Ask
any writer: the middle is a bitch.
Openings
are easy. Endings can be tricky, but as long as the hero gets the
girl and the bad guys get their due the details can be fixed in
editing or swept up with broad strokes; ultimately they all live happily
ever after. But the middle is a slog, the part where more good
stories with good characters can flounder and capsize. The trick to
staying afloat in the dreaded narrative median is to heap sufficient
conflict at your protagonists to keep them scrambling without
swamping them – and the audience. It's a delicate dance, an ulcer
in the undercarriage, a high-wire act over a pit of leprous
wolverines. But a second act well-handled can easily eclipse the
opening salvo of any trilogy - think The Empire Strikes Back,
The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 2.
The
Desolation of Smaug is Peter
Jackson's second shot at a middle story from Middle Earth; the first
was 2002's The Two Towers,
a film considered by many casual viewers and enthusiasts alike to be
superior to his freshman The Fellowship of the Ring
(I, myself, am hopelessly indecisive on the matter, unable after 10+
years to make up my mind one way or the other). Point being, it's a tough act to follow. After taking his
damned sweet time building up anything resembling momentum in An
Unexpected Journey, the
credulous Kiwi had the unenviable task of retaining that energy and
thickening the plot without running out of book. He's got one more
of these things coming out next year, remember.
I'm
pleased to say Mr. Jackson largely succeeded.
Smaug is a sharper,
smarter, more engrossing effort than AUJ,
though there is as much if not more 'Tolkien bloat' – those
snippets or whole sections that depart utterly from the novel – to
be found throughout. But the core story remains happily intact and
the embellishments only stray into outright excess once or twice.
One more pass in the editing room with a handful of people not so
close to the project would probably have helped keep the runtime down
(and spared a ruptured bladder or two). Through it all Jackson
manages to inject a sense of urgency and purpose largely missing from
the first Hobbit and
widen the scope of the conflict to include elves and humans, which,
in deference to our dwarf friends, is something of a relief.
Muttonchops, mouth-breathing and potbellies get a tad stale when it's
all you see.
The
Desolation of Smaug
covers what I GUESS could be considered the center cut of Tolkien's
trim novel, although anyone trying to follow along with the book may
be baffled by the pace: 40 minutes of screen time breezes over
something like four chapters while elsewhere a two-page transition is
lengthened into a huge, cornerstone action sequence. Jackson and his
writing team mine every paragraph for celluloid potential, sometimes
coming up short, more often finding points of interest we might have
otherwise glossed over. At best the bloat comes from tiny moments
only hinted at by Tolkien himself - little side yarns which Jackson seizes and gleefully
exaggerates. Gandalf's frequent holidays from the company, for
example, explained by Tolkien at the time as mere 'wizard
business' (which readers never see), has been extended into a meaty
subplot involving the return of the dark lord Sauron (that glowing
eye dick from the original trilogy) and a secret gathering of evil
forces in a ruined fortress. This is material assembled from Tolkien's voluminous appendices, a sort of
narrative cutting room floor where the good professor stored
everything that didn't make it into his manuscript. As such,
embellishments like these can sorta-kinda be considered canon and
purists may take heart that the story hasn't been utterly
bastardized.
 |
| I've almost got that eyelash... |
Alas, orthodox
Tolkienites might balk at some of the other 'new' material, even the
stuff that breathes fresh air into the tale. The elves have a
fleshier role thanks to the saw-it-a-mile-away appearance of Legolas
(Orlando Bloom, a bit thicker than a decade ago) and his fetching
she-elf companion Tauriel (Evangeline Lily), whose duties over killing scores of orcs with ridiculous ease include ramming
home the oft-repeated morals of the folly of negligence and the
interconnectedness of the world. While the elves' inclusion is a
perfect excuse to notch up the arrow-slinging action, it also
provides a prime example of the series starting – perhaps
inevitably – to repeat itself: three films or six, the same
profundities abound in Jackson's films; how and how often he chooses
to spoonfeed/shoehorn these profundities is a balancing act. Thankfully the elves aren't too overbearing, especially if
you're a dude: the camera happily feasts on Lily's leonine eyes and
alabaster pout while she reprimands Legolas with the shaming
rhetorical question “Are we not part of this world?”. I've been
preached to in worse ways.
Where
we do see some genuine script fatigue is in the contrived way the
filmmaker's tether Bloom and Lily – the only good ones in a forest
full of elf jerks – to the heroes for the rest of the
movie. Legolas joins the fight with hardly more to motivate him
than Tauriel's chiding, while Tauriel finds herself unable to resist
the mopey doe eyes of Fili, the dwarf played by the youngest,
handsomest actor who conveniently is the only one not wearing facial
prosthetics. These seem like rather brittle excuses for two immortal
warriors to turn their backs on centuries of obedience and the
elf-dwarf love connection, while amusing, contributes to a monstrous
slowdown in the third act. More on that in a minute.
And
what of poor Bilbo Baggins, the titular hobbit? Sadly the company's
burglar seems nearly lost amidst all the bravado and CGI. The
halfling's iconic moments of heroism – confronting the Mirkwood
spiders, ingeniously springing the dwarves from captivity, facing
Smaug – are all there but they feel phoned-in and rushed, eclipsed each time by something
bigger and flashier from Bloom's machine-gun archery to Benedict
Cumberbatch's gnashing, fetid voice as the treasure-hoarding dragon.
