Let's cut to the chase. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is an amazing achievement that succeeds on just about every level it's supposed to, and then some.
The grand finale of Peter Jackson's masterful adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's books is a 210-minute, total immersion experience that's apt to leave one feeling both exhilarated and emotionally exhausted. All in all, it's a deeply satisfying conclusion to a series that now seems all but assured of a place in cinema history as the War and Peace of fantasy-adventure movies.
Despite the Dungeons and Dragons trappings, The Return of the King is a surprisingly complex ride, rich enough to appeal to even the most resolute hobbit hater. The basic story continues to unfold as a hero's journey much in the Joseph Campbell tradition, complete with elements of exile, character-building and self-discovery through fiery trial and error. At its heart, however, this is an epic about absolute power corrupting absolutely, and Jackson's final installment brings that conundrum right to the surface. Return of the King is a work of mystical visions and vast, apocalyptic battles, but it's also filled with complicated emotions, divided loyalties and, most of all, a near-obsession with the duality of good and evil. Even those characters that at first glance appear to be clearly defined figures of good or evil are rarely quite what they seem.
The Middle-earth of Jackson's movie is a magical place inhabited by hobbits (good-natured, pint-sized, pointy-eared and furry-footed), elves (graceful and androgynously beautiful) and dwarves (feisty and squat), but it's also a world of shifting political alliances, conspiracies and the sort of deceit that would do a vintage film noir proud. It's not absolute Good and Evil that permeates the film's world but a moral relativism where even the strongest and most ethical of heroes fight a constant battle with their own weaknesses and baser instincts. The beauty of the story's concentration on the seductive power of the titular ring is that it showcases the fact that even the good guys here are corruptible, malleable, and as potentially dangerous as the bad guys are.
The Return of the King makes all of this more intriguing than ever, beginning with a brilliant opening sequence in which an idyllic fishing trip turns into a death match, as a pair of friends proceed to bash out each other's brains over ownership of the all-powerful ring. The survivor gradually transforms into that most conflicted and pitiable of creatures, Gollum, whose battles with himself reach epic (and Oscar-worthy) proportions in Return of the King.
Schizo Gollum is the most visible manifestation of the dualities in which the movie revels; however, mixed emotions, cruel but unavoidable compromises and uneasy alliances are everywhere you look. To recap: Brave but conflicted Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) is more torn than ever between the love of an elf and a human, while two key members of the movie's heroic Fellowship of the Rings, the elf Legolas and the dwarf Gimil, continue to feud along racial lines. A central plot point in Return of the King involves rival human kingdoms reluctantly uniting in order to defeat a common enemy, and, when all appears lost, a deal is even struck with the devil to call in the armies of the damned to save humankind's butts. And then there are the movie's central questers, Frodo and Sam (Elijah Wood and Sean Astin), forced to accept the necessary evil of Gollum in order to guide them back to the fires in which the ring was forged and where it must be destroyed.
What gives the characters (and the movie) resonance is that, despite their flaws, they remain undiminished. What allows us to sympathize with them is that they are always struggling to rise above their limitations. Their individual conflicts and dramas are all part of a vast, Wagnerian spectacle, complete with bodies burnt on lofty pyres, grand transformations and much talk of blood, essence, history and destiny. There are plenty of lighter moments too, crucial for leavening a dense and dark tone that sometimes borders on the oppressive.
The scale here is even more immense than that of the previous two installments, with an initial half-hour that is prelude (or, as one character puts it, "the deep breath before the plunge"), and the rest taking the form of the furious battle that is humanity's last stand. Great armies clash, civilizations emerge and vanish, and the end of the world is always just a shot away. Jackson and his visual team fill our eyes with astonishing images and, just when we think we've seen it all, come up with yet another show-stopper, like a rushing herd of elephant-like creatures, larger than the largest dinosaurs, squashing horses and their riders beneath their feet.
Most of this incredible imagery is computer-generated, of course, but perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Return of the King, as with the other films in the trilogy, is that all the high-tech shenanigans are always at the service of a story that never loses sight of its humanity. Beyond that, even in the midst of all the eye-popping CGI vistas and special effects, Return of the King actually comes off as oddly old-fashioned, in the best sense of the term. At root, it's an old school Hollywood extravaganza, a lavish Cecile B. DeMille razzmatazz tempered with the storytelling chops of D.W. Griffith in his prime. If you don't believe me, just check out the film's final struggles, dovetailing stories with a sustained, white-hot intensity propelled by ingenious editing that can be traced directly to what Griffith invented nearly a century ago in films like Birth of a Nation.
Even Old Hollywood was rarely this chaste, though, and when the movie ends with a prayer for peace and a call to rebuild the world (uttered in some mythical lingo that sounds a lot like Esperanto), one wonders where all the babies are going to come from. Frankly, almost no one in Middle Earth seems too interested in sex, from Ian McKellen's whiter-than-white wizard, to Orlando Bloom and those other too-pretty-for-their-own-good, self-fertilizing elves, to those perky little hobbits themselves — a roly-poly crew with all the erotic magnetism of court eunuchs.
And yet, Jackson keeps us watching, with nary a naked body in sight or even the remotest prospect of a little rubbing of the flesh. It can (and will) be argued that the movie's too long and contains at least one or two endings too many, but there's a lovely symmetry to the film's structure that ties together the entire trilogy with grace and humor. And frankly, I for one can't wait to see the even longer cut on DVD next year.
In any event, one of those two-endings-too-many is basically just an extended group hug for the characters, followed by a wedding. The wedding ends with a kiss, and even though it's not the ending that Jackson chose to end his movie, it might as well have been. The Return of the King is a marvelous way to end Jackson's opus, and it's that rare movie that sends us out of the theater feeling as though we're the ones who've been kissed.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Dec 18-24, 2003.