The only time he really slows down to do something special of his own is when Elrond warns Arwen what will become of her life if she marries Aragorn: the color almost leaves the scene and Jackson pulls back slowly from a stone bier wearing Aragorn’s death effigy. It’s nearly a black-and-white still and it’s the most memorable shot in Two Towers. It’s appropriate.
PW: Okay, I can see where you’re coming from vis-a-vis the galloping cavalry cavalcade. I don’t agree, necessarily—each charge was, to my eye, distinctive enough to stand out from the others—but, yes. There’s only so many ways to make huge honking hordes of horses look different.
What I don’t understand is your claim that Jackson let us down—or more precisely, with the way you tied this to the death of the Old Ways. Your underlying premise seems to be that modern film is best served by using techniques from a bygone era. Even if I accept that at face value (although I’d like to see you make the same arguments in other fields—medicine, for example), don’t your own examples show that Jackson is giving the past its due? Don’t his “almost monochromatic” treatment of various locales tip their hat to the silent masters? What am I missing here?
In fact, Tolkein’s text was not nearly the straitjacket you seem to think. That evocative scene at Aragorn’s grave never happened in the main text. Jackson pulled it out of one of Tolkein’s appendices, and polished a couple of throwaway paragraphs into the little gem you see on screen. Aragorn’s inner conflict, his reluctance to assume the mantle of leadership? Not Tolkein. 100% Walsh, Boyens, and Jackson.
The film abandons major episodes from the books. It shuffles written timelines without mercy. Characters are merged and split, motivations and attributes retooled. I would quibble with some of these changes—I have, above—but overall I’d say that Jackson improved on the original. Yes, there were problems with Tolkein’s text; but Jackson was too good a director to let them interfere with the story. And while the films have their failings, I cannot describe them as flaws in direction.
I’d agree wholeheartedly that Arwen’s graveyard watch was memorable, but I found equally memorable shots throughout all three films. The swooping camera work that started off The Two Towers, taking us smoothly from the stratosphere into the very heart of the Misty Mountains. The Balrog in free-fall. Gollum and Smeagol, arguing. Pippin serenading Denethor while Minas Tirith’s troops ride to their deaths. I’ve already mentioned the lighting of the beacons. I could go on (I usually do). I honestly don’t understand what makes any of these scenes less accomplished than Arwen’s quiet despair at Aragorn’s graveside.
Of course, I’m no expert, no formal student of film history. I didn’t even know that Kubrick had intended a 4-million-year montage between bone and bomb, which is especially embarrassing since 2001 remains one of my all-time favorite films. But presumably the Director’s Guild of America does have some level of expertise in these matters, and they just handed Jackson this year’s award for Best Director. That’s gotta be good for something.
SM: I hear leeches have made a comeback in medicine.
What you call the “Old Ways” of cinema, of interest only to bean counters, misstates my underlying premise, which has less to do with some nameless bygone era than with the everlasting value of rhetoric. When you say it’s the goal that matters, i.e., the content, and not the tools used to achieve its evocation, you might as well say a building can stand without reliance on girders or stone foundations: it’s all just floors and windows, the parts we actually pay attention to. In other words, we’re somehow expected to read a book or watch a film strictly for its manifest content, while treating the rhetorical method as irrelevant or, at best, transparent. Strunk and White have for years celebrated a see-through prose style that only bureaucrats actually write in. There’s not a writer in the Western Canon whose prose style does not in fact leap off the page and sing. Must we now claim to see films with no regard to images, no regard to texture or composition — the very things that make images into images — just as if there somehow exists, underneath the images, a true and verifiable content independent of them? My good man, that way madness lies! Next you’ll say good style is like good breeding: it never draws attention to itself. But you don’t write that way, and I don’t write that way, and neither did Mr. Hemingway. You would be hard-pressed as well to find any film in what’s becoming a global canon of cinema that anyone lauds for being stylistically sedate. In fact, insistence on the transparent style is one of the great hypocrisies of our age: no one actually works in it but everyone cheers on the notion just as if it were legitimate, and not merely a salve for mediocrity. But I digress.
Look. I liked watching this movie. I could see in every frame not only that Jackson is a hell of a talented man, not only that he is also just plain bright enough to want to get the look and feel of the story absolutely nailed down in terms of color desaturation and monochromatic tinting — wanting those things as much as Kubrick wanted space to be silent and without gravity — but also the kind of filmmaker who could have done more of what he had it in himself to do, if he didn’t also have to answer to the fans of Tolkein, of whom Jackson is one himself. I started this off by saying that, alas, Jackson is not our current Kubrick, but I never would have made the comparison if I hadn’t instinctively felt he belonged at the same table, or will one day. He is really good and tried very hard to do something almost impossible to do.
I still take issue with his camera work. Too much of it is Modern Slapdash, a style much in vogue at MTV (if they’re still around) but pioneered by Robert Altman (who is still around). Altman realized a long time ago, when everyone worked with a zoom lens strapped on the camera, that if you just kept zooming in or out you could cut from any zoom shot to any other kind of shot, without regard to composition, movement or distance from the subject. It forgives so much. Now we know that if you just keep moving the camera — spin it, keep swooping up or down, keep throwing or dropkicking it over the barn — you can cut from any shot to any other. It’s given us The Big Scribble, in which there is no consistent IDEA behind the lens, no EYE, like a writer with no voice. Jackson’s camera does everything, and runs the risk of doing nothing. And whether or not you’re a film student is immateriaclass="underline" you are affected by these things. You can’t not be affected by rhetorical devices, good or bad, written or filmed.
PW: I’m a huge fan of style. It surprises me that you’d interpret my argument as a dismissal of style, whether cinematic or literary. In fact, I’ve always resented those “transparent” writers who (stylistically speaking) couldn’t write their way out of a fortune cookie, while at the same time racking up sales figures orders of magnitude greater than anything I’ve ever achieved.
My view is not that cinema—or any other form of art—should be bereft of style. My view is that Peter Jackson’s Rings trilogy has style to burn, whether or not it meets the stylistic conventions of bygone days (or even present days, for that matter). I judge the work on its own terms, not Fritz Lang’s, and I don’t find it scribbly or unfocused. I find it downright moving in places, so much so that I expect to get the same lumps in my throat when I go to see Return of the King for the eighth time as I did the other seven.