The movie of the year
The heroic and epic film version of "The Lord of the Rings"
brings beauty, awe and excitement back to the big screen.
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By Stephanie Zacharek
Dec. 17, 2001 | The most heartbreaking thing about faithful moviegoing
is that awe, beauty and excitement, three of the things we go
to the movies for, are the very things we're cheated of the most.
The great wonder of "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship
of the Ring" is that it bathes us in all three, to the point
where we remember -- in a vague, pleasurably hallucinatory sensation
from another lifetime -- why we go to the movies in the first
place. It would be an insult to say the picture merely lives up
to its hype; it crashes the meaning of hype, exposing it as the
graven image it is. Advertising is dead: Long live moviemaking.
The first 10 minutes of "The Fellowship of the Ring"
renders all hype -- whether it's the kind that's bought and paid
for or the kind generated by eager fans -- inconsequential. In
adapting the story of hobbit Frodo Baggins and his mission to
guard and ultimately destroy a ring that has the power to bring
cursed evil upon the world, director Peter Jackson has given us
an epic in the true sense, with none of the pretentious fakery
that the word "epic" has come to imply.
Jackson's approach is refreshingly egalitarian: I had feared that
"The Fellowship of the Rings" would be a ferociously
clubby movie, one that would, with a snobbish sniff, shut out
people unfamiliar with Tolkien's books.
My guess, though, is that most fans of the books will warm to
Jackson's version (even if the story has been streamlined a bit,
with some characters' roles enhanced and other figures sliced
out altogether). And as for everyone else, Jackson makes all the
right moves in reaching out to them.
He explains the essential back story in a fleet, graceful expository
passage at the beginning: In ancient times, in an undefined place,
a set of powerful golden rings were forged and dispersed to various
kingdoms across the land. The dark lord Sauron himself made the
One Ring, the ring that would complete and intensify the power
of all the others. But the ring was taken from him, and ages later,
it accidentally found its way into the hands of a humble Hobbit
by the name of Bilbo Baggins (here played by Ian Holm). Sauron
will stop at nothing to get the ring back, but he needs to find
it first. That's the tale told in "The Hobbit," the
prequel to Tolkien's trilogy.
As the movie opens, the aged Bilbo has decided to bequeath the
ring to his favorite cousin, Frodo (Elijah Wood), who is unaware
of its significance. A great wizard, Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen),
clues Frodo in to its dangerous powers, and urges him to transport
the ring to the one place where it can be destroyed forever. Frodo
sets out, along the way assembling a ragtag crew of colleagues.
Some of them, like Frodo's faithful friend Sam (Sean Astin), come
from the hobbits' home, the grassy, idyllic Shire. Gimli (John
Rhys-Davis) is a gruff, rough dwarf. Strider (Viggo Mortensen)
is a mysterious human who understands how crucial it is to keep
the ring out of Sauron's hands. And Legolas (Orlando Bloom) is
a golden-handsome Elf warrior.
Jackson captures the spirit and flavor of Tolkien's storytelling
in the way he lays the group's adventures before us. Early on
we're introduced to the Black Riders, a nightmare-haunting group
of faceless horsemen who have been sent by Sauron to find and
capture the ring. They're the movie's earliest clue that "The
Fellowship of the Ring" isn't going to be a sprightly, cheerful
jaunt: At moments, in fact, it's terrifying.
"The Fellowship of the Ring" is soaked around the edges
with a melancholy darkness, which is part of what gives it such
resonance and depth. (At this point I need to make a special plea
to all those cranky souls who have no patience for ren-faire and
sword-and-sorcery bullcrap: My brothers and sisters, I feel your
pain, but "The Fellowship of the Ring" is too big and
too masterly to be scrunched into those puny categories.)
Jackson unfurls the action so that it drifts into graceful peaks
and valleys; the picture is a marvel of pacing, built on the premise
that the proper flow of tension and suspense is the most powerful
special effect of all, not to mention the cheapest. "The
Fellowship of the Ring" looks lavish but never wasteful,
miraculous given the way everything in Hollywood these days costs
big money, and yet nothing looks like it. (Compared with "Fellowship,"
the gaudy and lifeless "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone"
looks like a play mounted at a school for rich kids, where no
expense was spared in the attempt to cover up clumsy amateurishness.)
Jackson doesn't scrimp on staging, and the images and scenery
have a grand, burnished richness. His battle sequences are magnificently
plotted, and shot so that every angle of the action is clear.
(They're thrilling, but they also invoke the peril of warfare.
There's always the sense that people -- in other words, characters
you've come to care about -- could die.)
He shows us immense landscapes of snow or forest or rolling greenery
that make us feel incredibly small and inescapably human. And
his special effects are so seamless, so organic to the scenes
in which they appear, that you often spot them, dreamlike, first
out of the corner of your eye. (I gasped in disbelief as I watched
a tidal wave, conjured by an Elf princess, swiftly but subtly
transform into a herd of galloping horses, their heads and manes
defined by dancing crystals of water.)
This is moviemaking on a grand scale, which is not to say that
it's merely a big, impressive movie. (Any old goat can make one
of those.) The crucial distinction is that Jackson's sense of
scale is impeccable. The vistas are huge and wondrous, the special
effects sparkling: But Jackson also trains the eye on details
that, more than anything else, define the movie's rich, dreamy
look.
