J.R.R. Tolkien is best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. But before the Oxford don penned those fantasy epics, he was a passionate philologist, an officer in the Great War, and an impoverished orphan romancing his housemate, Edith Bratt, much to his guardian's chagrin. This is the story told by Tolkien, a new biopic about the creator of Middle-earth.
Set in Edwardian England, the film looks gorgeous, following its bright young stars through richly-furnished English homes and gas-lit Oxford streets and a trippy, fantasy-soaked no-mans-land of the Somme. Thomas Newman's score, with its distant faux-Celtic vocals, reminds one of the more New Agey portions of Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings compositions. The layers of gauze and moodiness are so thick that the film occasionally feels cocooned in its own emotions. Ultimately, Tolkien's preference for style over substance means that it hovers above the profound but never quite lands.
That said, it remains quite, as the kids say, a mood. The events of Tolkien's early life lend themselves well to the sort of nostalgic innocence of stories like Brideshead Revisited, a milieu to which Tolkien obviously owes a creative debt. Together with his gang of friends, young Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) gets thrown out of pubs, rambles about Nordic myth, and dreams of writing stories that will change the world. The boys call themselves the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, a poetic brotherhood whose literary ambitions loom crazily large against the oncoming devastation of the Great War.
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