On the one hand, I really wanted to love this film. I love biopics, where in the warp and weft of great filmmaking, a director weaves together the threads of a person’s biography into a work of fiction that is true in ways deeper than chronology and census registry. And, of course, I love his worlds: Tolkien’s work as a Christian artist and intellectual has shaped me in profound ways.

On the other hand, there are the fans. Tolkien fans are a fearsome bunch. They have intense loyalty, and are thus exacting and precise when it comes to Tolkien’s life and the legendarium. This is partly the nature of a “Frodo lives” generation that went on to become prodigious scholars and transformative fantasy writers. But it is also because Tolkien himself was exacting and precise. It was two decades before he published his first children’s novel, The Hobbit, and fifteen years before he completed “the new Hobbit,” what we know of as The Lord of the Rings. He never finished The Silmarillion, his great work, but his son and other specialized Tolkienists have since produced at least two dozen volumes from the many drafts of his world-building project.

So, frankly, I deeply desire to love this film, but I am terrified of the fans if I give a good review. Most who disagree with me will simply dismiss my reviews. But when I argued once that there was still some merit in the mess that was the Peter Jackson Hobbit adaptation, one commentator called me an “immoral human being.” I suppose I should be pleased that I am still considered human rather than orc, but there is no doubt that a certain ilk of Tolkien fan will hate this adaptation of the Professor’s life.

Still, I chose to be open to the Tolkien biopic. As C.S. Lewis says of good reading, I chose to “surrender” to the text that was in front of me, to yield to its powers and limitations, and to live in its world as the filmmakers told me a story.

And … I was moderately impressed. In many ways, this is a beautifully crafted film. The set design is lovely, the actors are compelling, the photography (with a few gaps) is precise, the score evokes empathy, and the storytelling is inviting. Rather than a gruesome feasting upon human violence on the battlefield, the war scenes flow between history, folktale, fantasy, and the supernatural—a strange melange active in soldier imagination, as John Garth notes in his gold-standard history, Tolkien and the Great War (2003).

More than sheer entertainment, I found Tolkien to be a moving picture that tells an absorbing story of three loves in Tolkien’s life: his close friends in the artistic collective, the T.C.B.S.; his illicit romance with Edith Bratt; and his love of language and myth that becomes both the foundation and heart of his mythology.

And yet the first question I was asked after the film was, “is it accurate?”

Truthfully, if you had a detailed timeline of Tolkien’s life with you in the theatre, you would be left somewhat confused. The T.C.B.S. discussions needed more depth and more revolutionary content. And the biggest absence of any is Tolkien’s fourth love, his Roman Catholic faith. Garth writes that Tolkien’s complex mythology as he was discovering it during WWI was “nothing less than an attempt to justify God’s creation of an imperfect world filled with suffering, loss, and grief” (Tolkien and the Great War, 249). Though the film tries to get at the depth of Tolkien’s invented worlds in language, myth, and history—and who could capture the intricate beauty of his project that is itself a year of reading?—the filmmakers could not, or would not, struggle to appreciate the faith at the centre of his worldview.

I think there is a reason why the filmmakers missed the religious perspectives, as I will argue in a moment. And I wonder if people who keep asking about biographical precision are making a category mistake, confusing a biopic for a documentary. Even given their own approach, the filmmakers could have done more to strengthen the historical linkages in the film. Still, the preoccupation with “accuracy” has left me troubled.

And then a question struck me that has sent me reeling ever since. I have long wondered about the weakness of Christian art in our age—particularly in North America, and particularly among evangelicals. Is the best that bible-reading, Jesus-loving artists can produce captured in Amish love stories, campy apocalyptic blockbuster Sunday School lessons, implausible culture war films, and imitations of Ron DiCianni paintings? Much of the most prominent contemporary Christian art has the sophistication and imagination of motivational posters with pictures of mountainous landscapes. Though rooted in millennia of history, art, faith, and story—and although the cross is central to much of Western art—mainstream Christian art today is as inconsequential as an Instagram post about cats.

