A (real) review of Jackson's "The Return of the
King"
Waiting for Right Words
TP enjoys PJ following the script - mostly
On one hand I want to tell Pyjama Jackson that I think
he’s incredible, that he’s made a better LOTR trilogy that I had any right to
expect and that if I ever meet him I’ll shake him warmly by the hand and offer to buy
him an alcopop of his choice. But on the other hand, I want to shout at him: “Come
on! You made it this good! That means you could have made it better!”
PJ gets almost everything right. He opens with the fall of Smeagol, in a scene that
finally conjures the true evil of the Ring. Gollum drags Frodo and Sam further into the
darkness, so that we are actually quite refreshed when the action switches to the free
peoples of Middle Earth facing nothing more terrifying than total annihilation. Phew.
Saruman’s absence is glossed over well enough, allowing Pyjama to spend more time on
the chilling Palantir (though in true Jackson fashion, it is not enough to have Boyd
emote, and he has to have Pippin leaping about with his hands on fire – but such
things no longer surprise me). The separation of Pippin and Merry is therefore given a
convincing cause, though young Dominic may rue the fact that it marks his virtual
departure from the film. He makes his come back as scripted, but his journey is skeletal,
and the less satisfying for it. He and the Rohirrim are relegated to background
characters, with Eomer yet again wondering why he turned up in the first place.
Pippin, on the other hand, does very well out of this film. PJ does indeed have him light
the beacons of Gondor (leading to a great excuse for combine cool NZ views with feisty
fire effects for a few minutes), pledges his service to Denethor, sings and kills a darned
big Orc. He also gets to save Faramir – more of that later. Boyd is more proficient
at burying his hobbit gurning during serious moments, and his comments about being stuck
on the edge of a battle he can’t escape summon up some of what Tolkien was trying to
achieve with the Siege of Gondor.
Meanwhile, the Frodo-Sam-Gollum paranoia triangle is working out nicely. The script ups
the ante quite nicely with some overt manipulation by Gollum, which goes over and above
the Tolkien blueprint. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d overdone
it slightly, and it may just have been an excuse to have this year’s “character
falling off something high” moment, though with deference to the law of diminishing
returns, this time it’s just Sam falling down a staircase. Fortunately, he’s
back for the confrontation with Shelob, and the bubbly spider from hell is given a full,
hideous realisation by the WETA team. I’m not arachnaphobic, but I was still
cringing. Yuck. Just a shame that Jackson chose to represent the moment Frodo is stung by
having Elijah Wood pull silly faces like Rowan Atkinson for thirty seconds before spitting
out some toothpaste. I stifled the sniggers.
The film’s triumphs are, as they have been in the previous instalments, best
displayed by battles. The steady advance of the Witch-King’s army (if only
they’d known that they just had to set fire to his cloak and he’d leg it) from
Osgiliath to the Pelennor is shown in gripping detail, from the crossing of the Anduin to
the final, brutal assault on the gates by Grond. The assault feels lightweight after
Helm’s Deep’s claustrophobic nightmare, but once the horseman of Rohan turn up
for their charge, the action is magnificent. The arrival, at a moment of seeming triumph,
of the Mumak both conjures the shifting nature of a real battle, and launches a sequence
of such grand audacity that David Lean would have had to go and have a lie down. I
won’t bother trying to describe it - I couldn’t do it justice.
Aragorn’s army of the dead, while extending their remit quite a lot from the book,
are pretty effective. Although I wasn’t keen on the way they washed over their
enemies like pea-soup, it was cool to see the enemy worsted by his own weapons.
But it’s not all good. As feared, Frodo’s tussle with Gollum at the cracks of
doom turns into big fight, which I’m afraid turns a moment of dramatic tension into
something that skirts around the edge of absurdity. The moment when Gollum take back the
ring, with a bit of dental assistance, remains pretty horrific, however.
And then we have the Great Ballsup of our Times. In FOTR we have Evil Galadriel. In TTT we
had Nasty Faramir. Today we offer you Completely Pointless and Slightly Embarrassing
Denethor! What were you thinking of, Peter??? How can a man as talented as you,
with such a famous attention to detail, allow a mindless and unbalancing bit of chaotic
editing and sloppy acting to make it into such a fine film? And it wasn’t even
necessary to the plot! After Gandalf heavy-handedly takes over control of the city you
could safely ignore Denethor and his fiery fate. Yes, we finally understand that Faramir
was loved after all (albeit in a deeply screwed up way), but given that Faz in only in the
films for two seconds himself, I doubt the audience were craving this. Yes, Pippin gets to
be brave, again. But he’s already lit the beacon and slain an ugly fiend. Give the
wee laddie a rest. To have lost Chris Lee and the Mouth of Sauron and gained this dramatic
monstrosity is extremely upsetting.
