The Hobbit – An Unexpected Journey

The Hobbit – An unexpected Journey – The first installment in Peter Jackson’s new Middle Earth trilogy is subtitled “An unexpected Adventure” – I suppose that this is to distinguish it from upcoming sequels in which, presumably, the adventures will be expected. After reading reviews of the film, almost uniformly snarky, I attended this picture with greatly diminished expectations – “bloated” and “elephantine” are two of the more kind adjectives applied by reviewers to this film. In fact, the picture is pretty good, certainly, very exciting and a feast for the eyes. Jackson adapts every preposition and comma in The Hobbit, which was a modest children’s book, and, apparently, amplifies enormously (both literally and metaphorically) episodes that are mere parenthetical phrases in the novel. But the effect is quick-moving, even, sprightly, and the film never lags over the course of its 2 hours and 47 minute running time. For better or worse, Jackson is enormously assured when it comes to Middle Earth and its characters – he seems to know the various dwarves and trolls and goblins to their very bones and the level of detail in his sets, costumes, and landscapes is nothing short of astounding. I suspect that The Hobbit is far inferior to the three Lord of the Rings pictures, but don’t know for sure. You would have to set the movies back to back for comparison – because they really are not like any other recent adventure films (nothing else really compares to them in this genre) – and given the size and intensity of the films this would be an impractical and daunting enterprise. About every twenty minutes, Jackson stages some kind of spectacular battle or chase and the level of visual ingenuity shown in these set pieces is staggering. One extended battle underground fought on a maze of rickety suspended rope-bridges, layers of upon layers of hammock-like bridges hanging from the walls of an enormous vaulted cavern filled with malignant goblins is literally breathtaking – characters plunge into huge abysses, great gulfs glowing with lava like the colossal landscapes of Bosch’s hell or John Martin’s paintings of Paradise Lost. Mountains tear free of their roots and hurl summits at one another; black widow spiders the size of elephants charge through fern forests, at one point three massive trolls put a half-dozen dwarves on a giant rotisserie spit and roast them over an open fire (this amazing scene is played for comedy). The picture is simple in outline – essentially, a gigantic chase. The power of Jackson’s Middle Earth films is that he creates interesting, even lovable, characters and, then, hurls them into frenzied action. The plot has something to do with thirteen bellicose dwarves, each characterized as a vivid individual, attempting to regain their lost homeland. The dwarves are like Diaspora Jews seeking return to Jerusalem – or like Palestinian Arabs – and their homelessness is powerfully portrayed. Bilbo Baggins is the eponymous Hobbit; his role is unclear and it’s certainly not evident why he is integral to the quest, although Jackson understands that it is important that an “everyman,” a peaceful rural squire be entangled in the wildly violent proceedings – this is the audience’s point of access to the exotic events that the film portrays. The acting is uniformly excellent and, of course, the highlight is the confrontation between Baggins and Gollem. Gollem is like Nosferatu or King Kong – one of the greatest and most indelible creations in cinema history and, when he is on-screen, you can’t take your eyes off him. There’s too much of the movie, but the action sequences are fantastic and the landscapes shot with helicopter-mounted Steadicam majestic. On TV ads, some of the special effects look cheesy – there’s a Terry Redlin quality, too pretty and saccharine, to some of the images, particularly the belvederes and dozen Yosemite Falls cascading into the gorge of Rivendell in the honeyed amber of the setting sun. But on the big screen, these images seem sublime – the moment when the dwarves emerge from a narrow chasm (it’s only about twenty inches wide) onto a crag overlooking the Elf City is tremendously effective. It’s a great folly in that no one needs this movie – it is completely redundant to the three films in The Lord of the Rings cycle. And, yet, many of the most important films in cinema history are follies. I don’t make a claim for greatness for this picture, but it convincingly captures the very real sense of wonder, as well as darkness in Tolkien’s novels.