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Her Method

by DICK CHENEY

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
dir. Peter Jackson
1145 minutes

Tauriel (Evangelina Lilly) is a wild, rambunctious elven warrior in service to King Thranduil. She has maybe like an on and off again thing with Legolas, who looks weirdly older than the other man we knew so long ago. Orlando Bloom's face looks like it had to be re-put together after a car crash, and he stares at Evangy with muted hatred. She is an elf and he is an elf, but they are not the same kind of elf.

Acting Without Acting is of course Ms. Lilly's masterpiece in the field, following the flamboyant homosexuality of Stravinsky's An Actor Prepares, the pro-Israel schleffing of David Mamet's True and False: Don't Act and the whorish subtlety of Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations. Ms. Lilly follows somewhere along the lines of these great thinkers in chapters like "Play Hard To Get", "Know Any Tennis Pros?" and "Sawyer." It is a great shame there is no Sawyer in The Hobbit - after all, it seems like everyone else got to be in it.

There is a scene in The Hobbit where Gandalf is physically assaulted by the eye of Sauron. It is meant ironically, for our own eyes are at war with Evangeline every moment is she on screen. She says words in a way where it is very clear she has no idea what they mean, a strategem she outlines in the book's persuasive last chapter, "Sayonara." At one point the camera even catches her mouthing the words, "Kate would run."

A theory of acting is always appreciated; a theory of politics less so. Peter Jackson has elevated a truly dull provincialism into a globe-trotting aesthetic in this second part of a second trilogy. Virtually nothing happens in the entire movie, a feat only recently perfected by Christopher Nolan and the guy who records my family functions. New Zealand looks very exciting really, probably more so than Middle-Earth just in its randomness. Jackson's mind is so ordered that the only thing out of place in his lazily long ode is Stephen Colbert.

Smaug is the inner personification of Lilly's anxiety over her future; he wakes when she leaves her Elven nest. Orlando Bloom is mildly concerned about this, so much so that he needs to talk it over with his dad. The two guys agree that there is a lot of violence in the world, most of it caused by non-Elves. Josh Holloway should have been Orlando Bloom's dad for maximum impact; he could offer the uptight, emasculated Legolas scotch in a semi-dirty glass and the two could intermingle ideas over how aging affects female elves so much more profoundly than males.

The elves and dwarves murder about 1600 orcs and other "dark persons" without so much as suffering a single blow. The pack of dwarves journeying to the dragon boasts equal invulnerability until Evangy's favorite dwarf takes an arrow in the knee from one enterprising villain. She saves him from death, and he frees his friends from an elven tributary that has virtually no one point of existing other than the fact that the elves have to dump their waste somewhere. Never trust a race whose sewers look like Appalachia.

It is not only the elves who are culpable in the acting disaster that occurs here. Martin Freeman saps the wonder from nearly every scene he is, making up for it only with an unexpectedly splendid physical comedy. His nebbishness has a half-life of about ten to twenty minutes, after which you want to hold him underwater by his ears. The gimmick of him turning invisible when he places a ring over his finger was done far more meaningfully when Chevy Chase did it, and I believe his version predates this one by almost eight decades. A lot of scientists agree that Fletch was first written in 25 B.C.

In some ways Middle Earth reminds me of the world without Jesus and guns, although an arrow seems as deadly put in the bow of a very horrible actress. Without these stabilizing voices, Jackson seems to be arguing, civilization breaks down, normal people are evacuated or forced away from the land, and genetic anomalies begin to dominate the discourse, in thrall to specific special interests. For the elves it is isolation, for the dwarves it is money, and for the hobbits it is food and pleasure. All are aberrations of humanity which must force down their inclinations in order to restore order.

There is a certain limitation to the dwarves in this volume. Previously they were messy, stimulating and individuated. Now they trot the landscape like a group of missionaries, barely able to think of anything except their task or loved ones left back in dwarven lands. There is little of the fun of new places; they are more like pilgrims wandering their ancestral desert. Their leader, Thorin Oakenshield, is a particular maudlin fellow.

The dragon itself looks quite wrong. It is not the thinness of its limbs, or the agility in the confined space at the mountain's base that are quite troubling. Instead the problem concerns the dragon's latent humanity. If he can contemplate revenge, as the dwarves seem to believe, then Smaug possesses his own legitimate set of grievances. Perhaps the dragon even has a coterie of devoted worshippers capable of blowing themselves up in public places like ferries or jizz saloons. The dragon may petition the council of races to be recognized; he could send a candle as his representative.

Fun has been stripped out of the world entirely; there is only an imported sanctimoniousness, impulses that occur seemingly on behalf of others but are actually disguised outlets for guilt and shame. The thrill of acting for its own sake has been dispensed with. There are no happy accidents in the business of making these movies, since even the slightest fuck-up can be fixed in post. What we find here is all there is: magic has fled the land, destined to be reclaimed in the sequel to Acting Without Acting, The Hobbit With Kate From Lost.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Christmas reading. You can find an archive of his writing in these pages here.

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