But the biggest disappointment for me was the end. No, not the extra endings, but the
final scenes at the havens. I should have been in floods of tears. I cannot read the end
of the book without crying. I cannot listen to “The Grey Havens” episode of the
BBC version without streaming. So why, when presented with the same scenario in films
which I really love, was I merely misty?
2 reasons, I think.
The first is definitely PJ’s fault. Plaudit’s to him for retaining a relatively
downbeat end, but slaps with one of Gollum’s fish for the tone he presents it in. One
gets the feeling that, that the hobbits and Gandalf are going on a permanent holiday. But
come on – it’s not as simple as that. They are going to the land that Elves go
to when they have had enough of our material world. In essence, they are going to heaven.
Which means, from a certain point of view, that Frodo and Bilbo die at the end of
LOTR. Now, Tolkien wasn’t quite that brutal in his telling, so I see no reason for
Pyjama to be, but acting like he’s just off to the beach at Lyme Regis was a big faux
pas. Pyjama was a strong believer in showing, not telling, and he has stuck it it firmly
all the way through. In the end though, when someone gets on a boat, words are important.
One might almost say "not all words are an evil". It’s not a sodding happy
ending! Frodo gives up everything because he is a broken ‘man’! It’s
heartbreaking. But because he hardly gets a chance to explain it, or to say a full good
bye to Sam, it is hard as an audience to suffer quite as much as we should. This links
into my other problem...
"Denethor instructs his staff to 'set a fire in our flesh': In their flesh? On,
surely?"
The second may be my fault – at least partially. Throughout the trilogy, the one
thing I felt PJ got consistently wrong was the language. Perhas because he was afraid of
pomposity, he toned down Tolkien’s dialogue with consistent brutality, turning lines
of quasi-poetry into mere functional intonements. The non-Tolkien dialogue in
“Rings” is normally either forgettable, or risible (”I withdraw you,
Saruman…” etc). Pyjama has some success transplanting what appear to be his
favourite lines to different places and some failures, but huge chunks of Tolkien’s
speech will now never be rendered on celluloid. However, in ROTK, Pyjama seemed to have
found his confidence. There was a “sleepless malice”. Theoden quotes Rohan
poetry. Arwen even quotes Bilbo. The Witch King warns, “Come not between a Nazgul and
his prey”. Denethor moans, “He is burning, already burning”. Pyjama
recognises that JRRT’s Return of the King speech is perfectly suited to the grandiose
finale he has in mind, and lets it seep back where it should have been all along.
But this is very disorientating for a fan that knows how the words should go.
Denethor’s fire comment should be followed by “they have set a fire in his
flesh” – instead, Denethor instructs his staff to “set a fire in our
flesh”. Well, it looks like Jackson liked the line but wanted to use it differently.
Unfortunately, in its new position it makes bugger all sense. In their flesh? On,
surely?
But that’s nothing compared to the Grey Havens. Lulled into a false sense of hope by
Pyjama’s liberal use of book dialogue, you wait eagerly for “do not be too sad
Sam. You have so much to see, and to be and to do” and “Everything I had, and
might have had, I leave to you” and not forgetting “as long as your part of the
story goes on!” Where were these beautiful, painful parting words that can reduce me
to a wreck in seconds? I sat watching Frodo get on the boat and all I could think was
“say it! Goddamn it, you descendent of rats, say the damned words, NOW!”
And of course he does, most of them anyway. But he says them over cheerful pictures of
cute hobbit children gambolling in Sam’s garden. Forgive me if I think that’s
the wrong moment. Yes the BBC do that too, but they repeat the words. They have had
their dramatic moment. Pyjama makes great pains to explain why he’s thrown characters
off cliffs, or made them mean or whatever when he does his commentaries. I’d like him
to explain to me why he slavishly sticks to the form of the ending just to leave out the
most emotionally effecting lines of dialogue Tolkien ever wrote. Maybe Wood couldn’t
deliver them as well as Holm did so he cut them. I’d like to know.
Because you see, Peter Jackson is so damned good that I don’t see why I should let
him off. If he can take an “unfilmable” book and turn it into the greatest movie
series ever, why do we have to endure Completely Pointless and Slightly Embarrassing
Denethor, and wishy-washy dialogue?
What’s that I hear you say? You think Gollum, Shelob, the Mumakil, the Ride of the
Rohirrim, the beacons, the Eagles, Mount Doom exploding, heads flung over the walls of
Minas Tirith and the general fact that this movie is moving, epic and utterly absorbing
should be grounds for forgiveness? Ha! You’re all soft, you know that?