Andy Capp

The Heavy Burden of Small Things

I really didn't know if anybody could make this work. Peter Jackson, the New Zealand director who had spent his early years giving us exploding sheep in *Bad Taste* and the raw adolescent pain of *Heavenly Creatures*, did not look like the obvious steward for J.R.R. Tolkien’s enormous myth. Then again, maybe that sideways career path is exactly why the film lands. You need someone comfortable in the mess to keep a fantasy this huge from floating away. Released in 2001, *The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring* is undeniably a giant logistical achievement. What keeps it alive, though, isn't the scale. It's the grime.



Jackson and cinematographer Andrew Lesnie make one smart choice after another with the look of the film. Middle-earth never feels polished up for tourists. It feels old, used, and inhabited. Swords are nicked. The hobbits' feet are always properly filthy. (They really did spend months pre-planting gardens in the Shire so the grass would look naturally overgrown once filming began.) Lesnie leans on natural light and wide lenses, and that gives even the most magical spaces a tactile weight. Rivendell doesn't arrive like some glossy digital postcard. It feels like an autumn refuge for a fading people who are simply tired. Xan Brooks over at The Guardian observed that the picture is "closer in spirit to an art-house film than a popcorn holiday romp," and he's entirely right.



The emotional center of the movie sits squarely in Ian McKellen's tired body. Around this time he was doing August Strindberg's *Dance of Death* on Broadway, tapping into a really corrosive strain of human weariness, and he brings that same exhaustion to Gandalf. Jackson reportedly told him to play the wizard not as a conjurer, but as an ancient being stuck inside an old man's failing frame. You can see that note all over the performance. In the quiet crossroads scene in the Mines of Moria, he lowers himself onto a rock like his bones hurt. His eyes cloud over. He admits to Frodo, with that small defeated breath, that he doesn't know the way. That's what makes the character hit so hard: the wisest figure in the story is still guessing.

Elijah Wood gives you the other side of the burden. He was only 18 when he moved to New Zealand for the brutal 16-month shoot, and he uses those enormous, searching eyes to show the ring getting its hooks into Frodo. Early on he moves with a spring in his step. By the time the company is struggling across Caradhras, his whole body has caved inward. He clutches at his chest. He avoids everyone else's gaze. It's an impressively physical picture of addiction taking shape in real time.



The Council of Elrond is still one of Jackson's best scenes because every bit of blocking does work. The camera circles men, elves, and dwarves as they argue, catching all those distrustful side glances. The ring sits on its pedestal in the middle, practically radiating menace with those guttural metallic whispers. The room swells into noise, and then Frodo gets to his feet. Jackson pushes in on Wood's face as he offers to carry the ring to Mordor, and the chaos just drops out. His voice barely lifts above a whisper: "Though... I do not know the way." It's heartbreaking because, in one line, all the swagger drains from the taller, louder people in the room.

Fantasy fan or not, the thing this movie understands is painfully familiar. It is about the lonely misery of doing what has to be done when everyone else is frightened. *The Fellowship of the Ring* doesn't finish on triumph. It finishes on a break: friends scattered, trust damaged, two very small people staring at a dead-looking landscape. What stays with me is how still that last image is. The film lets the uncertainty sit there.