2004 Oscar Dialogue: The Return of the King

Andy Stilp | The Age of the King

Consider this about The Return of the King: Both its predecessors hovered around the $800 million mark worldwide, scored nominations for Best Picture and sparked a multimedia hobbit frenzy that has resurrected the Tolkien catalog as a whole. We could say that it had no choice but to succeed, but it landed in the same year that saw The Matrix Revolutions (another final chapter of two solid flicks — call it the Liza Minnelli setup) crash and burn.

Why did Return of the King succeed? It was a great adaptation of a good book, and it was positioned to be a series of conflict closings. Think about it: Frodo and the ring, Aragorn and the king, Gandalf and Sauron … this film was set up to be closure after closure for a captive fan base the likes of which this nation hasn't seen since Star Wars (the original ones — not these crap-blap digi-films George Lucas is shilling now). Outside of the Shelob twist, there aren't any more major conflicts opened up. It's hand-in-hand, cheer-'em-'til-they're-done fare. What could be more satisfying?

Even though the story led to the mega-scene at Minas Tirith, Peter Jackson was able to retain those tenets that made the other two book-films successful: meaningful CGI, a sense of Zionism, distinguished musical accents and a human scale. Say what you will about the endings; they had to be that long because they had to anchor an ending to not one film epic, but three. I'm from the corner that The Fellowship of the Ring (vs. A Beautiful Mind) and The Two Towers (vs. Chicago) were also the Best Pictures of their year because the Jackson-Walsh-Boyens team created an unparalleled magic, and their wizardry has made it all the way to the conclusion of the Age of the Ring.

What say you?

David Essex | Pauline vs. Balrog

Because Return of the King and its prequels made so much moolah, I think its Oscar is probably as inevitable as Bush taking Florida. But should it be? Sure, its fans are legion and rabid, but so are those of ""Joe Millionaire." Sure, it boasted some great visuals and sometimes took you for a great ride, but so does Grand Theft Auto. I found it similarly heartless — not in the sociopathic sense (although given his splatter oeuvre, we might well wonder about Mr. Jackson) but because nothing in it really moved me. Perhaps if I had seen the three films on successive days, like the Ring Cycle at Bayreuth, I might have been more moved by some of the developments. Instead I felt like I was watching a Korean soap opera; I could tell vaguely that drama was taking place between and among the characters, and even picked up on what it was supposed to be. But could I care? No. The characters mattered to me as much as the figures in a video game — one that I don't play much.

Part of the problem is the no-discernible-rules thing. I liked the first installment fine: It seemed surprisingly ballsy. There was clearly something at stake because several key, engaging characters snuffed it. The brave princeling (please help me with the names) dies fighting, making a hopeless last stand so that Frodo can go on. That got me; it had a whiff of the Homeric. And Gandalf goes over the edge with a dragon. But then, in Part the Deux, Gandalf comes back! I don't even remember what the retroactive rationale was. Like "Perils of Pauline" perhaps. It only looked like he fell into the bottomless pit; what really happened is … scene of Gandalf/Pauline clutching convenient cave-dwelling pine? I truly don't remember, and I don't think that speaks well for the plot development. The authors just decided they'd suspend the rule of gravity like a Road Runner cartoon, because they needed Gandalf around for gravitas.

In precisely the same mode, Gandalf seems to have all kinds of superpowers at some times but not at others. Whenever we need some suspense, or Gandalf wants to project some dark foreboding into the back rows, his powers seem rather circumscribed ("It's out of my hands now"), but whenever he gets into a tight spot he goes into turbo-wizard mode and his rod becomes a starfighter or summons giant eagles and the day is saved. I'm happy to go along with nonsense (like the wall-to-wall gravity of the Enterprise/Millennium Falcon/Nostromo) but I want it to be consistent nonsense. Otherwise the story is unsatisfying, like when your Mom lets you beat her at Risk.

The most disastrous ramification of this for Return of the King comes in the last reel. The many "endings" didn't seem like the necessary and clever resolutions of many different plot lines. If fact, I had only been marginally aware of the subplots being resolved because I had no emotional investment in them. When there are no underlying rules, sequential events aren't plots, they're just one thing after another. It becomes like watching pi to see if the decimal repeats — which was the sense I had for the last eon or so of Return of the King. Suddenly the thing went all Spielberg — good work badly marred by never-ending ending.

Andy Stilp | Gandalf vs. Bore-omir

I don't think I require any license to say that your I-feel-nothing-here take on the trilogy is in the minority of moviegoers. It's not erroneous — takeaway is the threshold beyond which even the most bombastic productions can do very little — but sometimes, critics like us need to concede that the quality of a film just might be indicated by, yes, its popularity.

