Ring leaders NEW YORK — By all logic, The Lord of the Rings should never have been filmed, especially not as a nine-hour trilogy, the whole shot over 15 months by a relatively obscure filmmaker on location in New Zealand, at a cost of around $280 million. And Peter Jackson, who nonetheless accomplished this feat, is the first person to say so. "If you were imagining financing three Lord of the Rings movies at this budget, you’d never hire me to do it, never in a million years," he explains at the press junket. "You’d never have Philippa Boyens co-write the screenplay, because she’s never written a script before in her life. You’d never hire a little New Zealand special-effects company to do all the effects for a film like this. So I get a perverse satisfaction out of the fact that this has broken every rule in the book." To be sure, Jackson estimates that the films would have cost New Line twice as much if he hadn’t shot them on his home turf. Of course, you could consider the most formidable obstacle to have been the expectations of the worldwide cult of persnickety hobbitheads. But Jackson says, "You ultimately can’t make films for other people. If I were to listen to the opinion of one fan, there’s a million other fans that would have a different point of view. The best thing to do was to say, ‘I’m a fan like anybody else.’ I set out to make a film that I’d enjoy watching." Still, if the filmmakers didn’t always follow fan advice, they did pay attention to it. Even the casting of Elijah Wood in the lead role of Frodo came about via a tip from Ain’t It Cool News Web master Harry Knowles, who met Wood on the set of The Faculty. Wood recalls, "Harry came up to me one day, and he was like, ‘Dude! They’re making Lord of the Rings! And Peter Jackson’s going to direct it! You’ve got to play Frodo!’ And that was a year before they started casting." Ian McKellen, who plays the wizard Gandalf, fed fans frequent reports from the set via his Web site, mckellen.com, much to the displeasure of New Line. "Oh, they were terribly protective of their property. They insisted that we should show them everything in advance. And they did occasionally say, ‘Oh, please, don’t mention that.’ There was a basic disagreement between New Line and me as to whether it was appropriate to acknowledge the worldwide enthusiasm and interest in the films. Now Peter Jackson and I said, ‘My God, this movie’s got fans, and we haven’t even started shooting it. Hooray!’ He, more than I, would read the fan sites and say, ‘Look what they’re saying now,’ and he would write back. It’s taken New Line and other Hollywood studios a few months to catch up with the inevitable, that these fan sites are a real boon. They are people who want your film to be good. They’re not the enemy. They’re not the press. You don’t have to buy their support." The fans’ biggest complaint involved the character Arwen; many felt Liv Tyler was too lightweight to play a millennia-old elf princess, and they didn’t like Jackson’s swashbuckling reconception of the character. Tyler says her feelings were hurt, especially because she doesn’t see her Arwen as a radical departure from the book. "Honestly, it’s been heartbreaking. But at the same time I’ve been shuffling inside because I’ve known that we were doing the opposite thing." Tyler says the actors relieved the pressures of the long shoot with obscene pranks, most of them inside a make-up trailer "which had a really bad name that I can’t repeat. Viggo [Mortensen, who plays human warrior Aragorn] was the ringleader. He used to make fun of the ‘fucking elves.’ " Mortensen, less squeamish than Tyler, reveals that they called the trailer "the Cuntybago." He bonded with the others mostly through injury, like the battle scene where he had a tooth knocked out but kept fighting. "There were a lot of people who got hurt worse than me. We all had pulled muscles and broken toes. We all eventually not only got hurt but became ill. It’s a long process. People got married, people split up, people got pregnant, people left and returned. It was a traveling circus. It was insane. We became like brothers and sisters. The stunt people who played the monsters we were fighting, I must have killed each of them 50 times." In fact, the nine actors who played the Fellowship, the ad hoc group on a quest to destroy the Ring of Power, were so moved by their shared experience that they all got the elvish numeral "9" tattoo’d on their right shoulders. "Those naughty hobbits!" says McKellen. "We all promised when we had it done in the parlor in Wellington that we would never tell anybody unless someone was close enough to discover them. Mine is on display for the price of $70, if you come to see Dance of Death [on Broadway], where I take my shirt off." — Gary Susman

So, where’s Tom Bombadil? Only the most obsessed Tolkien fans will regret the absence of the most irritating character in Middle Earth in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of J.R.R.’s epic. Not much else is missing, though, and most should be satisfied, if not overwhelmed, by Jackson’s fidelity to the text. It endures as a happy hunting ground of Campbellian myth, adolescent angst, fairy-tale escapism, mediæval posturing, Wagnerian excess, Edda-headed rant, Yeatsian twilight, messianic brooding, and Toryish dyspepsia.

