Unfinished Tales: A Review of Dome Karukoski's "Tolkien" by Dawn Felagund

Unfinished Tales: A Review of Dome Karukoski's "Tolkien"

My journey to seeing Dome Karukoski's biopic Tolkien was as unexpected as Tolkien would probably say the best journeys always are. I was salty about the film at first, not because I had anything against the director or what I knew the film to be—I knew very little about it, holding it at deliberate arm's length due to the aforementioned saltiness—but because my initial excitement about it was immediately tempered by the announcement that it would be limited release. My choice to live in a rural area is totally that—my choice—but it means that we're well beyond the limits of "limited release," and it is exasperating that people outside major cities are never considered worth courting as a potential audience. So even though there was buzz about the film on the SWG's Discord server, it wasn't something I was keeping on my radar, just like I doubt Tantalus scoped the location of the tastiest of low-hanging fruit.

In February, I had a proposal accepted to present at the Tolkien at UVM Conference in Burlington, Vermont. I was thrilled that Grundy and sian22redux would be presenting as well; we'd met last year for the conference and had an amazing time, and I was looking forward to a repeat of that experience. I didn't expect, though, the email a couple weeks before the conference: There would be a screening of Karukoski's Tolkien for conference attendees.

It seemed, while the backs of the gods were turned, Tantalus was permitted to grab a pineapple.

Adaptation is a question always salient in my life. I'm a Tolkien fan. I'm also a fanfiction writer. I both consume and produce adaptations of texts that have been especially meaningful to my life. What are the rules for doing this? Are there (or should there even be) rules for doing this?

Anyone familiar with my work—or really with my worldview more generally—knows I come down on the side of fewer rules. What, I have argued many times, is the harm? I have given Tirion a democracy and a redlight district; I have slashed various different characters; I have thrust Tolkien's neglected woman characters to the forefronts of their societies, and yet, if you pick up The Silmarillion for the first time, you will find it exactly as I found it sixteen years ago.

What about when you are adapting a life?

Here I will confess that I am not an expert on Tolkien's life. I know, of course, the basic shape and key details, but I have not done any sort of biographical research. Sian, on the other hand, has focused on biographical research and knows the material really well. Karukoski could have pulled the wool over my eyes at many points, but Sian ripped it right back off again.

Of course, even within those moments that aren’t true to Tolkien’s life, there are (one hopes) deliberate choices behind them. This is, after all, a work of art, and the filmmakers had to choose what to bring forward and withhold—what to invent from whole cloth?—in order to tell the story they wanted to tell. As I’ve discussed and thought about the film, I have felt the tension between those things: the urge to be true to the life you are using to make the art that expresses that life’s particular value.

The film focuses on Tolkien's early life, beginning more or less with the death of his mother and concerning mostly on his friendship with the TCBS, his romance with Edith Bratt, and his service in World War I. The narrative structure ricochets between a linear narrative about his relationships with both the TCBS and Edith, interspersed with scenes of life in the trenches. The structure emphasizes connections between his early life and the turning point that was World War I and ratchets up the poignancy of the contrast between the innocence of youth and the horror of war and its ensuing losses.

Sian objected to the characterization of Robert Gilson, who has been a focus of her research, but as writers, we could reason out the purpose of the change. Still: what are the ethics of adapting a life? Of changing a person no longer alive to speak for himself whose legacy will be—intended or not—partly predicated upon this relatively high-profile depiction?

This became particularly relevant for Edith. The script focused on the limited availability of meaningful options for her, as a woman in early 20th-century England and her frustration, as a gifted musician, in the narrow scope of her reality. I found this interesting. Edith has been a subject of discussion among the feminist fandom friends for years: about how she often felt out-of-place among the other Oxford wives and, no matter the romanticization of her marriage as inspiration for the story of Lúthien and Beren, a sidenote in her husband's life. She also gave up, eventually, her music, even as she wrote out many of her husband’s manuscripts for him.

There is a scene where Tolkien and Edith go to lunch at a restaurant beyond their means and co-create a story of "Cellar Door," which Tolkien once identified as the most beautiful-sounding name he could imagine. The story they invent has no basis in Tolkien's work; it doesn't even feel like a story Tolkien would make, being grounded more in fairy-tale motifs than in the deeper mythic archetypes that imbued his own writings. In the story, Edith says of the princess that "she longs for another life." This is clearly meant to be Edith speaking of herself.

