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A Review of The Two Towers

A Joy Forever
by Marian Kester Coombs
Human Events, January 13, 2003

he Two Towers should be viewed not as a separate movie or typical sequel but as the "To be continued" of a single cultural event whose opening salvo was The Fellowship of the Ring. Peter Jackson's decision to shoot all three volumes of J.R.R. Tolkien's Ring cycle as one mega-film has preserved the unity of the composed-through book. It's also a treat to watch the actors perform in blissful unawareness that they are about to become superstars, in perfect ignorance of the tidal wave of adoration and obsession that will be set off by The Fellowship.

At this stage in the fortunes of the West, we are thankful such a project is undertaken at all, much less done well. That it has in fact been done beautifully, brilliantly and inspirationally should bring us to our knees. When word got round that Mr. Jackson would direct the trilogy and Howard Shore would compose the score, those familiar with their extensive work in the "splatter" genre groaned more than a little. But if these two hardened purveyors of sick zombie flicks are still capable of creating such beauty, maybe all of us are. At least that is the flame of hope fanned by their Lord of the Rings.

Art is by definition beautiful or it is not art (although this is still disputed in artless circles). Beauty takes many forms in The Two Towers — faces, costumes, sets and structures, weapons, horses, landscapes, languages, music, dialogue, the reversed-Quest plot itself. The beauty is juxtaposed at every turn with horror, lest Middle-earth prove as boring as Milton's Paradise. "A bunch of Kiwis making a very English film with American money" is Peter Jackson's summa of the project; yet four of the most beautiful faces in the film are American -- Sean Astin's Sam, Elijah Wood's Frodo, Liv Tyler's Arwen and Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn.

New Zealand and Australia continue their fine job of populating the screen with virile males and incandescent females, while Great Britain maintains her age-old mastery of the actor's craft. In The Fellowship, Sean Bean brought Othello, Macbeth and Hamlet to the role of Boromir; in Two Towers, Bernard Hill is Lear, Henry V and Julius Caesar as the beleaguered King Theoden of Rohan, lord of the Riddermark. The film mingles Celtic and Germanic in its visual, architectural and musical style just as the script mingles Shakespeare and Nordic saga; both Tolkien and the filmmakers were after "distillate of Europe," a fugitive vision both many and one.

Howard Shore got an Oscar for last year's installment of the score. This year's is just as emotionally effective, full of new leitmotivs, such as a wild Celtic fiddle tune rising plangent above the plains of Rohan as one of its forlorn banners is torn loose by the wind, and new orchestrations of previous motivs, such as a transformation of the Elves' keening, Asiatic lament for Gandalf into a steely, drumming march as the Elf column arrives at Helm's Deep to "honor their alliance" with men. Mr. Shore has called his score an opera, but it is more a choral symphony for our time, one that will be enjoyed in concert for years to come.

The Two Towers is one great scene after another -- how does one speak fairer of any film? It's a lads' movie with plenty for the ladies as well. But none of that blind-rage head-banging so common to the "action" genre: Middle-earth's warriors behave with restraint, and ceremoniously beg each other's pardon. "Reckless hate," as the dazed Theoden puts it, is all on the side of Sauron. Middle-earth fights only because the fight is forced on them by the infinite power grab of Mordor.

The sneer of "action movie" is only one dart that's been aimed at the film. Some academics profess horror at the vulgarization of a literary masterwork; yet a reading of Tolkien finds not belles lettres but a thumping great story, told in plain Anglo-Saxon just as Orwell recommended in "Politics and the English Language." More bizarre, whereas last year a battered West embraced the Two Towers as symbolic replicas of the lost Twin Towers, this year a World Trade Center survivors' association accused Jackson and company of maliciously naming the film for the disaster. How thin the line twixt prophecy and provocation!

A thing of beauty is a joy forever. Great works of art live many times before their deaths. Reincarnated on film at the dawn of the 21st century, The Two Towers openly celebrates beauty and nobility even though to do so is to make that most appalling of gaffes, a value judgment.