Me, I was seduced by the book at age 13; I had a map of Middle Earth on my wall, and I laughed heartily a year later at the Harvard Lampoon’s parody Bored of the Rings. For me, this film comes as an earnest anticlimax, moving in places but less inventive — and subversive — than might have been expected from Jackson. A budget of $350 million for a three-film package over three years can make you cautious.

The basic story has the hobbit (four feet tall, beardless, hairy feet, a soft spot for comfort, Irish accent) Frodo (Elijah Wood), the ward of Bilbo Baggins (a hammy Ian Holm), being chosen by destiny and circumstances as the unlikely bearer of the Ring of Power, which brings to those who wear it invisibility, and potential invincibility, but at the price of submission to Sauron, the evil entity who forged it. Frodo must take the ring to Mount Doom in Sauron’s realm of Mordor and there throw it into the fire from which it was forged. Accompanying him in this hopeless task is the Fellowship, a mixed-race party (no black or brown skins in this film, unless you count the Orcs — Tolkien is at least as racially problematic as George Lucas) of Frodo’s fellow hobbits Samwise (Sean Astin), Meriadoc (Dominic Monaghan), and Pippin (Billy Boyd); Legolas (Orlando Bloom), an Elf (immortal, Swedish-looking, English accent); Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), a Dwarf (hirsute, likes axes, hates Elves, Scottish accent); Boromir (Sean Bean), a Man (the weakest link?); Strider (Viggo Mortensen), the gaunt Ranger; and, of course, Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen), a Wizard and the most desirable of the action figures.

Merchandising aside, Jackson shows impeccable discernment in his casting. Even as the narrative itself blurs or becomes irrelevant to the spectacle, the characters — especially Wood’s Frodo, who looks like a Botticelli angel crossed with a Cabbage Patch doll — linger in the imagination, offering emotional clarity. As for the tale itself, maybe it’s the map that’s lacking, because the adventures that follow so inevitably in the book (you follow the road from Bag End to Bree and . . . ) here seem episodic, a reprise of special effects recalling everything from The Wizard of Oz (welcome to Munchkinland) and King Kong (the Cave Troll) to Star Wars and Sleepy Hollow.

The sets seem staid and derivative — the Elven Forest of Lothlorien looks designed by Busby Berkeley — and the landscapes and costumes conjure toned-down Frank Franzetta illustrations. But there’s also a David Lynch perversity to some of the imagery. The Eye of Sauron appears like a giant, flaming vagina, and Sauron’s sliced-off, Ring-laden finger, seen in a multi-millennia flashback, is phallic enough to satisfy any Freudian.

Which is about as sexy as The Lord of the Rings gets, unless you consider the homoerotic subtext (Bilbo goes nuts when Frodo opens his shirt, exposing the Ring). The characters are mostly androgynous or asexual, though in this regard Jackson improves on the original by giving the girlfriends screen time. Here it’s Arwen (ethereal, big-bodied Liv Tyler), the Elf princess in love with Strider (Tolkien gives her about two sentences), who rescues the gravely wounded Frodo, and when I saw her turn and face the pursuing Nazgûl on the banks of the Bruinen before Rivendell, I realized that despite its flaws, the film had won me over.

I also realized I was not far from playing Dungeons and Dragons. Arwen? Nazgûl? The lingo summons up images of conventioneers in wizard capes and pointed hats. But it also evokes the eldritch nomenclature of the war in Afghanistan, where Tora Bora and Spin Boldak could be confused with Barad-Dûr and the Mines of Moria. Although Tolkien denied it, the book can be read as an allegory of World War II, or of any world conflict between good and evil. The question The Lord of the Rings raises is, which is which? And for how long?

Issue Date: December 20 - 27, 2001

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