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The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the RingAt the heart of Peter Jackson's brilliant The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - the first of three cinematic adaptations of Tolkien's fantasy, shot simultaneously for release in consecutive years - is a favourable melancholy, a despair born of two things: the crucial feeling of desperation that infests a small band of heroes striving against an invincible evil; and the knowledge that this film will soon end, its sequel twelve months away. Jackson has translated nearly every element of Tolkien's universe, from a vast, sprawling history implied in the language and the actions of its multi-specied characters, to a completely immersive fantasy realm with nary a seam to spoil the illusion, to a quest that's worthy of epic attention. He's captured the sadness and moral weight of Tolkien with the kind of deep reality that seems effortless but is born of a meticulous preparation and all-consuming vision. It takes a certain skill to make things look good; it takes genius to keep the pretty pictures from overwhelming the narrative of what is, in this case, a universally familiar story. Ridley Scott never quite got the hang of it.In some ways, Jackson's film surpasses Tolkien's books.
Though adept at the creation of a rich history and a multi-layered reality, Tolkien lacked a gift for crafting climactic scenarios and compelling action sequences. You'll find no such problems in The Fellowship of the Ring, particularly when it comes to the fighting: every sword thrust, axe chop, and slung arrow lands with a savage purpose. One forgets that many of the antagonists are computer-generated. Peter Jackson is among the few directors truly capable of integrating CGI and live-action (as evidenced by the underestimated The Frighteners), a knack attributable to his understanding that images should augment a scene and not upstage it. But even better than Jackson's visionary re-imagining of Tolkien's battles is his expulsion of the British philologian's subterranean religiosity and subtext of virulent racism. The Fellowship of the Ring manages to be neither proselytizing nor xenophobic while retaining some political elements that make it surprisingly poignant for a modern audience. It is, in other words, a personal story about hardship that refrains from such easy relationship crutches as schmaltz and, at the other end of the spectrum, a patronizing belligerence. Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) is a hobbit, a creature approximately four feet in height (the actors were digitally, flawlessly shrunk) who lives in the ever-flowering Shire's bucolic Hobbiton. On the occasion of his uncle Bilbo's (Ian Holm) 111th birthday, Frodo is given a mysterious ring as his birthright. The wizard Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) suspects something infernal of the ring when the otherwise honest Bilbo lies to hold onto it. A quick study reveals that it belongs to a dark lord now seeking, through a steady rebuilding of his armies, to regain the ring and with it his corporeal form. The malevolent warlord (named "Sauron") dispatches nine wraiths: hooded avatars riding midnight steeds whose voices sound like screaming children. Frodo is forced to leave his beloved Shire on a journey in which he enlists allies (the titular Fellowship) to destroy the ring in the fires of a volcano at the heart of the enemy's realm.
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