"Tolkien" opens with the noted author in the trenches of WWI, slithering through the mud and over the corpses of soldiers who buried face up in puddles and perhaps killed by the poison gas wafting overhead.
The young officer (Nicholas Hoult) is fighting in France, but we are encouraged in these scenes to think of a land east of the Emyn Muil and just west of the Dagorlad plain, in the Dead Marshes where Frodo and Sam made their way to Mordor, also contending with poisoned air and the submerged bodies of fallen soldiers.
Tolkien himself insisted that his "Lord of the Rings" stories were unrelated to his life experiences, and strictly the product of imagination and his estate has distanced itself from this movie. But "Tolkien" is having none of that.
By the time the movie ends, subtle prodding has gone out the window, and the fever-mad Tolkien is seeing spectral horseman and flying dragons over the battlefield. If "Goodbye Christopher Robin" had taken this approach, A.A. Milne might have found himself in the Somme fighting alongside Winnie the Pooh.
So, yes, "Tolkien" is a little on the nose. But there is also an undeniable appeal to the life-art allusions that drive this earnest movie, which is handsomely mounted, well cast and well acted.
It begins with Tolkien's happy bucolic life in woodsy (the shire!) England; his deeply unhappy adolescence amid the belching factories of Birmingham (the old world will burn in the fires of industry!), from which he emerges an orphan, a ward of the church (Colm Meaney is his guardian/priest) who secures a spot in private school, where his amazing gift for language earns the admiration of classmates, three of whom join with Tolkien to form a close bond the movie helpfully refers to as a "fellowship."
The way "Tolkien" keeps winking at "LOTR" buffs sometimes borders on comedy, but the movie really only asks for a laugh once, when Tolkien and his sweetheart Edith Bratt (Lily Collins) attend a Wagner opera and complain that it shouldn't take six hours to tell a story about a ring.
In a world of fan fiction, "Tolkien" stands as something new _ fan nonfiction. And it's often kind of fun, despite its clanging obviousness. Hoult is an appealing actor, and has decent chemistry with Collins. Relationships with school friends are less well drawn, and the movie's time-fractured narrative means that half a dozen actors play the young men at different ages, so connections are not as deeply felt.
The movie is at its best when probing Tolkien's mania (and genius) for languages, identified and nurtured at Cambridge by an eccentric professor (Derek Jacobi) who recognizes the young's man's singular gift and develops it, essentially saving the faltering student from flunking out.
"Tolkien" gives Jacobi some suspiciously ornate and perfect speeches about the beauty and importance of words, , but Jacobi is having such an immensely good time in these scenes that it's hard to quibble.
In the end, he presents young Tolkien with an intriguing idea_to highlight the beauty of ancient words and languages by fusing them with the equally beautiful ancient myths. That idea, the young Tolkien thinks, has a nice ring to it.