Yet the irony of Edith's story is how readily the filmmakers turned to romantic tropes—dare I say clichés?—in telling her story. It is the lot of women in story: a reduced palette of options for how we should behave (especially the moment a man becomes involved) that echoes and is probably at least in part a result of the very lack of options that Edith, in the film, bemoans. I am fairly certain, for example, that no one has ever parted from someone they have loved secretly and from afar, or forbiddenly, only to, at twenty paces, suddenly whip about and rush into that person's arms and passionately liplock and, in that fifteen-second span, reach the consensus to upend both lives and pursue true love. (Okay, in the vastness of human experience, this probably has happened, but not with nearly the frequency suggested by Hollywood films. I have seen it twice in films just this week.) This scene happens in Tolkien on the docks as he is preparing to depart for France and World War I.

The thing is that the film doesn't have to be inventive on this count. Tolkien fans have idealized and romanticized Tolkien and Edith's relationship for decades using actual details from their actual lives. There is actual material to pull from. It was disappointing to see these details stricken in favor of the purely invented and cliché.

This is true for more than just Edith. Much of the World War I material is concerned with a purely fictionalized and frantic pursuit by Tolkien, through a webwork of trenches punctuated by images of horror—a bilious cloud of gas oozing overhead, a shadow in the mists that resolves as flame thrower-wielding soldiers—to find any news of whether his friend and fellow TCBS member Geoffrey Smith was okay. He hadn't, you see, heard from Geoff in weeks. There was a foot soldier aptly named Sam, toddling along at his heels and urging him to take care and … well, the whole thing had a disconnect with reality. It was a purely artful construction that, on some level, did succeed but suffered from such a disconnect from how an actual officer during World War I would act that it became a distraction. Nor were those gruesome images—so essential to establishing the effect of the war on Tolkien's work—tethered to this particular plot. As with Edith, they could have come with a firmer grounding in reality and likely succeeded all the more for it.

As in the scene with Edith on the docks, the distress one feels when a loved one is in danger rarely inspires a mad dash of singular pursuit. This tends to happen only in films. Rather, we tend to buckle down to duty, making that heart-stopping agony of not knowing something quieter but no less profound.

The title of this review, "Unfinished Tales," has nothing to do with the fact that the film ends at the precise moment that Tolkien lays down the first words to The Hobbit. I like the choice to focus on Tolkien’s earlier life, before he became the “Author of the Century.” I alluded earlier to Edith's dissatisfaction with her life as an Oxford wife, one relegated to management of household and children, leaving no time for music. The argument between Edith and Tolkien over her desire to discuss Wagner may have been invented, but the unease behind it was not, even if real Edith likely lacked the words to articulate what she was experiencing.

Yet this thread dangles, unfulfilled, by the film's end. This is not exactly a critique. The bitter fact is that Edith never did resolve this unease. There is no Hollywood ending for this particular conflict. Without negating the love she certainly felt for her husband and children, she never found that satisfying other life that she imagined the fictional princess of Cellar Door pursuing. One of the final scenes shows her sitting on the steps of their Oxford home, talking to Tolkien with despair in her voice of the cakes she made with the children and that they saved for him but he was not home to eat. Her life: reduced to cakes and children. His: so embroiled in his work that she and the children and the cakes that they make have become incidentals. Then they are walking in the woods with those children, holding hands and happy, and the question of Edith's satisfaction is not raised again.

The thread is not falsely tied off. Of that, I am glad. Nor do I think that, because it cannot be resolved, that it should never have been raised. I do think it should have been raised, and would have found it far less satisfying to reduce Edith to a purely romantic figure. Yet with that final scene of hand-holding amid their scampering brood of children, it is tucked out of sight: the inherent satisfaction in marriage and motherhood that a woman is supposed to feel is presented as triumphant over the desire for more, for another life. I’d rather the thread be left dangling: her unhappiness the final word. The same is true of Tolkien's poverty. He says to Edith, at one point, when he does not have enough money to buy them tickets to see a performance of Wagner's opera, that she deserves a life where scrounging pennies is not her reality. Yet from reading Tolkien's Letters, it is clear that the family wasn't economically comfortable, even after the publication of The Hobbit. This is another dangling thread, also straggling across that scene on the doorstep where Tolkien reveals that he doesn't write for fun anymore. Again, this is the bitter truth. His letters make plain that he was often grading exam papers as a side hustle to make money or otherwise too exhausted by work to pursue the "sequel to The Hobbit" that would become The Lord of the Rings. Unlike Edith's dissatisfaction, though, Tolkien's creative drought, at least, is presumed alleviated when we see him begin The Hobbit.

