Directed by Dome Karukoski ( Tom of Finland ), the film chronicling the life of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien takes the advantage of finding in the life of the writer, his inspirations for the development of the universe of Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. the Orphan and survivor of correctness of the battle of the Somme, the creator of middle-Earth has had an eventful life. The thread of the story, Tolkien address of many winks to the films of Peter Jackson. Winks appreciated differently by the French press.
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way too classic to tell the story that is pointed to by almost all the press titles. But for some of them, in a highly charged emotional well proportioned saves the film. For The new yorker , Tolkien is a film told in a very classic, but full of emotion”. A notice that can be found in the critique of Figaro : “Under his bill, classic, beautiful and wise film costumes in this Belle Époque shining its last lights, Tolkien splits despite all the armor of the biopic and offers an unexpected journey into the imagination of the master of fantasy.”
others do not forgive the next already-seen from the narration. According to the Express , it assists during 1h52 to “a succession of sequences, not so boring in the background, but suffer from a too large classicism, and an achievement without surprises”. On his side, Télérama refers to “a fresco biographical whose the wise academism is in part offset by the liveliness of the actors and the many nods to the classic in the future”.
First appreciated the subtle link between the work and the life of the writer, and, in particular, “the monsters popping up in homeopathic doses in the middle of the grape-shot of the trenches of the First world War”. This is not, however, the point of view of Michaël Devaux, chairman of a study association tolkieniennes who sign an op-ed in The Point : “Can it reasonably be supposed that, in the heat of the action, Tolkien had conceived of anything?”
factual errors
But this is not the main criticism is that this is a long film. The one for whom “the film does not lack fancy” tip of the finger several factual errors in the life of Tolkien. The impasse made for example on the engagement of Tolkien with Edith, which took place before the war. And above all, the faith of Tolkien is being abused according to him: “this dimension is in part absent, for part caricaturée, part of the despised”. For Vincent Ferré, another expert on Tolkien, which is expressed in The new yorker , the main problem is to introduce the history of the Hobbit after his experience in the trenches, “so that all of its texts, it is perhaps the one that has the least number of links with the war!”.
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Because, according to many critics, the film has the tendency to distort some of the scenes from the life of the hero to get in the boxes of his work. It is the opinion of Release , to that Dome Karukoski is as obsessed by the need of contract? – to bring into being images that could conjure up to the eye of the general public to those developed by Peter Jackson for his own adaptations to success”. In the same vein, Inrocks regret that the director, “rather than listen to the spirit demiurgic and nebulous of the author, we book the narrative fantasy of his youth”.
criticism of World , according to which Tolkien is devoid of all imagination,” is by far the most severe and insist on the same elements: “the flowering of the talent of Tolkien is reviewed either as a series of events that do not require to be transposed to middle-Earth […], either as a series of micro-revelations quasi-mystical. Nothing truly becomes the knowledge of the work or the man.”
