Dimitra Fimi’s sympathetic review of the new ‘young Tolkien’ biopic feature-film has appeared in the latest TLS ($ paywalled). Fimi opens by picking up on some of the many factual errors, omissions and storytelling shortcuts, and notes that Tolkien’s Catholic faith is minimised in favour of making space instead for musings on the nature of language and Philology. Lucky Philology.

I read that one of his tutors at Oxford, the great Joseph Wright, appears and is played by Derek Jacobi no less. I’m sure Wright would have been tickled by that. I hope Jacobi did the correct accent rather than played it as Gandalf, and I assume he got the accent right. As for the other characters, Tolkien’s future wife Edith apparently becomes a sharp intellectual (she wasn’t) and his friend G.B. Smith is made out to be gay (he wasn’t, so far as I know).

As with several other expert reviewers of the film, Fimi concludes that it is best understood as being about a Tolkien-like character with many of the same interests, but not the real Tolkien. Regrettably this is now part of how popular culture works, and every well-loved and/or real character is taken and mutated into a changeling replacement.

Fimi ends the review by pointing out that the film does broadly get the emotional arcs about right, and it may thus be useful in nudging some of the more intelligent and sympathetic members of a new generation toward a deeper appreciation of Tolkien in his historical context…

It opens the door for many more potential readers and viewers to appreciate Tolkien us a writer of his time, shaped as much by his experiences and historical context, as by the literary tradition he knew so well as a scholar.

I’ll be interested in how well the film portrays Birmingham, Oxford and mid Staffordshire, but no review I’ve yet seen is from someone able to comment on the topographic and architectural aspects of the film-making.

I haven’t seen the film yet, and I’m not even sure it’s managed to wend its way to the cinema here in Stoke-on-Trent. I shall probably hold off seeing the DVD (extended cut?) until my book on the young Tolkien is out, so as not to risk any ‘skewing’. Apparently there’s another biopic on the same ‘young Tolkien’, which hasn’t yet been released. So this film is just the first of two.