Interzone #244 Jan - Feb 2013 (24 page)

The Hobbit
was a strange book to start with, and only got more so after Tolkien started fiddling with it to force it into coherence with the larger story of Sauron’s quest for the Ring. But the actual 1944 rewrite of “Riddles in the Dark” (incorporated by a happy mixup into the 1951 and subsequent editions), and the subsequent well-documented smaller changes to the text, are all but incidental to this story, which centres instead on matters that never made it into the book at all: above all, the retrospective expansion of the single sentence explaining Gandalf’s detour to eject the Necromancer from Dol Guldur (which Tolkien admitted in correspondence was merely an ad hoc contrivance to take Gandalf out of the story for nine chapters) into the climax of a 2000-year prequel to the War of the Ring. The effect of this radical retroception was to turn
The Hobbit
into a Rosencrantz & Guildenstern view of the real story, which is the White Council’s assault on Dol Guldur and the resultant flushing-out of Sauron from Mirkwood to Mordor. That offscreen epic, which Tolkien himself never told circumstantially in any form, makes the defeat of Smaug and the Battle of Five Armies a footnote in a much vaster and more consequential saga, which Peter Jackson and his partners in burglary are now trying their sincerest to tell as it deserves. And while eyebrows may levitate at the late decision to expand the two films shot into three, Jackson has been here before; until Jackson blagged New Line into bankrolling a trilogy, Miramax had been trying to shrink what were then two films into one for $75m with half the hobbits killed off. Indeed, three three-hour films is actually quite a modest frame for this very large and ambitious expanded
Hobbit
, especially if (as has been intimated) the third film will reach past the end of the novel and deep into the untold hexecontaetia beyond.

Unfortunately for Jackson, the film rights to the
Hobbit
narrative are notoriously messy – far more so than those for
LotR
, which is why Jackson had to abandon his original 1995 plan to make
The Hobbit
first, why the 2010 MGM bankruptcy was so devastating to the production in its del Toro two-film incarnation, and why almost everyone involved – Jackson, New Line, Saul Zaentz, the Tolkien estate – has sued everyone else along the way, before a dwarvish recognition of mutual benefit from a shared quest imposed the present uneasy alliance and fellowship. Tolkien’s colossal blunder in his 1969 contract with United Artists sold away the film and merchandising rights in perpetuity, thus effectively freezing his heirs out of any share in the profits. This was then compounded by the estate’s own 1976 sale to Saul Zaentz, who had bought the film rights from UA, of trademarks on all the named characters, places, and objects in both works: a deal as monumentally disadvantageous to the vendor as Fox’s surrender of the
Star Wars
licensing rights to George Lucas the same year. But Zaentz unaccountably failed to pick up the distribution rights for
The Hobbit
from UA, whence they passed to MGM in the 2004 merger; and even with a defibrillated MGM aboard as co-producers, Jackson and New Line have access only to what was sold by Tolkien in his lifetime. This includes the published
Hobbit
and the text and appendices of
LotR
– but not the posthumously published material owned by Christopher Tolkien from
The Silmarillion
onwards, including anything in the 12-volume
History of Middle-Earth
, or the unpublished
Hobbit
drafts, revisions, and plot notes subsequently gathered in John Rateliff’s 2007 history of the text and its 2011 addenda. Thus, for example, the film Gandalf’s catalogue of the Istari includes “the two blue wizards; I forget their names” (audience: “Alatar and Pallando! Keep up, Ganders”), because the names only appear in CJRT’s commentary in
Unfinished Tales
. Crucially, the unowned material includes not just the abandoned 1960 rewrite, which set out to harmonise the tone with
LotR
until someone who may have been Naomi Mitchison torpedoed it after two and a bit chapters, but the 1954 retelling “The Quest of Erebor” – versions of which have been published by Tolkien
fils
in
Unfinished Tales
and in Douglas Anderson’s annotated edition of
The Hobbit
, and which remains the only version to attempt a causal explanation of the puzzlingly synchronous relationship between Bilbo’s adventure and the White Council’s campaign. Jackson may yet use this, if he can find a way to reverse-engineer it from the surviving hints and fragments in “Durin’s Folk” and the Tale of Years, or simply to appropriate it without fear of a renewed legal tussle with the estate. Without it, he has a significant problem.

