TNMC

Now don’t get me wrong.  I love The Lord of the Rings in all its forms.  It is the finest series of books ever written, I believe, and the movies are on a par.  I am not a Tolkien purist.  For the most part, I approve of the changes and alterations that Jackson made in the story (and somewhere in New Zealand, Jackson exhales, relief etched on his features).  What he did to Faramir, though, was shocking to me, and completely obliterated part of the point that I always believed Tolkien was trying to make in the series in the first place.

The Lord of the Rings is about the end of the Third Age of Middle Earth.  The Elves are in decline and the Age of Man is drawing nigh.  In the vanguard of the new Age are Aragon and the Brothers Mir, Boro and Fara.  Boromir, however, proved to be made of weak stuff, falling prey to the Ring’s ancient design.  The Ring was built to corrupt the hearts of Men, and it had been doing so since its capture by Elendil so many years before.  Boromir succumbed to the Ring’s call.  He tried to take the Ring from Frodo by force and it killed him in the end.  Frodo took the Ring and left the Fellowship, and eventually fell into the hands of Faramir in the woods near Mordor.

This is where the filmed Two Towers deviates from the book.  In the book, Faramir is beset by the same demons that confronted, and defeated, his brother.  He contemplates taking the Ring, or at least taking Frodo (with the Ring), back to Gondor for judgment.  Frodo and Sam appeal to his nobility and his honor and win their freedom.  Faramir decides the fate of the world is a larger concern than the fate of Gondor and he lets them go.  Yes!  Faramir lets them go.  He proves himself the first of a new race of Men, one that is above the corruption of the past, and through him, Tolkien gives the reader their first real impression that there is yet hope in the increasing darkness.

In the movie, though, Faramir falls just as Boromir did, only not as far or as completely.  He decides to take Frodo and Sam back to Gondor and so is forced to take them along when he goes to Osgiliath to see to the defense of that city.  Only when he truly realizes how far gone in his Ring-induced madness Frodo is, and how determined the Enemy would be to come after the Ring, does he elect to let Frodo and Sam go free.  It comes off as a much more pragmatic decision than in the book and quite a bit less noble.  The Extended Edition of The Two Towers offers him a measure of redemption as he is shown giving the same passionate “You’d better not be thinking of screwing them over” speech to Smeagol as he does in the book.  It’s a powerful moment, but it’s not really enough in my eyes, to make up for what had come before.  The character was fundamentally flawed by the initial decision to take the Ring to Gondor, and the symbolism and nobility that I believe Tolkien placed in Faramir was taken from him.

While not a major character as measured in time on screen or on the page, Faramir’s actions in the book presaged a dramatic swing in the fortunes of Men as a race.  He showed that there was nobility in Man—nobility that Gandalf believed was there, but that Elrond denied.  He put the Ring aside, and thus rose above the almost inherent corruptibility of his race that allowed Sauron to dominate the world in past Ages.  He established Men as legitimate heirs to the world the Elves were leaving behind.  In the book, that is, he did all that.  In the movie, not so much.  In the movie, he sent Frodo off to Mordor--primarily, it seemed, to save his own bacon.

To his credit, Jackson does address the issue in an interview that appears in the bonus section of the DVD set.  He says that he didn’t feel that the resolution of the Faramir storyline had enough “punch” and he wanted to give Frodo’s storyline a dramatic situation at the end of Two Towers to counterpoint the ongoing tension that his friends were undergoing at Helm’s Deep.  Jackson knew he was making a decision that certain of Tolkien’s fans would likely disagree with, but he did it anyway.  For that, I can respect him, I think—he had a vision for his movie and he stuck by it even knowing it would likely be unpopular among diehard Tolkien fans.  Still, I wish he’d found another way to build his tension.  Faramir deserved a better fate.