|
“Like butter that has been scraped over too much bread” was how JRR Tolkien
described the supernatural world-weariness of Bilbo Baggins in the opening
chapter of The Lord of the Rings.
This phrase, incomparably Tolkien-esque in its syntactic neatness and semantic
beauty, is also a perfect description for the first installment in Peter
Jackson’s three-part adaptation of The Hobbit.
I am, of course, being snitty: there is plenty of stuff in An Unexpected
Journey. It's damn well full of stuff, in fact, stuff all the way up to a
bloated 169-minute running time. But stuff is not exactly the same thing as
having a rich and complicated plot, or at the very least a panoply of events.
Upon learning that producer, director, and co-writer Peter Jackson, in concert
with fellow writers Philippa Boyens & Fran Welsh (and a credit for Guillermo del
Toro that smacks of being a bit more of a contractual thing than an actual sign
of his involvement), had decided to turn a 310-page children's book into a film
trilogy augmented by the material from the appendices at the end of The Lord of
the Rings, it was easy to assume that the new films were going to be so
overburdened with the epic machinations of Great Men, hidden in the background
of The Hobbit or missing altogether, would form a huge bulk of the trilogy's
plot, overwhelming the simple little story of a homebody who was thrust on an
adventure and found that he thrived there.
This is not the case: other than a lengthy scene right in the middle, almost
everything in An Unexpected Journey is taken from the first third of the book, a
book extremely light on detail, especially in that selfsame first third, and
depicted in exacting detail; or, when necessary, the writers take a paragraph of
general description or even just a sentence glossing over a story development,
and use it as the crux for a scene. It is a film in which you can very nearly
see the sweat as it struggles to invent things to happen, and the sense one gets
isn't that An Unexpected Journey is 169 minutes because Jackson couldn't figure
out how to shorten it any more, but because he was goddamn well not going to
release a Tolkien adaptation that came in under two and three-quarter hours.
In a way, this is soothing: one recalls the last time Jackson and company opened
up a fantasy trilogy in 2001, with The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the
Ring, that movie was hectic and frenzied in its attempt to cram an
incident-heavy plot - the busiest of any individual volume of The Lord of the
Rings - into just a bit under three hours. For An Unexpected Journey to instead
take its time to linger over its sets and its plot points and characters isn't
actually a sin, then. Except insofar as those things aren't, by and large, all
that interesting: the design of the world has a definite "been there, done that"
feeling to it, and while I imagine the trilogy's faithful legion would have
every reason to be ecstatic to see good ol' Bag End and good ol' Rivendell
again, the new film's insistence on the familiar and the domestic makes it feel
less like a movie in its own right, more like a tribute to how proud the
filmmakers are of the original trilogy, and want to remind you of it (certainly
the length of time spent at just these two recurring locations - by far the
longest pauses in the journey of the title - adds to this impression). As for
the characters, the script does its best to differentiate the 15 principals, but
even with only nine and more time to explore them individually, The Fellowship
of the Ring still left a couple members of the titular group feeling painfully
undernourished, and An Unexpected Journey has a mostly undifferentiated mass of
dwarves, of whom at most four emerge from the general mass, and two of them more
for their physical characteristics (Fat One and One With Pointy Hair) as for
their personalities.
That leaves the film feeling more like a solo affair than an ensemble piece: and
luckily, in the form of Martin Freeman as the titular hobbit, Bilbo Baggins
(played by Ian Holm in the original films, and in story-opening cameo here), An
Unexpected Journey has a tremendously effective lead performance: quite possibly
the best job of casting anywhere in the whole franchi se, and a performance at
the level of even the very best of the originals' packed casts - and since the
best actors in those movies reprise their characters here, Ian McKellen as the
twinkling, mysterious wizard Gandalf the Grey, and Andy Serkis as the
motion-captured cave creature Gollum, it's easy to compare Freeman to them
directly. Freeman's Bilbo hits all of the right notes: easily flustered, easily
offended, but also enough of a closeted romantic that he secretly enjoys himself
too much to be genuinely afraid of the perilous situations that confront him.
If only the film surrounding Freeman matched his nimble, fun, unfussy
performance! But it is not, except in patches: a scene involving a couple of
battling rock monsters achieves that certain sense of awe and wonder that the
rest of the film is sorely lacking, and a revisit with Gollum in a note-perfect
dramatic version of "Riddles in the Dark", the most famous and beloved passage
in all of Tolkien's writing, that finds Serkis actually better than his already
best-in-show work in
The Two
Towers and The Return of the King; followed by a battle scene that is much
the best of the film's action set pieces. And this sandwich helps to make the
movie a bit more palatable.
But everything in between these end points is generally stiff, uninspiring,
bland fantasy filmmaking: a leaden scene with old Bilbo and his nephew Frodo
(Elijah Wood) that retells, in excruciating detail, what happened in the 10
minutes before The Fellowship of the Rings opened, mostly to add recurring names
to the cast list; far too much business with far too many unspecific dwarves
before the plot actually asserts itself, and they and Bilbo and Gandalf all go
journeying through fairly unspecific locations (though as always, the New
Zealand scenery is glorious), while having clumsily-staged fights along the way
- until the end, there's not a single action sequence that I can get behind,
with one (a chase through a subterranean city of goblins) that looks in every
way more like the cut scenes from a video game based on the movie than the movie
itself.
Good things crop up every now and then: the design of the Goblin King (Barry
Humphries) is pleasingly yucky (and his aide-de-camp is a dead ringer for the
zombie baby in Jackson's wonderful "Braindead"), and a LOTR reunion between
McKellen, Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, and Christopher Lee is fun until it
becomes obvious how much their scene together is interfering with the little bit
of narrative momentum that has managed to accrue. The CGI is a mixed bag
throughout, and the new technology used for Gollum results in a subtler and more
refined visual depiction of that character than before. In general, the film
never evokes the lighter, children's story tone of the book. Jackson's attempt
to marry the book's silliness with the seriousness of his own LOTR movies (this
is as violent a movie as any of them) works very poorly - there are moments
where McKellen looks genuinely wretched at having to square the things he's
saying with the character he has already established - and not even the book's
light tone can justify the extraneous depiction of comic relief wizard Radagast
(Sylvester McCoy), with his bird dung-covered face and rabbit-drawn sled, and
his garish bumbling even in the face of the film's one truly dark and grim
location (which already looks like a carbon copy of a location from Fellowship).
Basically, the film is unfocused and stretched-out, and the good things seem
almost as arbitrary and accidental as the bad things. Bottom line: The film is
simplistic and meandering. Making it through all 169 minutes is a chore—a
description one should never use to describe what is intended to be a big
popcorn entertainment—and what is to follow in the next two films seems almost
perplexing. With approximately six more hours to go, it's tough not to shudder
at the sheer lengths director Peter Jackson is about to go to stretch this story
into paper-thin taffy.
|
