, remaining true to its own vision. If pity falls by the wayside as a virtue, grit, hope, and comradeship in the face of death do not. Of all things Tolkien, the film is most deeply committed to his idea about the way courage is expressed in Norse myth and saga: "that," as Tom Shippey puts it, "victory or defeat have nothing to do with right and wrong, and that even if the universe is controlled beyond redemption by hostile and evil forces, that is not enough to make a hero change sides." Bernard Hill's Theoden lives and dies by this creed; he's a vigorous presence in this film, and he gets a great death. (His last word, delivered as if his eyes are indeed going dark, is a fine naturalistic touch after the high rhetoric.) Viggo Mortensen incorporates this theme into his address to the troops at the Black Gate, although his tactical considerations are larger than Theoden's, and his approach to kingship consistently more humble. I love the deep breath he takes before turning to face the citizens of Minas Tirith and deliver his first speech as their king. (Not to mention his slightly undignified but obviously heartfelt lip-lock with Liv Tyler's Arwen. :-) This humility has a curious parallel in the diminshed screen time afforded Mortensen and sidekicks John Rhys-Davies and Orlando Bloom: their odyssey to rally the Dead takes them out of circulation for many minutes so that their day-saving reemergence onto the Pelennor Fields can come as a surprise. Fortunately the editors did not truncate the arc of Legolas' and Gimli's relationship, which fittingly concludes with the realization that, however little they might have expected it, they can die friends before the Black Gate, if die they must.
Mortensen's fade from prominence is balanced by the return of Ian McKellen to center stage, a welcome development. I missed Gandalf when he disappeared over the horizon in The Two Towers; McKellen is a very fine actor, lending both gravitas and wit to the proceedings. His work with Billy Boyd's Pippin stood out particularly for me -- all the more so for the fact that, due to the F/X constraints of making hobbits short, they probably weren't in direct contact all that much. I'll quibble about the front end of Pippin's idiot maneuver with the palantir (why was Merry awake to watch? why didn't he interfere physically when things went wrong? why didn't everyone else in the room wake up sooner?), but not the back end, where McKellen meets Boyd's terror and anguish with a great mix of compassion, worry and exasperation. I enjoyed the fact that Gandalf never quite gets over being annoyed with Pippin's immaturity; equally, I was glad to see that annoyance tempered by fatherliness in the scenes where Pippin struggles toward the kind of cold courage needed to hold one's ground in the face of approaching disaster. The two have another fine moment when Gandalf explains the nature of death to Pippin: the script handily lifts the description of Frodo's arrival at Tol Eressea and recasts it as metaphor; McKellen gets across a consoling sense of personal experience; and Boyd's eagerness to be consoled fades superbly back into anxiety -- death is still frightening, even if tempered by the hope of heaven. Bravo! Dominic Monaghan's Merry, though in the spotlight less, makes the most of what he's given. I've already mentioned his work with Miranda Otto; he also gets across both the nerve-wracking tension and the exhilaration of battle (I'd have liked to see a little more of the former before he stabs the Witch-King, but that's another quibble). I'm looking forward to more of his interactions with Theoden in the extended DVD.
All this, however, is B-plot. The heart of the movie is the Ring-quest and, despite my reservations about theme and plot logic, I can't fault the overall execution of the journey to Mount Doom. The acting continues strong, making it easy to care about characters who spend a lot of time crawling through rocks and staring at each other and the blighted landscape. Where the script doesn't let him down, Elijah Wood is adequate to the task of conveying Frodo's downward spiral. (His hallucination/flashback of Galadriel, which I was sure I was going to hate, was surprisingly effective. I loved Cate Blanchett's grin as she hauled him to his feet -- that's the Galadriel who went racketing off to Middle-earth in the First Age! -- and the cut back to Torech Ungol was perfectly timed.) Despite my annoyance with the script's interpretation of Gollum, I have no quarrel at all with Andy Serkis' and WETA's coperformance. Smeagol's dialogue with his Gollum-reflection in the pool is a beautiful piece of work, sinister and funny and pitiable all at once. But this is Sean Astin's moment to shine, and he nails it. The film requires everything of him: hatred and anger near to madness at Gollum and love for Frodo; terrible grief at Frodo's supposed death and sober joy at the completion of their quest; valor that faces down Shelob and the orcs in Cirith Ungol and grim determination that pushes him across Mordor; nostalgia and practicality and humor and humilty and ... I could go on, but I'd simply end up rehearsing the entire A-plot. Give this man a Best Supporting Actor nomination -- he's earned it.
