the case for Jackson's Faramir
Feb. 23rd, 2003 10:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyWent to see That Movie again last night. Have gone insane and will now defend Jackson's most outrageous and indefensible alteration of the original. (Sorry, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
papersky and jess79. The cut tag is for you.)
[ETA: a caveat
My rhetoric in making this argument outstripped my actual feelings. I really like book-Faramir; he's a good person, and it is a relief to find somebody in Gondor with their head on straight. When I said I find Faramir uninteresting in the book, I think I was speaking a little more from a writer-type perspective than I realized at the time. Book-Faramir is static; he gets wounded and grieves and all the rest of it, but at the end of RotK he's still very much the same person he was when Frodo and Sam meet him in TTT. So no matter how wonderful a character he is, there's this level for me on which he's just boring. This is not the only level on which to think about Faramir, and I apologize for framing my argument as if it were. Mea maxima culpa. So the thing that won me over to Jackson's version is the fact that he's clearly dynamic. That's what I love.]
But first, a confession. Faramir in the books is a character whom I like, because he's noble, honorable, loyal, good, handsome, etc. ("this grave young man, whose words seemed so wise and fair" (TTT 280)), but find fundamentally uninteresting--because he's noble, honorable, loyal, good, handsome, etc. I always feel like poor Eowyn is ending up with the consolation prize: no, you can't marry the heroic King of Gondor, but here! you can have the almost-as-heroic Prince of Ithilien instead, and he'll be loving and thoughtful and never complain when you cry out Aragorn's name in bed. Faramir is Perfect and (faithful readers of this LJ can sing along here) therefore boring.
Somebody else points out somewhere (and, mea culpa, I'm sorry that I can't remember who you are or where I read your insightful point) that Faramir's behavior in the books is actually rather, er, convenient for Frodo and Sam. He shelters them, feeds them, gives them advice and provisions, and--oh yes--validates their courage and nobility and the rightness of their actions. He's a deus ex machina, who further provides the useful plot point of alienating Gollum from Frodo again. He's not a character; he's a cardboard cutout labeled Good Guy.
And that pretty much sums him up for The Return of the King as well. The most interesting things that happen to Faramir all happen while he's out of his head with fever. And the "love story" between Eowyn and Faramir is beautifully written and elegiac and talks very movingly about recovering (or not) from the influence of the Nazgul--as later passages about Frodo will also do--but Tolkien fundamentally was not interested in exploring relationships between men and women, and that lack of interest shows. "The Steward and the King" tidies Eowyn away nicely and gives Faramir a bride, but it's not even as convincing or moving a love story as "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen" in Appendix A (RotK 337-44).
So Tolkien's Faramir can be pigeonholed neatly as Not Boromir and left alone.
Whatever you can say about Jackson's Faramir, that ain't it.
Yes, the Osgiliath thing is weird. I don't know if it's a mistake or not (RotK will tell for sure), but I'm not denying it's a weird choice. (Although I adore unreservedly the way in which Faramir gets the truth out of Gollum--furthering the development of Gollum's dyadic personality--instead of the lame-ass way Sam blurts it out in the book.) However, at this point, Jackson is telling a story which is different from Tolkien's in some small but crucial ways, principally the effect of the Ring. Tolkien is subtle, and he has interiority to work with; the hold the Ring gains over Frodo gathers very slowly in the books, and its effect on other people even more so. Jackson makes what I think is a very wise decision and plays up the effect of the Ring from the moment the first movie starts. So that by the time we get to Faramir, we've seen Boromir driven crazy, we've seen Aragorn sorely tempted, Gandalf frightened, Galadriel gone postal, Frodo himself getting creepier by the minute (and I know I've mentioned before how much Elijah Wood impresses me in TTT, but I need to say it again: I am totally blown away by his performance) ... so that the book-Faramir's reaction, "I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway" (TTT 280), would leave us all going, like, so who died and made you Captain America? It's simply not realistic for Faramir to remain utterly untempted by this thing that everybody else in the freaking story is jonesing for. (Actually, *ahem*, that goes for the books, too.)