I can't do a good job of waxing about the Jackson drama because it leans on a method that's far more Shakespearean than modern and it's often momentus interruptus because they laid down vast amounts of footage. Return of the King is also an odd piece of cinema for judging the acting; by this point, our characters have already climbed half the ladder, and this film is simply the rest of the trip to the roof. As a whole, though, the actors have truly faded into characters (a death sentence for Elijah Wood indeed), and ultimately, that seems to be the essence, the goal of every work of drama.

The multiple-ending close to Return of the King has been publicly called out as a sore spot, and while the book requires it, the movie doesn't necessarily have to be the book. But the fact that you were detached from the characters — this is an issue that stemmed from Fellowship for you, no? The trilogy does a spectacular job of promoting a formalized laddism — a men's club with rules, structure, honor, chivalry and a goal: Return the ring. Beyond that, this club permits good Eowyn/Arwen commentary on the role of women in life and love. I'm wondering why the stubborn companionship of Legolas and Gimli, why the heartfelt tie that bound Merry and Pippin, the British officer/batman relationship of Frodo and Sam … why didn't these make any impression on you? If nothing else, the portrayals of these characters are lovable. Aside from the PG-13 blood and digi-guts of it all, the trilogy has provided enough evidence that we should care about the fates of — forget everyone else — the hobbits, these smallish, neutral people drawn into world war unsuspectingly. This is why heartbreak sets in when Merry can't tell Pippin when he'll see him again, why one hobbit discovering another on the field of battle is crushingly good.

This probably means that Aragorn's glam phrase — "For Frodo" — has fallen on deaf ears in your case. Return of the King clinches it — the Jackson team has constructed a grand fate-of-the-world war epic whose backbone, this humanity, is stronger than a hundred drum-banging cave trolls. He says "For Frodo," and you realize that the fate of the world isn't in Frodo's hands, but Sam's. At that moment, Aragorn and Sam reveal the gas and oil that motors the ring cause's engine. A fully realized Aragorn leads the remnants of man into their final battle against the masses of Mordor to provide a clear path to Mount Doom for Sam and Frodo. Sam, heart of gold, is physically carrying the weakened Frodo up the mountain to achieve their quest and get home (the Zionism I spoke of before). Any debate about The Lord of the Rings really being about Boromir and Samwise is gone on someone who can't dig the characters, but come on, man — why can't you buy into Sam, the most selfless creature around?

I feel we should spend a little more time assessing the movie Return of the King and its merits, but to clarify: The name of the prince in Fellowship was Boromir (Sean Bean), slain while defending more his quality than his hobbits, and there was nothing convenient about Gandalf's fall at Khazad-dum. The Two Towers opened with exposition on how he and the Balrog fell and fell and fell into the heart of Moria, depths well beyond the mines the dwarves explored. The camera angles may have been confusing. Picking apart Gandalf's wizard powers, though — that seems to be the task of a man working really hard to not like these movies. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is nothing if not consistent — a half-decade was spent developing the story, growing the Shire, training the actors and preening the frames. This has been an immersion project, and its product has been a three-film culture, the hallmark of unity.

David Essex | Superman vs. batman

Popularity is haphazardly correlated with quality. Many critics do take an elitist stance, assuming that anything that moves a mass audience does so through its LCD appeal, and that's just facile and contrarian. Sometimes truly great things are wildly popular — the Beatles come to mind. But let's not forget that professional wrestling, hate radio and televangelism are extremely popular. And Tuesday night many more people watched "My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance" than bought movie tickets.

There's an inherent problem with discussing Return of the King as Best Picture because it's the culmination of a trilogy. Moreover, it's not like The Godfather III; it was always designed as the climax. It is quite arguable that Return should get its Oscar for the cumulative achievement. It probably will, and that will be no global injustice. But still, I didn't come out of the theater thinking, "That was the best thing I've seen all year." Perhaps that's because I don't have the cultural apparatus to keep all the plot-plates spinning on the imaginary sticks. I found the books unreadable and I've only seen the first two films once. But with all those resources the film should have transcended my limitations.

I agree that much of the series' strength is in the camaraderie of the hobbits, and I did find that engaging, funny, etc. — in the first episode. But then the little guys went their separate ways. By this episode we're basically down to Sam and Frodo. Sam's devotion to Frodo is mildly touching, but it also seems overwrought and out of nowhere. What inspires such devotion, whence this unflagging fealty? I guess maybe it has to do with their friendship back in the shire, or else Sam's belief in their calling. Either way it seems too abstract. You compare it to an officer/batman duo, but that kind of pairing takes place in a clear hierarchy that provides both parties predefined niches. The batman (butler, squire, etc.) constructs honor being the best batman he can be — even if (as in the best versions) the boss is no paragon. Here it reads: Frodo the Chosen, Sam the doormat.