I know that some of the reason for the thinness of our age is our lack of theological integration—ideas that don’t go deep into the intricate relationships of family life, worship, mission, ethics, and social justice. But there is more, I think, and as I winced in preparation for fan reactions to this adaptation of Tolkien’s life, I saw the problem from another angle:

What if Christians approach art the way that committed fans approach adaptation?

It isn’t just Tolkien fans, as we see from constant online arguments about adaptations of work by George R.R. Martin and J.K. Rowling, and worlds like Star Wars and Narnia. There is a certain attention to detail in fandom that highlights, I think, the narrow focus Christians have toward art.

Of the three transcendentals, truth, beauty, and goodness, like Tolkien (or Game of Thrones, or Harry Potter) superfans, Christians often have an inordinate focus upon truth that unbalances the art we make and the art we receive. As fans focus on facticity, Christian art-makers are so focussed upon a message in the piece—the “truth” of it—that we do not appreciate beauty and goodness. This is slightly different for fans and Christians, as fans want the facticity to honour the beauty, and Christians want truth to shore up goodness. In either case, the relationship between truth, beauty, and goodness becomes disordered.

And of all arts, filmmaking especially requires an integration of the three, so that an unbeautiful film can never tell truth or inspire goodness at the deepest levels.

In the Christian world, we produce novels timelined according to a particular reading of Daniel and Revelation, or romance books set in a para-modern world where issues of sex and bodies never arise, or paintings where the parable is crystal clear, or stories where the moral is obvious to everyone—typically a moral that with enough faith we can win the football game or make a child or stand up to jerk atheist professors. It is not that art cannot have a moral. We see popular moralistic authors of various persuasions who write well, like C.S. Lewis, Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Cormac McCarthy, and Salman Rushdie. I miss VeggieTales, for when it was good it told moral tales excellently in a way that inspired goodness.

The problem is not the moral. The problem is that our attention to the moral (in the case of activistic art), or exacting concerns for facticity (in the case of adaptations of well-loved writers), disorders the relationship between truth, beauty, and goodness. The attention to the “truth” side of the coin—C.S. Lewis called it the “expository demon”—seems to produce art without beauty.

I would have loved more fidelity to Tolkien’s rich and complex history in the biopic. Honestly, there is a troubling infidelity to the deepest resonances in adaptations of faith-based authors of late, as we see in the Peter Jackson Tolkien films, the very pale Narnia films, and the missed opportunity of remaking Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. The makers of Tolkien likewise fail to understand the protagonist’s worldview.

But why should they understand it? In a pan-European, post-Christian film team, who is there that can understand someone who quietly works his ancient faith into the subtext of his created worlds? Unlike American Christian films, faith is not even a leitmotif in Tolkien’s mythology. And yet it is essential to his project.

Even if the Tolkien filmmakers could intimate that faith, however, what are their models for Christian faith in film? Would Tolkien be better if it looked more like Left Behind, Heaven is for Real, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, The Omega Code, or one of the Billy Graham films from the 1980s with a conversion scene at the end? This film biography is missing one of Tolkien’s deepest loves because no model exists for addressing it that is not, quite frankly, bad art.

So I have chosen to love this film. For all its limitations, it is surprisingly well-made. And though it misses one of the deepest elements, that of faith, it is otherwise faithful to the heart of the man that gave us Middle-earth.

Moreover, the work of J.R.R. Tolkien as a Christian artist speaks to us as artists, drawing us to a more compelling vision of what “subcreation”—in Tolkien’s own terms—can be like. We are all “Little Makers,” Tolkien calls us, and our art is a reflection of the divine Creator. Perhaps if we can follow Tolkien into his vision for the integration of faith and art, we will be able to paint and tell stories and make films that provide models for biopics to reflect that part of the story.

For as much as we want our art to tell the truth and inspire goodness, it is not art if it is not, in its own way, beautiful.

Forefront is committed to fostering a robust conversation on the intersection of Christian faith and the arts by publishing a wide range of voices and opinions. The views expressed here reflect those of the author.