REVIEW

Nicholas Hoult in Tolkien, a sober affair that is driven by love and friendship.

TOLKIEN is driven by love. It is about the passion that J.R.R. Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult), creator of The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings, had for his wife, Edith (Lily Collins). In telling the story of his early years, it also chronicles his love for his friends, and for language itself. It is a likeable picture, a bit anodyne in parts, rather clunky in others, but it has a great heart.

Film Trailer (approx. 2.5 minutes)

It opens on nightmarishly familiar images of the Somme, and then whisks us back in time to show us young Ronald’s eventful early childhood. Around the turn of the 20th century, his widowed mother – the person who auspiciously first filled his head with stories of dragons and derring do – falls on what she calls “impecunious circumstances”, and uproots Ronald and his younger brother from a rural idyll to soot polluted Birmingham.

But then she dies, and his guardian, a kindly Catholic priest (Colm Meaney), moves the orphaned Ronald (played at this stage by Harry Gilby) to a kind of middle-class orphanage owned by a pompous matron (Pam Ferris). That’s where he falls for Edith, who becomes the love of his life.

Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s film explores their burgeoning relationship, and her influence on him, but also dwells on his coterie of schoolfriends, with whom Ronald forms a club, a fellowship, devoted to “changing the world through the power of art”.

His brilliant mind and academic prowess continues to broadens at Oxford, where he is mentored by a venerable professor of Middle English, sweetly played by Derek Jacobi. It is, though, his friends who influence him most, and he becomes especially attached to one of them, aspiring poet Geoffrey Bache Smith (Anthony Boyle).

Later, in one of the flits back and forth to the Somme, we see him and Geoffrey endlessly calling each other’s name on the battlefield. In scenes that are meant to be deeply poignant, cynics may wonder whether they shouldn’t perhaps be attempting to kill enemy soldiers rather than trying to locate each other like Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in the briny at the end of Titanic. Tolkien, for all its slight deficiencies, is a highly watchable film.

Aptly, for a biopic of perhaps the greatest of all fantasy writers, it is nicely written, by Stephen Beresford – who scripted the hugely engaging 2014 film Pride – and David Gleeson.

And while it no doubt takes plenty of dramatic licence, it is hard to see what might offend the author’s surviving relatives, who have strenuously objected to it being made at all.

Verdict: Big-hearted biopic

★★★