My misgivings about Gandalf are not "a man working really hard to not like these movies." (I don't dislike them, I just don't love them.) My quibble with Gandalf's on-and-off powers springs from the most instinctive, unmediated movie aesthetic. As lads, my friends and I first critiqued films in terms of their "fakiness," which was to say, whether we had bought their suspensions of disbelief. This was in part our naive apprehension that guns appearing in the third act should be established in the first. Even escapist auteurs recognize this. Bond's gadgets are established before the mission, and the limits and capabilities of the Terminators are clearly defined by their pursuers before combat is fully joined. And Jackson recognizes this too, in the sampling of "Macbeth." We're carefully told that "no man can kill" the Evil Dude and that setup pays off on the point of the blonde's sword. But Gandalf just pulls stuff out of his ass, deus ex machina, like some hitherto undisclosed folding helicopter in Bond's wristwatch. "That part was fakey," the roundtables of my boyhood would have concluded sadly.

Speaking of that, onto the truly craptacular aspects of the trilogy. How about the tree men (wisely minimized in this episode) and especially the army of the dead? What a dead end that is. The mission is nicely set up, and the backstory is OK (the restless dead must redeem their honor) but when we meet the dead the effects are right out of Jason and the Argonauts circa 1962! And they get worse when the ectoplasmic dead take to the battlefield. It's like a fine restaurant serving spray cheese for dinner. What's up with that?

Andy Stilp | Eowynners vs. Losers

There should be no movie that requires more than one viewing, in my opinion, but this might explain the disconnect we have over the roots of the hobbit strain and the efficacy of Sean Astin as batman. The Lord of the Rings is a frenzy. Well, Crouching Tiger was a frenzy. The Lord of the Rings is an all-out Tolkien revolution. In the past three years, neophytes (dilettantes?) everywhere have re-watched these works, gone back to the source text and sat through 20 percent extended versions of the films, replete with tantalizing backstory. It's an investment that many people have made, and you're not wrong to have one-timed each film. A higher investment in these areas nets a greater satisfaction for Return's race to the finish, for sure.

You're definitely right on some points — I only tolerated Jackson's Army of the Dead because Tolkien's text gave it plenty more drama (not to mention logic, justification and so forth). Green goo is right. Why Aragorn let them off the hook before storming the Black Gate is beyond me. For Gandalf, it sure seemed that his wizarding were back-burner attributes, as strange as that may sound. His leadership and diplomacy are far more potent, so whether he can light a lantern to fend off Nazgul at one point and ignore them the next in lieu of some hack-and-slashing, it's not nearly as big an injustice as if he went from corporal to private to renegade. The batman debate, though, comes from Tolkien's own hand. Whether any one of us reads the Sam/Frodo relationship as a greater, lesser or twisted take on this is, like your investment in the fates of the hobbitses, eye-of-the-beholder jazz.

Let's open these new topics for debate:

The women: In the "Return of the King" text, the name "Arwen" is cited exactly six times. How and why she gets so much sexed-up screen time is beyond me. The trilogy didn't need to pander to that particular audience, I don't think, and the "linking of her life force" to the ring, which is Sauron's life force which … it confuses. Aside: Jackson and Co. originally had Arwen at Helm's Deep, too, for a while. Worked too hard to involve her. Eowyn, though, follows Tolkien almost to the page. The confrontation with the Witch King is straight from Tolkien. I'd say that no one claimed he bought women's lib, but this is a war movie, so beyond her moment in the sun, who cares?

The race issue: I don't think there's any racial subtext. The racial commentary is at all times in our faces. All this talk of men, dwarves, elves, hobbits, Ents, orcs, Uruk-hai, and so on — is there any question that race is at every juncture the key component of this strife? The Council of Elrond and the Entmoot speak directly to how overt the issue of race is. Tell me what you agree/disagree with. I'm curious.