The cloaks worn by Frodo and his gang are clasped with delicate
green enamel pins in the shape of an art nouveau leaf. As readers
of the Tolkien books know, the clasps will ultimately have a special
role. Even so, considering that most of us understand the visual
shorthand of movie props and costumes, there's no reason they'd
have to be so exquisitely made. As it is, with their tendrils
and fragile veins, they look like family heirlooms, and they're
valuable grace notes to the look of the movie. Unlike the painstakingly
re-created carpets and china patterns of James Cameron's "Titanic,"
obsessive details that just get swallowed up in the blur of the
movie's hubris anyway, these cloak pins are a bit of visual music
to go along with the story.
They also help establish its gorgeous pre-Raphaelite look. Rivendell
is filled with architectural details (trellises, gazebos) that
echo the graceful swoops and swirls of nature -- if Alphonse Mucha
were a production designer, he'd be proud to put his name on it.
(As it is, production designer Grant Major is the one who deserves
the credit.) Cate Blanchett plays Galadriel, a bewitching but
foreboding Elf queen, and the movie makes perfect use of the actress's
floating carriage and luminescent porcelain skin: Her Galadriel
is an enchantress who's floated out of an Edward Burne-Jones painting.
Visual cues like that one give "The Fellowship of the Ring"
a glow that's both ancient and redolent of the turn of the last
century. They also establish it as a love letter of sorts to England,
specifically to the beauty of the English countryside, which Tolkien
so loved. Cinematographer Andrew Lesnie ("Babe," "Babe:
Pig in the City") shoots the billowing, grassy hills so that
they sing out with love for that countryside -- no matter that
it wasn't filmed there: Through Lesnie's lens New Zealand is its
spiritual twin.
And yet the secret to the great wonder of "The Fellowship
of the Ring" lies not just in Jackson's ability to marshal
detail and action and panorama to do his bidding. It's in the
way he opens his camera to the faces of his performers. Most "big"
movies make a human sacrifice of their actors; that's become so
common it's almost an accepted practice. (You had to paw through
the rubble of "The Phantom Menace" to get any sense
of its star, Ewan McGregor.)
"The Fellowship of the Ring" is a big movie in its scope
and vision. But Jackson makes it work on a much more intimate
level as well, by allowing the faces of the characters to tell
the story in its most emotional terms. The great Christopher Lee
appears as the once good, now malevolent wizard Saruman, and,
with his robes and long white hair, he looks like an evil Jesus.
Jackson shoots Lee's face, with its noble, hooked contours, as
if it were one of the world's great landscapes. Ian McKellen's
Gandalf has a silvery nobility that's never overplayed -- he's
a wizard who clearly understands that the glimmering undercurrents
of magic are just as powerful as its giant signs and explosions.
Sean Astin's Sam, Frodo's cheerful and devoted companion, has
a face that's almost heartbreakingly open. And Elijah Wood's Frodo
holds the camera captivated in just about every one of his scenes.
He shows equal parts boyishness and gravity. His face, all immense
eyes, still glows with youthful innocence, but there's also something
fearfully mature about it: If you've read the books, you'll see
how that look points the way to the darker, more devastating turns
this story will take from here. (The two sequels, "The Two
Towers" and "The Return of the King," have already
been shot and are scheduled to be released at Christmastime in
2002 and 2003, respectively.)
"The Fellowship of the Ring" could have gone wrong in
so many ways. As it is, though, I see it as nearly perfect: It's
one of the best fantasy pictures ever made. And it's a lovely
example of how, with care and thought and not all that much money
(Jackson will have made all three "Rings" movies for
less than $300 million), a director can successfully capture the
mood and feel of a book on the big screen. (I read and enjoyed
the books more than 25 years ago, but the details of them had
gone hazy. Jackson brought them back more vividly than I could
have hoped.)
Most of us are happy enough these days to go to the movies and
not get screwed, so rarely does a movie even keep its promises,
much less surpass them. That's why "The Fellowship of the
Ring" is something of a miracle. It makes the great potentialities
of movies seem realistic and achievable. Inventive, magical and
relatively inexpensive, it proves that throwing money at a movie
doesn't necessarily make it good -- an idea that should be much
easier for Hollywood to grasp than it actually is.
Writing about Bernardo Bertolucci's "1900," Pauline
Kael identified the distinction between studio-driven big-budget
pictures and those that are powered by the skill and vision of
a filmmaker. "The artist-initiated epic is an obsessive testing
of possibilities, and often it comes out of an overwhelming desire
to express what the artist thinks are the unconscious needs of
the public. It comes, too, from a conviction, or a hope, that
if you give popular audiences the greatest you have in you they
will respond."
"The Fellowship of the Ring" throws down a daunting
challenge to filmmakers everywhere, and even more so to the studios
that back them. Audiences deserve the greatest you have in you.
If you've made money off giving them anything less, it was just
dumb luck. From now on, they'll know they have a right to magic.
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About the writer
Stephanie Zacharek is a staff writer for Salon Arts & Entertainment.
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