An Unexpected Journey
is tentative in its address to these issues, but is at least encouragingly aware of the opportunities to resculpt the novel into something more closely resembling JRRT’s own unrealised post-
Rings
conception of its real story, no least by cashing in the new tolerance of both audiences and studios for more expansive and generous multi-part adaptations. Post-
Potter
audiences are perfectly used to long films which give space to the scenes and characters they want to see from the books, and which aren’t in a rush to condense and abbreviate. And as the distended editions of the original trilogy show off very well, Jackson is perfectly able to sustain a dense, pacy narrative on a scale a third longer again than this, while his familiar weaknesses as a filmmaker – slack plotting, tin-eared dialogue, watery-eyed sentimentality, coarse melodramatisation, lazy Hollywood-formula motivation, an abhorrence of understatement, and jarringly crass injections of low-end kiwi humour – are if anything better masked by the longer running times he’s continued to explore in his post-
Rings
work. It’s admittedly a bold choice to devote half the first act of a gigantic 3D IMAX HFR epic to a single cramped scene of fifteen characters squeezed into a hobbit-sized breakfast bar expounding their ample guts out; but the leisurely dwarvish comedics play well to the younger audience who need to be brought onside early if they’re to put up with much of what’s coming, and those who grumble about the pacing must have mercifully unremembered the interminable Cirith Ungol stretch of
Return
. Tiny throwaways inflate like airbags – the stone giants are a single sentence in the book – and time has been found not just for the pocket-handkerchief and the thrush but even for the dwarves’ washing-up song and for Gollum’s subterranean doggerel ditty.

If anything, Tolkien’s actual story has in fact been fairly drastically condensed, pulling nine hundred years of backstory into the timeframe of the film, and eliminating Gandalf’s earlier expeditions to Dol Guldur and his discovery of the Necromancer’s identity almost a century before the events of
The Hobbit
. How this squares with Gandalf’s acquisition of the key to Erebor from Thráin is unclear, though it will be unlike Jackson if he passes up the chance to exploit the Necromancer’s involvement in the death of Thorin’s father – especially since, for more Hollywood-compliant motivation, Azog the rather ropey digital orc has here been allowed to survive his canonical slaying by Dáin after offing Thorin’s granddad, and to assume the role taken in the novel by his son Bolg so that Thorin can avenge two generations of dads at once (result!). Hollywoodised in a different way is the restructured motivation of the quest to “take back Erebor”, which is here not about the treasure but the reestablishment of a homeland for the diasporised Durinfolk in “the last dwarvish kingdom in Middle-Earth” (erm, if you forget all about the Iron Hills) – and an arc for Bilbo that modulates from midlife Call to Adventure to homely hobbit’s sympathy for the unhomed. (Needless to say, this being Jackson/Walsh/Boyens, Bilbo doesn’t trust to show-don’t-tell but spells it out for them on the big dwarvish nose.) Dol Guldur is brought into the foreground storyline by introducing an orcish pursuit by Azog on the Necromancer’s business, even though this makes for a curious slippage between the scary orcs above ground and the comically inept goblins below. The White Council meet conveniently at Rivendell during Bilbo’s stopover to debate northern strategy, while big backstory inserts make screentime for the arrival of Smaug, the battle of Moria, and similar nods to Tolkien’s own unembarrassed fondness for analeptic flourishes. Yet mostly it’s still the
Hobbit
we know with bits of the untold tipped in, and some earnest if clumsy engagement with the questions Tolkien continued to wrestle with for decades: why a hobbit? Why Bilbo? What in the name of Manwë was Gandalf thinking?