David Essex | The Unbearable Whiteness of Ring

On a less lofty aesthetic note, a minor quibble. I was a little disappointed by the trilogy's dearth of babeage. I suppose it would really violate the sacred spirit of the novel to foreground a rounded female character, but there are mighty few films that aren't improved by a good actress hitting her stride. (This is something the Master and Commander people should have remembered; their source novel had Lucky Jack Aubrey getting lucky in every sense of the word.) Here we got Miranda Otto and Liv Tyler in soft focus and nearly comatose. They were like wax flowers, or lunchmeat under plastic. Very much the same thing as Natalie Portman in the Star Wars cartoons. What a waste! Lucas at one time had the good sense to let Carrie Fisher run around bra-less, and then to chain her up in a leather bikini, and also to give her something to do besides pine and whisper. In Return, I liked the Eowyn character, and hissed at the screen when Viggo didn't jump her (fool! idiot!) but I guess the future king knew (as did all the viewers) that he and Liv were as inevitable as Captain Kirk's survival. I was glad that Eowyn got to do something by way of compensation.

Regarding Smeagol/Gollum: Why is it the bad guys always steal the show? It's totally ironic that the CGI Smegol is by far the most complex, psychologically real and interesting character in the entire series. The ring is just abstract power/corruption until it ends up in his hands, where it becomes Self, or whatever is at the bottom of the addict's narcissistic pool. (He reminds me of Mena Suvari's crankhead character in Spun). Jackson was right to open Return with Smeagol's devolution. I found that the most powerful bit of film in the trilogy. I wondered where it came in the novels, but not why it was reserved for this moment in the film — Jackson wanted to grab us, and he did. The nightmare vision of Smeagol mutating from hobbit to vermin taps into something archetypal, something that's been taken up by Homer (the Circe effect) and Hogarth ("The Rake's Progress," "Gin Lane"). It did in a few minutes what Requiem for a Dream tried to do for several didactic, laborious hours.

Smeagol actually gets a character arc, too. I remember him from The Two Towers as a distinctly ambiguous character, apparently struggling in his divided nature, plotting and helping. It makes sense, that as Frodo gets closer to destruction of the ring in Return, Smeagol will go over to the dark side. I felt that; it carried over, in a way that no subjective sense of the other characters did. It feels entirely natural that the Iago-esque side of Smeagol should come out as they climb the stair, and this was nicely externalized.

This said, I was a little disappointed that Smeagol should also go over a precipice and yet somehow survive (insert M. Python voice: "I'm not dead yet!") to cause another little mini-climax later. I guess it had to be, but … why again?

As far as race is concerned, I suppose it's just that my left-leaning, race-traitorous side predominating in my Smeagol-esque nature, but I must admit that I've always been slightly bugged by the color scheme of The Lord of the Rings. The good guys are so outrageously white (Orlando Bloom!) and the bad so swarthy, black and/or simian. (At least Lucas had the good sense to put the stormtroopers in white.) I'm a little surprised that they didn't give Smeagol some gangsta tattoos, but they did dehumanize him, nicely preserving the Manichean "bad = other" metaphysics.

This is a pretty minor quibble (though I'm sure somebody, somewhere is getting a thesis out of the reactionary elements in The Lord of the Rings), but in each film there were moments when I was just embarrassed. It would pull me out of the story for a bit. The bad wizard in the first film was a hook-nosed, Semitic character right out of the Crusaders' demonology. And at some point there were some colossi towering over a lake that looked like Albert Speer's wet dream, completely with semi-erect Nazi arm-raise. And how about those archers on the giant elephants? Rather brown, if I recall correctly; no need to think about their snuffed hopes or grieving loved ones. Art imitates life, or is it the other way around?

Then again there's the grandiloquence of the whole, the aesthetic. Never mind the premise (we need a king); check out how huge everything is: the massed armies, the castles, the Southern Alps, the spider, the elephants, the stakes: Good versus Evildoers for God's sake, in a winner-take-eternity grudge match! A lot of Leni Riefenstahl moments in there, it seemed.

It probably would have offended purists, but mightn't it have been nice to cast perhaps some Maoris (long as we're in New Zealand) as one of these warrior tribes? Or how about this: The hobbits — peaceable diminutive people living in rural agrarian hamlets — caught up quite by accident in a war between global superpowers … why not put them in black pajamas and coolie hats, make them incredibly brave, cunning and resolute enough to have an outside chance against the dark superpower? Maybe give them some cool martial arts ….

Oh well. I know all too well why that will never fly. But it's the lack of such subversion that keeps The Lord of the Rings from being artistically triumphant. It's a great franchise; I hope some crumbs of its billions help some great art into existence.

