Tolkien

This tends towards being about four separate films about the pre-writing history of JRR Tolkein, looking at how his experiences influenced him when he eventually wrote some of the best selling novels of all time. We get his early romance with the woman who became his wife, we get the early bonding at school with other artistically inclined boys, we get his struggles in the early years of Oxford, and we get his experiences in the trenches of World War 1. And while Nicholas Hoult does a fine job in each of the phases of Tolkein’s life, the stop-start nature of this means the film is only occasionally absorbing. It’s a very British story of young men coming together as comrades over common causes, about emotional reticence and about transcending class barriers. But there are a couple of decent breakout moments – particularly the study of eccentric Oxford behaviour with Derek Jacobi – and the impressionistic looks at the war utilising elements of Tolkeins fantasies has some interesting images. But in the end this really suffers from never deiciding what essential narrative about Tolkein’s early life the film wants to tell – thereby failing to serve any of the four possible underlying narratives particularly well.