Even the One Ring itself upstages our hero – after a fashion –
when it appears to drive poor Bilbo into a murderous, spider-hacking
rage after briefly going AWOL from his finger. For all Jackson's
gushing on how The Hobbit
inspired him with Bilbo's uncomplicated courage and resourcefulness I
expected more patience when it came to the great Tolkien-esque
moments showcasing those virtues. Woe, then, that the “I come from over hill
and under hill” lines are hurried through without the flourish they
deserve. Thankfully Bilbo's Martin Freeman continues to delight
anyway; his abashed expressions and faux-dignified pantomime are so
gleefully British and perfectly awesome.
The
third act never truly stumbles but oh boy does it slow down, which
should be a ludicrous statement considering the third act includes a
dragon, an orc raid, and even a cameo by eye-hole Sauron (see what I
did there, saying 'eye-hole' instead of 'asshole'? I didn't ask for
this talent, folks – the gods delivered it to my front door). But
in this case, the faster the film tries to go the more it seems to
tangle itself. The problem stems from the prodigious number of plot
threads suddenly coming home to roost all at once. Jackson has to
keep so many plates spinning his only option seems to be extending
the action on each of them endlessly, sequence after sequence,
without devoting five uninterrupted minutes to resolving ANY of them.
I never would have thought the long-awaited
confrontation with Smaug could be described as 'tiresome', but when
stacked in the same pile as a Lake Town attack, a orc-versus-elf
throwdown, Gandalf's troubles, a poisoned Fili waxing poetic about
Tauriel, and reluctant hero Bard being tossed in the slammer by a
jealous politician (Stephen Fry, woo hoo!!), yes the damn dragon gets
a wee tiresome. The Lonely Mountain sequence goes on fully
five-to-seven minutes longer than it should and by the time that –
the largest of the many actions scenes – is finally resolved you've forgotten what had happened in several other plot
threads.
More
troubling, I'm seeing signs of Jackson and Company beginning to
self-mutilate. That is, the more story they tell the more they
undermine what they've already done, specifically in the original
Lord of the Rings trilogy.
You can refer to the Star Wars prequels
for virtually innumerable examples of this phenomenon, this poisoning
the mystery by drawing the curtain back too far. Gandalf's subplot,
while an excellent chance for the wizard to show off, concerns the
portents of Sauron's return and the horrors coming sixty years down
the road with the War of the Ring. His confrontation with a
proto-version of the Dark Lord as an oily, disembodied shadow is a
back-slapper of a moment for Gandalf fans who, as in his fight with
the Balrog, displays something closer to the demi-god level of power
he really possesses. Rich, velvety prequel material, to be sure. But the deeper
Gandalf probes the more your eyebrows tend to tent up in puzzlement:
the Gray Pilgrim seems to be uncovering enough of a poopstorm to keep
him plenty worried for the next sixty years...not dancing with
midgets at birthday parties and lighting fireworks, no? The subtlety
of Sauron's return, the image of the vile spirit as a meticulous schemer skulking in the shadows is all but banished here
in favor of a spell-slinging action blast-'em-up. It looks great,
but I couldn't help thinking 'If Gandalf went through all
this, how
on Earth could he be off-guard
at the beginning of LOTR?
“I
have terrible news! Sauron has returned!!”
“Um...we
know, dude...you threw down with him sixty years ago. Or did you
forget?”'
I
get that Jackson is trying...hell, is obligated
to top himself in every way possible. But the more you try to fill
in the gaps for the viewers the more you tend to stumble...and take
the audience with you when you go down. Despite all their
embellishments the Hobbit movies
have done a pretty good job of sticking with the core message, but
this plumbing of the ring mythology feels less like comfortable territory and more like caltrops on the road of
continuity.
Final
verdict? I'm a charitable sap, but when the credits do make their
(long-awaited) appearance what we're left with is ultimately a pretty
good film, middle chapter or otherwise - the delicate dance is done to satisfaction. The frenetic action matches
the hero's growing haste and desperation (even as certain sequences
go on too long) and the script has a good rhythm, wafting back and
forth between grim, playful, thrilling and thoughtful. At times
everyone seems to have too much to do, but that's the nature of any
second act – lots of balls in the air. Jackson is a master of the
over-the-top set piece and his timing with scenes both somber and
humorous is masterful. As a reader of the book it was a thrill
especially to see the barrel-riding sequence (even testosteroned to a
fare-thee-well) and Lake Town, here re-imagined as an frigid
Elizabethan labyrinth by way of Neil Gaiman. I enjoyed the fact
that, unlike in Lord of the Rings,
the greatest danger is not, in fact, the journey, but rather the
enormous, vengeful dragon at the end of that journey; you ain't just
tossin' a trinket into a hole this time, little hobbit. And as cliff-hangers go, this one was a doozy.
But
that sound you're hearing is Han Solo's carbonite-encrusted butt
reminding us that we only have to wait 'til next Christmas to see
this through to the end.