Andy Stilp | Man 34%, Dwarf 19%, Orc or Uruk 16%, Elf 13%, Hobbit 6%

There's a piece cut out of the final print — or at least we can assume it was filmed, because it was in the book, and Jackson has footage like the pope's got prayers — where Eowyn gets brought down in pretty rough fashion. It's after the Fields of Pelennor, and I think it's Gandalf who softly tells her to open her eyes, that she's in search of a man of arms, a leader — not specifically Aragorn. He then turns her to Faramir and basically says, "Look! Look at Faramir. Isn't he an eligible man, a decent leader, a soldier?" She bucks up, takes him, and this is why the two are indescribably shown in a pair of two-shots during Ending #2 atop Minas Tirith. Now, to go from dragonslayer to some docile fawn, steered toward love by men who "know more" … wouldn't this have just about blown the top off? The consolation isn't great — her last big moment is slaying the Witch King, and those last two shots feel like non-sequiturs — but it at least avoids the disempowering of the most rogueish female in the story.

The woman I wanted more from was Cate Blanchett as Galadriel. Clearly, here we had an überfrau of epic proportions, and all she does is dot the narration from time to time. I know it is how it was (in Tolkien), but still. As a result, we're left whining about Arwen (reminder: six mentions in "Return of the King" text) and Eowyn, whose joust with the wraith is admittedly a severely corny moment.

Smeagol/Deagol: An ace move by Jackson to open with that sequence — it was originally earmarked for the scene in The Two Towers on the Dead Marshes where Frodo first trots out the "S" word and gets Gollum remembering his name. What bugged me, though, was how Smeagol took a plunge and then magically reappeared precisely when our protagonists needed no interference. One shot — one frame of him trailing from afar — could've built this better. The Gollum head slowly popping up behind Samwise was comic book. Video game. With viewer knowledge of his pursuit, anticipating the conflict at the end, that becomes good stuff.

Do you think Gollum turned out so well because there were so many cooks in the kitchen? A director coaches an actor, and his or her performance is informed by a very limited sphere of contacts. This CGI work was driven by conference rooms full of partial parents to it. Who from a legion of 20 programmers, directors and artists would have allowed the work of Gollum to escape as less than flawless?

I think our points fit together nicely on race. The capital-I issue is the recruitment of each race for one side or the other. The underlying issue, from a filmmaking slant, is that all the baddies are black. Not just black, but Black: huge, hulking, Afro-Am Uruk Hai, less hulking Black Orcs, and so on. To that end, the hunter baddie Faramir shoots off of the olyphant in Towers looks Hispanic, and Christopher Lee working in Isengard? L'shanah tovah, good man! Yeah, it would have been good to fit the Maori — or any minority — as one of these factions, but no.

What explains it? Tolkien? JRR was born in South Africa, but back in 1892, and was shuffled out of there at age 3. Is it Jackson? Well, New Zealand runs 75 percent Caucasian and 10 percent Maori. With his WETA workshop based among the Kiwi and crew and extras abounding, there wasn't a shortage of opportunities. I stick the issue with multiple parties; if Tolkien crisply described a hobbit from head to toe, which he essentially did, you can't sway from that, but you can update it. If your main hobbit is Elijah Wood, to build the culpability of a population and eventually stage this all-races-must-help-Aragorn proposition, all your hobbits have to look like Elijah in frump regalia. Rohan seems especially homogenous, particularly among the ruling class. But hell. The good guys gleam (re: Gandalf), the bad guys burn (re: Sauron), and it's not like Peter Jackson was flipping this notion on its ear in the horror genre in years prior. Heck, I thought it was a big risk to have an actor play Aragorn with such imperfect teeth.

Consider this, though — Gollum belongs to no race. He used to be hobbit-like, but the ring (as we noted) has winnowed him to bare essential skin and bones. The race issue we touched on before gets a capital I because Sauron's focus is on the world of man. Dwarves and elves are keen to this because once men are out of the way, Sauron will check the census data and track down the next largest subcell. Tolkien highlights this by trotting out Tom Bombadil, the balance of all existence, a raceless being owing no one but to himself, in the early parts of "Fellowship." He sings, he dances, he helps Sam and Frodo out. He's the Richard Simmons of Middle Earth, but importantly, he will be the last reed standing in the face of Sauron's army.

Except Gollum. The movie cut Tom, and so Gollum slides into that role, another (conveniently) raceless creature. In my eyes, this lays a fair share of irony on his pursuit of the ring, beyond what he might represent. In terms of what he is, he's Middle Earth's last hope and biggest threat, all at once.

David Essex | The eighth ending?

Let me just say, in retrospect, I know that the drama of the whole thing was considerably diminished for me, by my knowledge — I know not where from (general buzz, I guess) — that the mission would be accomplished and all the hobbits and principal characters would come out all right. And sure enough, like the crew of the Enterprise, only the peripheral (and the dusky) pay any price, and Good nonetheless triumphs. Kinda like America. So far.

E-mail David Essex at djessex@earthlink.net.

E-mail Andy Stilp at info at andystilp dot com.