As the technical landmark it seeks to be, the film is a fascinatingly mixed-success adventure. It’s thrilling to see Jackson finally let into the 3D party, with swooping tours of Erebor in its prime and the subterranean orcopolis delivering what the famous shots of the pits of Orthanc could only foreshadow. All the same, at my screening the left visual channel dropped temporarily out when we hit Rivendell, and the audience removed their glasses to wipe lenses in bemusement, only to find themselves awakened blinking into a glowing 2D world of brilliant light and colour in which many would have been quite happy to spend the rest of the film. And while the 3D is undeniably smoother in 48fps, the unexpected cultural problem with the crispness and clarity of HFR is that it looks to most eyes like television, an impression hardly helped by the engagement of so many small-screen faces. The dwarves do what they can, the broader performances nicely darkened by knowledge of Thorin’s arc, the fates of his nephews, and what will happen to the amiable Balin when he tries to replicate the Erebor triumph in Moria. But the cut from Ian Holm to Martin Freeman in the role of Bilbo only underlines the difference in register from the earlier trilogy, as a comic actor of great deftness and timing but more limited dramatic range takes over, still in his Arthur Dent dressing gown, from a stunning classical master of sixpence tonal turns. Freeman is good at pity staying his hand, but you still can’t quite imagine him doing Bilbo’s scene with the Ring in Rivendell in
Fellowship
.

While the action sequences and the landscapes all look lovely, the art of makeup has yet to catch up with the more ruthless scrutiny afforded. If you were going to choose a film to showcase the attractions of 48fps IMAX, you probably wouldn’t opt for one in which thirteen of your most closeupped characters perform in fake foreheads and latex honkers, and your returning stars are ten-years-older actors attempting to play versions of their characters sixty years younger. Gandalf is disconcertingly ravaged; you can see every one of Galadriel’s new elven wrinkles; and a painfully frail Saruman has had his sit-down role pasted digitally in from Pinewood and then telepathically talked over anyway (probably a mercy, as the audible part of his speech is frankly beneath his dignity, with some quite dreadful stuff about Radagast’s excessive consumption of mushrooms and a nonsense line about “calling himself the Necromancer” when they’ve just made that title up themselves). The overwhelming effect is to make the insanely expensive look cheap, and while one does attune to the look, it’s not in the immersive way its makers hope but rather in a heightened tolerance of artificiality and semiosis, with the long, actorly dialogue scenes and sub-illusory makeup repeatedly invoking the feel not of film but of theatre, quite often to the film’s advantage. The riddles in the dark, in particular, play beautifully as a nine-minute two-hander (only one pair of riddles is cut) between two scenery-eating performers at the very top of their game, and it seems almost incidental that one of them happens to be mocapped. Perhaps this is indeed the next revolution in cinema, but you can bet Jim Cameron is nervous.

From time to time in the writing of both
Hobbit
and
LotR
Tolkien would stop in his tracks and review the road ahead, and his
Hobbit
notes especially show the story being improvised as it went – which is why Thorin’s arc in the book takes such an unanticipated turn, and Bard is so belatedly promoted and named as a pivotal figure.
Journey
’s horripilant climactic shot of Erebor seen from the Eyrie invites a similar mapping of the way that will lie before them when Bilbo awakes in
The
Desolation of Smaug
with the early sun in his eyes. That Jackson is playing a thoughtful long game is suggested by the almost impossibly dense allusions to
Fellowship
in particular, from the initial undeleted scenes from the day of Bilbo’s eleventy-first, via the myriad Bag End details reactivated for new meaning and resonance, to the visual quotation of Frodo’s moment in the Prancing Pony when the ring first falls on to Bilbo’s finger. Thranduil pops his head around the door as a teaser for his role in film 2, but nothing is yet seen of his famous son – nor of Glóin’s, at this time a youngster of 62, nor of any ten-year-old human ward wandering round Rivendell in the background, though it seems inconceivable that something will not occur on the back-again; and while it would be pleasant not to see any more of Liv Tyler, the smart money must be on some involvement of Lorien in the Dol Guldur campaign which would open a window of opportunism that Jackson might find hard to resist. Given that we open on an owl eye and end on Smaug’s, it’s a safe bet what the final shot of
There and Back Again
will be. Of course we can safely expect disappointments, even desolation – but perhaps at least a fourteenth share of gold.