Rounding out the main cast, Liv Tyler's Arwen and Hugo Weaving's Elrond have little to do in this film except finish their argument and reforge the Sword of Elendil. Some nice touches here: another flash-forward, this time to the existence of Eldarion, Arwen and Aragorn's son; Arwen's cold hands signalling her choice of mortality; a nod to the text with her holding a banner at Aragorn's coronation. This particular plot thread didn't really grab my interest, however: mostly I noticed that all the slow motion camerawork made it drag. Jackson is a splendid purveyor of spectacle, but the trick of underlining Significant Moments (TM) with slo-mo began to pall after a while. I wasn't quite as blown away by the battle scenes as many reviewers seem to have been, but they certainly passed the grip test (i.e. the harder I find myself clasping my hands together, the better the action sequence), and Eowyn's confrontation with the Witch-King passed the "favorite moment from the book -- don't screw it up!" test as well. Her victory got a huge round of applause from the audience, more even than Legolas's mumak-killing run, although Gimli's line -- "That only counts as one!" -- got the biggest laugh of the showing. Howard Shore's score continues to be wonderful, if a touch overstated in places: Sam carrying Frodo up Mount Doom is sufficiently heroic in the performance not to need a boy choir underneath it. I'd also have appreciated getting the Nazgul's fantastic eldritch scream further forward in the sound mix -- they were a bit too much close-air-support and a bit too little weapons-of-mass-despair for my taste.
But Richard Taylor and the design wizards at WETA and environs are to be commended, again, for getting the look of things exactly right in so many places: the stains on the roof of Aragorn's tent at Dunharrow; the there-and-not-there presence of the Dead army; Minas Tirith in all its glory; the Witch-King's helm; the series of prosthetics that turn Andy Serkis from Smeagol into near-Gollum; Ian Holm's prosthetics as an extremely aged Bilbo; and Shelob. Whoa. That spider is one bloody impressive effect, all the more so for looking less like an effect that just about any monster the F/X team has put up on screen, including Gollum. A special commendation is due the unit director and editor responsible for Shelob's second entrance: movie monsters don't frighten me, but I jumped right on cue anyway. :-) I would also like to applaud the digital graders, the guys who make great cinematography look even better. The first thing I noticed as the film opened was the return of the gorgeous greens and browns of the Hobbiton scenes in Fellowship to frame Smeagol's murder of Deagol; Minas Tirith, by contrast, looks bright and spacious but also somewhat wintry and sterile -- a good choice. (My only complaint is that the battle of the Pelennor Fields didn't take place under a gray, dim, lowering sky, as in the books. It was awfully bright out for the Forces of Darkness to be holding such sway.) Then there were all the little touches designed to catch the eye of the alert fangeek, like Narya on Gandalf's finger at the Grey Havens or the number 3 on Sam's gate. Excellent.
Overall, a good film and a decent adaptation, well worth the investment of money and time to see on a big screen with a THX-certified sound system. It's sobering to contemplate the fact that I've spent the last six years or so (almost as long as I worked on the dissertation!) watching this film trilogy turn from a gleam in the eye of Wingnut Films into an international blockbuster. It's been an education: the process was so closely watched and reported that just about everything I know about filmmaking I discovered by tracking this project. Even my yen to invest in a DVD player arose from the conviction that Fellowship of the Ring would look much better in that format. What am I going to do now?
Oh, yeah ... read the books again. :-)