So Jackson's playing fair; by the rules of the narrative he's set up, the Ring has to affect Faramir just like everybody else. He's not holding a Get Out of Jail Free card. And, yet (and this is where I think Jackson hasn't lost his marbles or traduced the material), notice that Faramir doesn't want the Ring for himself. He's intent on taking it back to Dear Old Dad, which is (a.) consistent with Boromir's remarks about his father to Aragorn in Lothlorien, (b.) consistent with Faramir's Daddy Issues in the book (his only hint of genuine characterization), and (c.) beautiful set-up for Denethor's entrance in RotK.
Jackson's Faramir is also, quite realistically, a harried commander with too many things to think about at once. I was quite struck, this viewing, by how every single time he tries to stop and talk to the hobbits, there's that damn minion nattering on about Osgiliath again. This Faramir may not have his head on straight, but that's partly because he never gets a chance to think things through. And his grief for his brother is, again v. realistically, shot through with anger, so that the fact that he's making bad decisions arises entirely plausibly from the situation he's in.
I further think that Faramir's partial succumbing to the Ring makes his renunciation of it all the more powerful. There's really something at stake for him in Osgiliath when he decides to let Frodo and Sam go; he's felt the Ring's power, and he's seen what it can do. And the repercussions are literally breathing down his neck, in the shape of that same obsessive little minion. Tolkien's Faramir has an air of simply putting aside all these trivial matters because he knows what the Right Thing To Do is, and I like the fact that Jackson's Faramir is really having to make a decision and genuinely having to go against what he thinks he ought to be doing.
I also like the way David Wenham plays him, very quiet, but able to pull out the menacing like a rabbit out of a hat--and with an undercurrent of bitterness that makes him three-dimensional.
I can believe that Miranda Otto's Eowyn and David Wenham's Faramir will fall in love after the death of Theoden, the death of Denethor, the catastrophic defeat of the Witch-King of Angmar. I want to see this love story between two bitter, fallible, but still striving people. I think there's going to be some power behind it.
December's gonna be a long time coming.
---
WORKS CITED
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Return of the King. The Lord of the Rings 3. 2nd Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
---. The Two Towers. The Lord of the Rings 2. 2nd Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
papersky and jess79. The cut tag is for you.)[ETA: a caveat
My rhetoric in making this argument outstripped my actual feelings. I really like book-Faramir; he's a good person, and it is a relief to find somebody in Gondor with their head on straight. When I said I find Faramir uninteresting in the book, I think I was speaking a little more from a writer-type perspective than I realized at the time. Book-Faramir is static; he gets wounded and grieves and all the rest of it, but at the end of RotK he's still very much the same person he was when Frodo and Sam meet him in TTT. So no matter how wonderful a character he is, there's this level for me on which he's just boring. This is not the only level on which to think about Faramir, and I apologize for framing my argument as if it were. Mea maxima culpa. So the thing that won me over to Jackson's version is the fact that he's clearly dynamic. That's what I love.]
But first, a confession. Faramir in the books is a character whom I like, because he's noble, honorable, loyal, good, handsome, etc. ("this grave young man, whose words seemed so wise and fair" (TTT 280)), but find fundamentally uninteresting--because he's noble, honorable, loyal, good, handsome, etc. I always feel like poor Eowyn is ending up with the consolation prize: no, you can't marry the heroic King of Gondor, but here! you can have the almost-as-heroic Prince of Ithilien instead, and he'll be loving and thoughtful and never complain when you cry out Aragorn's name in bed. Faramir is Perfect and (faithful readers of this LJ can sing along here) therefore boring.
Somebody else points out somewhere (and, mea culpa, I'm sorry that I can't remember who you are or where I read your insightful point) that Faramir's behavior in the books is actually rather, er, convenient for Frodo and Sam. He shelters them, feeds them, gives them advice and provisions, and--oh yes--validates their courage and nobility and the rightness of their actions. He's a deus ex machina, who further provides the useful plot point of alienating Gollum from Frodo again. He's not a character; he's a cardboard cutout labeled Good Guy.