This is, I suppose, the peril of writing within the constraints of a life. Invention gives us the scene on the docks, the beautiful and playful romance backstage at the opera, the restaurant scene with the story Tolkien never told and the sugar cube I'm fairly sure Edith never tossed onto a rich lady’s hat. But it cannot satisfy the reality of the first half of the 20th century for millions of women who were sidelined as bored housewives, bit players in the staging of their husband's lives. In a Hollywood film not so constrained by her actual life, Edith would have surely been permitted to walk onto the stage, as a pianist, that she once could not afford to sit before. But that is not the story of this life. This thread ravels off, unfulfilled.

It is fitting that most of the ideas I exchanged with Sian and Grundy in writing this review of a film primarily about fellowship and how it can compel art in the face of the pressures of modern life were largely exchanged in a bar, over drinks, elbows propped on the table and stumbling over each other in our eagerness to make sense of this film in the context of this fandom that means so much to us. We did not strut around making grand proclamations and none of us proposed to the waitress, but the parallel between the TCBS and our own friendship built around a mutual love of art was not lost on me.

For that was the crux of this film: the influence of male companionship on Tolkien's intellectual and creative achievements. Oriented early as this film is, it focuses on the TCBS, but we know that this theme would arise again with the Inklings (contributing to Edith's dissatisfaction as Tolkien did not see her a fit—or as fit a—conversation partner on topics of value to him as he did the Inklings). Nor does Karukoski, to his credit, shy from what Chris Vaccaro, at the conference the next day, would politely term "homo-amorous" overtones, particularly in Geoffrey Smith's regard for Tolkien. (Probably not to my credit is my delight in imagining the homophobic pockets of fandom that still persist discovering this unexpectedly when they see the film.)¹ In the face of a modern fixation on the artist as a lone genius, the film's celebration of the social aspects of creativity—which I would argue is the innate form of human creativity, the “lone genius” being the mutation—was beautiful.

Our particular creative collective decided, over our drinks at Mad River, that film overall succeeded. Stitched throughout were small allusions to the legendarium and also the sources in which Tolkien himself found his inspiration. (There were also several instances in both the imagery and the soundtrack that we all agreed were intentional allusions to the Jackson films, which was an interesting—if dangerous—approach.) There was a telling moment in Mad River that night when we were discussing a particular image, seen as part of a fever dream during the war, that Sian had seen as a Norse fire-giant and I had seen as Tolkien's first imagining of Sauron during the Last Alliance. And as we debated who was right, we realized that we were both right. The film was masterful in doing that: in stitching together the mythic roots and the situational inspiration and the creative realization, all into an indistinguishable coherence. And it is fitting that only by likewise stitching together my impressions with those of my friends, was I able to come to this realization.

I imagine people reading this will be doing so with two possible purposes. Either they have seen the film and want to discuss or possibly argue about it with me, or they are trying to decide if it is worth the cost of a theater ticket or a rental (if they likewise live beyond the limits of its release). If you’re in the first group, you can comment using the links below. To the second: should you see it? Yes, I think you should. It is not perfect. There are many things I would have done differently, but it is beautiful and powerful in places and sings forth a theme that I do not think we, in fandom, can hear enough: of not just the legitimacy but the power of friendship as a motive in our creativity.

Chapter End Notes

¹ Okay, okay, because I know for at least a few people reading this, this will be the most intriguing sentence of the thing, I’ll elucidate further. The film hints strongly that Geoffrey Smith had affections for Tolkien that pass beyond friendship. In the film, Tolkien knows and accepts this, even if he does not reciprocate. So no, Tolkien is not gay in the film; however, he is accepting of the orientation of his friend, which I imagine will come as a surprise to those who prefer to believe that his own views on sexual orientation echoed those of the religious right today. If you’re curious about the evidence for Smith’s "affections" for Tolkien, Christopher Vaccaro presented a great paper at the Tolkien at UVM Conference, looking at Smith’s poems, which Tolkien advocated to have posthumously published in the collection called A Spring Harvest. The poem "Memories" is believed to be written about the three other major members of the TCBS. The stanza about Tolkien is the fourth. Check it out.

I have to finally express my gratitude to sian22redux and Grundy. Talking about the film over the course of a day and a half allowed me to clarify my own feelings about it. Many of the ideas here were theirs or made in the "cauldron" (to borrow Tolkien’s metaphor) of our shared discussion.

Tolkien begins to be released worldwide in early May. The International Movie Database has a release schedule by country. The film’s official site has trailers and all that good stuff.

Image Credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures