Peter Jackson returns to Middle-earth with a children’s book stretched across 169 minutes, and the strain shows. Martin Freeman is a near-perfect Bilbo and the riddle game in the dark is a small marvel; much of what lies between is handsome, noisy and far too long.
Nine years after The Return of the King, Peter Jackson goes back to Middle-earth for J. R. R. Tolkien’s slimmest book and makes the first of three films from it. This one runs 169 minutes and covers roughly the first third of a story that fits comfortably in a coat pocket. The odd result is that the best of it is the slowest: a long evening at Bag End with a flustered host and too many guests. Once the company sets out, the film gets bigger and louder and worse, with one exception we will come to.
Martin Freeman is the reason to see it. His Bilbo is a man who has arranged his life so that nothing happens in it, and Freeman plays the arrival of thirteen dwarves as an assault on the crockery. He counts plates, rescues a doily, watches his pantry emptied and mouths small objections nobody hears. It is very funny and it is exact. Ian McKellen slips back into Gandalf as if he had never taken the hat off. Richard Armitage gives Thorin a brooding, wronged dignity that the script keeps confirming with speeches. Ken Stott is warm as Balin, James Nesbitt’s Bofur gets the jokes, and the other dwarves are largely a matter of hats.
The craft is what you would expect from these people. Dan Hennah’s Bag End is all round doors, low beams and honey-coloured wood, a home you could draw from memory after one visit. Andrew Lesnie shoots the Shire green under a low sun and the road east in grey and rock. Howard Shore brings back his old themes and adds a low, slow dwarf song that is the film’s one new tune worth humming. Jabez Olssen has cut it as though every scene had been told to run long enough to justify the trilogy, and most of them obey.
We saw it as many cinemas showed it, at a doubled frame rate in 3D, and we did not like it. Motion smooths out, the image sharpens, and sets start to look like sets and costumes like costumes. The Shire, which in 2001 looked like a place, here looks like a very good exhibition about a place. At home, at the ordinary frame rate, this problem disappears and the film looks like its predecessors again, which is a point in favour of the sofa.
Then there is the action, of which there is a great deal. Three trolls (Peter Hambleton doubles as William Troll) argue about cooking, and the scene has the book’s shape and some of its comedy. Sylvester McCoy’s Radagast the Brown arrives on a sled pulled by rabbits, with birds nesting under his hat, and we winced. The goblin town, ruled by Barry Humphries’s Great Goblin, is a long tumble through wooden walkways in which dwarves fall hundreds of feet onto rock and stand up, and here we were bored, and then irritated at being bored by something that plainly cost so much. Nothing in it has weight. When nobody can be hurt, the noise is just noise.
And then, deep in the second half, the film stops running and starts to think. There is a stretch in which Bilbo is on his own with a single creature and nothing to fight with but his wits, and Andy Serkis makes that creature pitiable and lethal by turns, sometimes within a line, while Freeman answers him with a terrified politeness that is exactly right. For ten minutes there are two figures, some water and a light, and the film is better than anything around it. We were gripped in a way the stone giants and the wolf-riders never managed. It is also the only stretch in which Bilbo has to be clever rather than lucky.
The Fellowship of the Ring had the same shape, home, road, a night in the mines, and got through it in less time with a great deal more at stake. Jackson knows this journey; what he has lost is the sense that it has to move. The 12A is fair, and the children around us were happy enough throughout. If you are ten, or you own the extended editions, this is for you. Everyone else should bring a cushion and know that the mountain is still a long way off when the lights come up.