And that pretty much sums him up for The Return of the King as well. The most interesting things that happen to Faramir all happen while he's out of his head with fever. And the "love story" between Eowyn and Faramir is beautifully written and elegiac and talks very movingly about recovering (or not) from the influence of the Nazgul--as later passages about Frodo will also do--but Tolkien fundamentally was not interested in exploring relationships between men and women, and that lack of interest shows. "The Steward and the King" tidies Eowyn away nicely and gives Faramir a bride, but it's not even as convincing or moving a love story as "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen" in Appendix A (RotK 337-44).
So Tolkien's Faramir can be pigeonholed neatly as Not Boromir and left alone.
Whatever you can say about Jackson's Faramir, that ain't it.
Yes, the Osgiliath thing is weird. I don't know if it's a mistake or not (RotK will tell for sure), but I'm not denying it's a weird choice. (Although I adore unreservedly the way in which Faramir gets the truth out of Gollum--furthering the development of Gollum's dyadic personality--instead of the lame-ass way Sam blurts it out in the book.) However, at this point, Jackson is telling a story which is different from Tolkien's in some small but crucial ways, principally the effect of the Ring. Tolkien is subtle, and he has interiority to work with; the hold the Ring gains over Frodo gathers very slowly in the books, and its effect on other people even more so. Jackson makes what I think is a very wise decision and plays up the effect of the Ring from the moment the first movie starts. So that by the time we get to Faramir, we've seen Boromir driven crazy, we've seen Aragorn sorely tempted, Gandalf frightened, Galadriel gone postal, Frodo himself getting creepier by the minute (and I know I've mentioned before how much Elijah Wood impresses me in TTT, but I need to say it again: I am totally blown away by his performance) ... so that the book-Faramir's reaction, "I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway" (TTT 280), would leave us all going, like, so who died and made you Captain America? It's simply not realistic for Faramir to remain utterly untempted by this thing that everybody else in the freaking story is jonesing for. (Actually, *ahem*, that goes for the books, too.)
So Jackson's playing fair; by the rules of the narrative he's set up, the Ring has to affect Faramir just like everybody else. He's not holding a Get Out of Jail Free card. And, yet (and this is where I think Jackson hasn't lost his marbles or traduced the material), notice that Faramir doesn't want the Ring for himself. He's intent on taking it back to Dear Old Dad, which is (a.) consistent with Boromir's remarks about his father to Aragorn in Lothlorien, (b.) consistent with Faramir's Daddy Issues in the book (his only hint of genuine characterization), and (c.) beautiful set-up for Denethor's entrance in RotK.
Jackson's Faramir is also, quite realistically, a harried commander with too many things to think about at once. I was quite struck, this viewing, by how every single time he tries to stop and talk to the hobbits, there's that damn minion nattering on about Osgiliath again. This Faramir may not have his head on straight, but that's partly because he never gets a chance to think things through. And his grief for his brother is, again v. realistically, shot through with anger, so that the fact that he's making bad decisions arises entirely plausibly from the situation he's in.
I further think that Faramir's partial succumbing to the Ring makes his renunciation of it all the more powerful. There's really something at stake for him in Osgiliath when he decides to let Frodo and Sam go; he's felt the Ring's power, and he's seen what it can do. And the repercussions are literally breathing down his neck, in the shape of that same obsessive little minion. Tolkien's Faramir has an air of simply putting aside all these trivial matters because he knows what the Right Thing To Do is, and I like the fact that Jackson's Faramir is really having to make a decision and genuinely having to go against what he thinks he ought to be doing.
I also like the way David Wenham plays him, very quiet, but able to pull out the menacing like a rabbit out of a hat--and with an undercurrent of bitterness that makes him three-dimensional.
I can believe that Miranda Otto's Eowyn and David Wenham's Faramir will fall in love after the death of Theoden, the death of Denethor, the catastrophic defeat of the Witch-King of Angmar. I want to see this love story between two bitter, fallible, but still striving people. I think there's going to be some power behind it.
December's gonna be a long time coming.
---
WORKS CITED
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Return of the King. The Lord of the Rings 3. 2nd Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
---. The Two Towers. The Lord of the Rings 2. 2nd Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
