The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

So another December has come bearing with it another Peter Jackson adaptation of a J.R.R. Tolkien story.  With each passing movie, my enjoyment has declined to the point where I decided that I would make the effort to see the second The Hobbit adaptation, The Hobbit:  The Desolation of Smaug more out of a morbid curiosity to see how I would react this time to the sundry changes than out of any real expectation that what I would view would be engaging entertainment.  With such expectations, it is hard to be disappointed, as the critic then is, if not suspending her judgments, involved more in a meta-evaluation than a full-scale critique of the film at hand. 

This is, of course, merely a long-winded way of saying that some films provide exactly what they promise, dammit if viewers would have liked something more from it.  Before commencing with this review, I re-read my 2012 review of the first film and found myself thinking that I could copy/paste almost the entirety of that review here, changing only the title and specific details and it would encapsulate well what I thought of the second installment.

As I said in that earlier review, I am no "purist"; I understand that cinema and novels are very different storytelling forms and that there are things that have to be adjusted to fit the medium in question.  That being said, the questionable alterations that Jackson did in order to split the story in three (presumably in order to spend more time on the Gandalf/Necromancer side-plot) bear their dreadful fruit here.  For those who favor a tauter narrative less filled with repetitive scenes, The Hobbit:  The Desolation of Smaug is not the movie for you.  Now onto an exploration of some of the issues I had with it (filled of course, with those ever-so-dreadful "spoilers" that some drone on about for some reason or another.)

The film begins roughly a day or two after the final events of the first installment.  While Beorn does make an appearance here (and Jackson provides a great visual of his home that suits the descriptions found in the book), his entire history and his interactions with the war party are so haphazardly presented that one might question, if it were not for the fact that the dwarves needed ponies for a little while, why this scene appeared here if it to be so sketchily presented.  But mercifully, the scene quickly shifts to Mirkwood and the visceral horrors of that place are well-rendered.

But even here there are issues with the narrative.  Jackson's Bilbo does not get that moment of character development present in the book when he fights the spiders.  Instead, this scene devolves into a more generic action-adventure scene with dizzying spirals of action as the dwarfs, hobbit, and then some elves dance hither and fro slashing at and filling their enemies full of arrows and pointy objects.  There is nothing outright "bad," per se, about having such depicted in detail (conceding of course that this alters the themes of the source material), but there is really nothing spectacular here.  In thinking back to this scene and to subsequent fighting scenes (and there are a lot of fighting scenes, since one cannot keep a good orc down, it seems), I found myself thinking of two movie trailers that appeared before the opening scene, Seventh Son and the 300 sequel.  In those trailers and here in Jackson's film, the cinematography is very similar.  The camera moves in such a vertiginous fashion that it is difficult to keep the eye focused on the movements.  The grim-faced characters, speaking with voices reminiscent of 300's King Leonidas yelling "Sparta!", back-handing foes and having evil beasts roaring in their faces – all of this runs together into a prosaic, forgettable mash-up of action at the expense of any real storytelling.  Yet for many who "like this sort of stuff," these action scenes, which comprise at least 1/3 of the film's nearly three hours, will be appealing to them (as it was for my dad, who has never read the Tolkien books).

Other additions are a bit more tedious.  While the latest elf-maiden stand-in wasn't as incongruous as the Arwen character in the LotR films, the story becomes bogged down in its own need to justify its length around the point of the elvish appearance.  Instead of a simpler means of explaining the dwarfs' escape, Jackson feels the need to provide drama in the form of extraneous attacks (and lots of fighting, some of which, like the running across the heads of some of the fighters, was ridiculous to behold).  This does not add tension to the narrative as much as it drags out the scenes, making the flight-then-fight sequences feel redundant, as if the characters were trapped in some sort of Middle-Earth Groundhog Day.  Add to that a half-developed political conflict interlude in Lake Town and the entire affair just feels bloated in order to justify earlier bloatedness.

The Gandalf scenes, left undescribed in the book, also suffers from this bloating, not so much in the scenes themselves, but in the lack of development in contrast to the too-long time devoted to going from the elvish halls to the Lonely Mountain of Erebor.  While some of the scenes in this sub-plot are well-rendered, there is a discernible lack of connection with the greater narrative, something that perhaps could have been redressed by judicious edits in the larger plot coupled with perhaps a furthering of Gandalf's narrative.  As it stands, however, his scenes feel superfluous and they too add to the sense that Jackson has delayed overlong in having the war party reach Smaug's lair.

The final hour or so of the film is pretty much non-stop action, which again will appeal to some, but for others such as myself, will be another tedious exercise in repetitive fighting.  Smaug's initial scene with Bilbo is well-done, but Jackson's choice of having the dwarfs emerge to fight the dragon leads merely to a series of capers that quickly becomes dull.  There is nothing that occurs here that justifies over 45 minutes of movements and dumping of copious amounts of ore and molten metal ad nauseam.  Even if only 20 minutes (I would have preferred less than 10) were devoted to this fight, it might have been bearable, but near the end, I began to lose focus as I kept wondering, "when will this damn thing ever end?"  Finally, it does, with a series of (expected) cliffhangers that remain to be resolved in a year's time.

