48 LISTENER JUNE 8 2019
BOOKS&CULTURE
(Tea Club and Barrovian Society). Only
Tolkien and one other would later sur-
vive World War I. There’s also the love
story between Tolkien and Edith Bratt,
whom he met when they were teenage
residents in the same boarding house.
Banned by his guardian, Catholic
priest Father Francis Morgan, from
having anything to do with her until he
was of age, Tolkien
eventually persuaded
Bratt to marry him,
despite her already
being engaged to
someone else.
The movie shuffles
the chronology of the
real love story – Tolk-
ien and Bratt were
engaged before WWI
and married before he
was posted to France
in 1916. The movie
has them rekindling
their romance on a
station platform just
as he’s shipping out.A
s with Tolkien’s
most famous
books, the movie
starts at “Bag End”,
which was the name
of an aunt’s farm in
the West Midlands
countryside, an
inspiration for the
unspoilt idyll of the
Shire. Elsewhere,
it’s hard not to see
Tolkien’s linguistics
mentor at Oxford, Professor Joseph
Wright, played by Sir Derek Jacobi, as the
film’s own wise Gandalf.
“It was just beautiful to listen to him
deliver that dialogue,” says Hoult of his
scenes shot with the veteran actor at
the University of Oxford. “We were very
lucky to work with him.”
The Tolkien Estate, which has never
approved a Middle-earth movie and
occasionally sues rights holders when
they overstep the mark, put out a
statement in April saying it wasn’t
involved in, authorising or endorsing
the biopic. That was characterised
by media such as the Guardian as a
“broadside” against the film, though the
three sentences in the press release were,effectively, a position statement: please,
don’t call us.
Hoult notes that among the actors
playing troops in the WWI scenes is
one Callum Tolkien, a great-grandson
of the man himself. Neither Hoult,
nor the director, is worried by the
supposed snub. After all, they’ve made
a film that is reverent and skirts some
of his more difficult
characteristics,
such as his devout
Catholicism – Edith’s
forced conversion
before their marriage
goes unmentioned.
It also takes a leap
into fantasy when it
comes to depicting his
time on the Western
Front. The WWI
scenes come with
hallucinations of fire-
breathing monsters
and dark knights;
all part of a delirium
brought on by trench
fever, a condition that
curtailed his frontline
duties.
“I believe that
him seeing evil
and darkness is the
emotion he took from
war,” says Karukoski
of his creative
interpretation, hinting
at the monsters to
come in Middle-earth.
“I wanted to bring
that into this story.”
For Hoult, that meant spending some
of the shoot lying in a muddy water-
filled hole in no man’s land. “I think
that’s the lovely contrast of making this
movie – there were these wonderfully
written dialogue scenes where you get to
appreciate the relationships between the
characters. But you are torn out of that
occasionally into this horrific world of
WWI.
“You weren’t just sitting in nice tea
shops in historic costumes ... getting
thrown into a freezing cold puddle in
the bottom of a bomb crater is quite a
nice antidote.” lTolkien is in cinemas from June 6. To win a
double pass to the film, go to noted.co.nz/win/.The film skirts
Tolkien’s devout
Catholicism – Edith’s
forced conversionbefore their marriage
goes unmentioned.by RUSSELL BAILLIEA
s a documentary, Camino Skies is
following a well-trodden path.
Yes, it’s an affecting film about
six people, Kiwis and Aussies,
walking the Camino de Santiago
in northern Spain. Almost 300,000 do
so every year on what’s been a Christian
pilgrim route since the Middle Ages and,
since the 1990s, a tourist magnet. But it’s
also following in the footsteps of earlier films
about the 800km route. The 2010 drama
The Way, which starred Martin Sheen as a
grieving father completing his dead son’s
trek, opened a floodgate to a dozen or more
docos and features.
They’ve included films about an American
cellist hauling along his instrument to
play for fellow hikers (Strangers on Earth);
one about a wheelchair-bound guy and
supportive best pal (I’ll Push You); and
another about a deaf and blind German
determined to make the trek unassisted (The
World at Arm’s Length).
The various Camino films, with their
themes of the long walk being as much of
a spiritual undertaking as a physical one,
have become an art-house fixture, and it is
what encouraged co-directors and producers
Fergus Grady and Noel Smyth to make
Camino Skies. Grady, who has a background
as a sound recordist, saw the popularity of
earlier Camino titles distributed by a former
employer in Melbourne. That brought him
into contact with people running Facebook
groups devoted to the trek, and he also
met diminutive Aussie septuagenarian
Sue Morris, who had attempted the walk
of 40-plus days twice before and whose
third attempt in Camino Skies comes after
spinal surgery and a diagnosis of severe
degenerative arthritis.Heart-to-
heart walk
How Kiwi doco makers
put in some hard miles
on an Antipodean
pilgrimage along the
Camino de Santiago..
G
ET
TY
IM
AG
ES
JRR Tolkien in the 1940s.