The Pride of the Bagginses

Interesting article.

I never did realise this, but Juliet is right on almost all counts: In the LotR movies, moments in the book depicting Frodo's heroism are almost always passed up in favour of yet another "trance scene", as I have come to call them. The article gives some really good examples, including the standoff at the Ford, where Frodo summons up literally the last dredges of his courage and will to resist the Black Riders, and all we saw in the movie was comatose!Frodo. At Weathertop, he is the last to quaver and fall; and of course he never ever listens to Gollum and sends Sam away.

In the first two examples, at least, the movie could have stayed true to Tolkien without compromising on the nail-bite factor - quite the opposite actually. Imagine this scene: we've just witnessed a spectacular scene as Arwen rides to the Ford, dodging the wraiths at every turn. She crosses the Ford, and Frodo holds his sword aloft, swaying - his stand against the Black Riders. Just as the white water horses make their entrance, his eyeballs roll up, he slides off the horse and crumples in a heap on the ground. Scene continues as before, Arwen cradling Frodo in her arms. Wouldn't that have been awesome?

But the other changes I'm quite happy to live with - even, to a certain extent, the whole Gollum brainwashing thing. Someone on The One Ring.Net made an excellent point that Frodo, Sam and Smeagol form this sexless sort of love triangle, and their storyline is exactly that of any stock romance novel. A love story wouldn't be complete if at some point, love wasn't overcome by suspicion and jealousy and shadow. I, for one, don't think this is a bad thing at all. There are many emotions and nuances one can easily convey in a book that are close to impossible to translate onto a screen, after all. The love-story parallel is just a way of bringing the true nature of Frodo and Sam's relationship to light.*

Same goes for the Osgiliath sequence in TTT (and numerous other trance scenes) where Frodo attacks Sam. The book can afford to give just understated flashes of Frodo's protectiveness of the Ring, but to effectively foreshadow the final scene at Sammath Naur, the movie is forced to amplify it all. I am definitely not complaining. I think these scenes brought out some of the finest bits of acting in the movies. Elijah Wood was fantastic in them.

But the fact remains that this could have been done without the cost to Frodo's heroic nature. As Juliet says, we never do realise in the movies why Frodo is such a hero, why he truly 'bows to noone'. The movies took away the initiative and the daring in his nature. In a sense, PJ does with Frodo what Chris Columbus and Daniel Radcliffe (mostly the latter) do with Harry Potter, only in the latter case, the contrast is that much more visible, because Harry's character is so defined by his initiative and daring, and that's exactly what Dan Radcliffe fails dismally in portraying.

So yeah. That's what I mean. At the end of the movies, people could be forgiven for coming out thinking "Frodo failed!" rather than "Frodo lives!"

* I will personally dismember the people who draw the usual "Oh, so they are gay!" conclusion from this sentence. :P