Tolkien is a biopic covering the early life of J.R.R. Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) and it is not especially memorable. I’m even forgetting it as I’m trying to remember it. Yes, it’s one of those. Come back, come back, I need to remember you at least until the end of this review. But, no, it’s fading, fading, fading. Still, I’ll do what I can before it is fully gone, which may happen any minute now. This is quite the race against time, in fact.
So, quickly, quickly. The film opens in 1916, during the first world war, with Tolkien, then 24, on the front line at the Battle of the Somme. As directed by Dome Karukoski, the horror of the battlefield is interwoven with imagery from Lord of the Rings — mythical characters thundering past on horseback etc., thereby equating the battle for Middle Earth with the battle for Europe.
It’s that heavy-handed, in other words. We then spool back to his childhood, which was certainly tragic. His father died when he was three (although I had to look up how and why; for a tick-boxing exercise this doesn’t even tick the boxes that well) while his beloved mother died when he was 12. He came home from school one day and there she was, slumped in the armchair. (Again, I had to look that up: diabetes.) Father Francis (Colm Meaney), a Catholic priest, becomes his guardian and arranges for him to lodge with Mrs Faulkner (Pam Ferris), which I expected to lead to fun and japes, as with the landlady played by Julie Walters in Brooklyn, but no such luck. Ferris is dumped after one scene.
He attends King Edward’s School in Birmingham, where he forms a ‘fellowship’ with three friends who wish to ‘change the world though the power of art’ which, as played out here, seemed tossy and shallow rather than deep or heartfelt.
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