The Hobbit:  The Desolation of Smaug is not the sort of movie that I ever would enjoy.  If it weren't for the fact that I loved the book when I was 12 in early 1987, I wouldn't have considered watching it, knowing that it would be chock-full of the sorts of generic action/adventure scenes that I have come to loathe.  For this cinematic genre, however, it is decent, albeit not the sort of plot one should lose any sleep over considering its cohesiveness (or lack thereof).  But it certainly is a film that reveals in painful detail just why so many people questioned the need to have a 300 page book split into three movies that will cover nearly a combined nine hours.  A thoroughly mediocre production that illustrates well the declining abilities of its producer.

The Great Gatsby (1974 film)

Cinema is a very different medium from literature, no matter how frequently and how in-depth directors appropriate literary works in creating their cinematic adaptations.  Often films labeled "based on the novel" are wretched, turgid affairs not because the directors fail to be faithful enough to the source material but instead because they are too faithful, at least to the letter of the story and not to its spirit.  This is especially notable when the source material is a classic that has the mass readership comparable to F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby.  In the 88 years since its release, four cinema versions (only three are extant - 1949, 1974, 2013 - with the 1926 silent film version being mostly "lost") and one television mini-series (2000) have been released.  Of these adaptations, I have seen the 1974 and 2013 versions and over the course of two reviews, I plan on noting the ways that both approach Fitzgerald's novel and the strengths and weaknesses of each.

The 1974 version certainly had some major starpower.  With a screenplay written by Francis Ford Coppola, this film also featured Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan.  With a running time of just over 2 hours and 20 minutes, the film was very faithful to the scenes and dialogue of the novel.  If anything, it tried too hard to replicate the voice of the novel, instead creating a cinematic experience that is often cold and distant from the vibrancy of Fitzgerald's tale.  The only two characters who stand out are Nick Carraway (Sam Waterston) and George Wilson (Scott Wilson); each of them figures more significantly into the action here than in the 2013 edition.  The rest of the roles are competently if not brilliantly executed by others including Bruce Dern (who played Tom Buchanan) and Lois Chiles (Jordan Baker).

The action mirrors the novel closely; there are very few scenes that do not at least quote parts of the corresponding novel.  At times, the movie feels as though it is close to becoming vibrant and emotional, only to see those traces of livelihood stamped down almost immediately.  Redford, based on his other films of the 1970s, could have displayed a wider range with Gatsby, but instead (possibly directed to do so by director Jack Clayton) his Gatsby is too formal, too polished, too devoid of inner anguish to really engage the viewer.  Likewise, Farrow's Daisy is an odd character.  While her Daisy at least attempts to speak with a posh Southern accent, there were several instances where Farrow's Daisy oscillates between capricious love and diffident materialism.  While this oscillation certainly jibes more with the original novel than how the character was portrayed in the 2013 version, it is too jarring here.  Perhaps the point is that Daisy's vapidness is what makes her character so attractive to some, but Farrow too often overplays it.  Her scenes with Redford feel cold and the emotional lines uttered by both feel as natural as if a Wookie were to start emoting Hamlet.

Yet there are some interesting moments in this film.  Early scenes with Myrtle Wilson and the McKees in the NYC apartment as well as the first seen party at Gatsby's mansion reveal a more nuanced approach toward the flappers and their rebellion against social mores than does the 2013 version.  Here, there is not the emphasis on spectacle that the recently-released adaptation has, but instead in their dances and in their comments, the young women, major and bit players alike, are not as sexualized here.  Although there certainly are hints of dalliances taking place in this film, the women here are allowed to be slightly more well-rounded than they are in the current release.  Chiles' Jordan Baker more openly displays her amorality compared to Elizabeth Debicki's portrayal, as her interpretation of the character is more subtle and yet clear in terms of her refusal to be constricted by rules and regulations.  As noted above, Farrow's Daisy displays a wider range (albeit a range that sometimes works against the best interests of key scenes) and she is not as apparently besotted with Gatsby as was Carey Mulligan's interpretation of the character.  The same goes for Karen Black and how her Myrtle Wilson captured more of the class consciousness of the novel than Isla Fisher's more sex-centered portrayal.

Waterston's Nick carefully walks the line between being a keen observer and a callow pushover.  His Nick is perhaps slightly better than Tobey Maguire's simply because Nick plays a more integral part in the 1974 film.  Yet due to his co-stars' failures to capture the mixture of burning passion and callousness that was present in the novel, Nick's more memorable lines do not succeed in capturing the depths of his emotional confusion and outrage.  The only character that truly does so is George Wilson.  Scott Wilson's interpretation captures a man whose simple honesty stands in sharp relief to the capricious games that the Buchanans, Jordan, and others play over the course of the film.  His descent into murderous grief is very believable here because more effort is made to show his inner conflicts.

At nearly two and a half hours, this film felt at times interminable due to the subpar acting performances and focus on showing the glamor of the 1922 Long Island setting at the expense of developing the characters better.  Yet the film suffers not only because it is compared to a great novel, but because its own promise was thwarted time and time again by Clayton's choice to emphasize the exterior at the expense of the characters themselves.  With few exceptions, the characterizations show glints of greatness that are covered with a thick grime of affected poses and perfunctory nods toward character conflict.  This 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby captures the skeleton and most of the skin of the novel, but its heart and soul are withered in comparison.  Not recommended for most viewers.