“IN THE OFFICIAL TRAILER for The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, viewers get a tantalizing glimpse of Saruman, no more than two seconds long, intoning in Christopher Lee’s inimitable basso profundo, “Leave Sauron to me!” For fans of Tolkien and of the genre he helped launch, the prospect of a showdown between the two most powerful persons in all of Middle-earth is delicious.
But, of course, we know that the showdown never takes place. The now six-film saga of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings has made sure to emphasize Saruman’s inherent evil. Although The Battle of the Five Armies does include that scene in which Saruman fights alongside Elrond and Galadriel against the servants of Sauron, the implication in the end is that the White Wizard is really helping Sauron to escape. The oversimplification of Saruman is, in my view, one of the more egregious mistakes made by Peter Jackson and his team. They have taken one of the most interesting — because conflicted and flawed — characters in J. R. R. Tolkien’s story, and turned him into a boringly one-dimensional movie villain. He is evil, and that’s that.
One of the knocks on Tolkien has been that his world is too neatly divided into good and evil, with the saintly elves, heroic men, doughty dwarves, and innocent hobbits standing their righteous ground against hordes of demonic orcs, trolls, evil or fallen men (who are sometimes coded as racial outsiders as well), and some great Satan. This simplistic moral universe has even been taken as a hallmark of fantasy fiction, by such imminent critics of the genre as Darko Suvin, Fredric Jameson, and Carl Freedman, who favor what they take to the political complexity of science fiction. The “great divide” has been bridged by such fantasists as Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel R. Delany, and China Miéville, among others, but there remains a sense that Tolkien’s own writings are almost comically reductive with respect to morality.
The Jackson films have only exacerbated this perception by reducing the nuances of the books even further, but a careful reading of Tolkien’s writings reveals a far more subtle and complicated view of the motives and goals of various characters in The Lord of the Rings and other texts. Perhaps even against his own wishes, in what might be considered a sort of political unconscious, Tolkien’s work draws attention to the troubled and troubling political and moral quandaries. Saruman is an exemplary figure in this regard.
The filmmakers’ cartoonishly evil vision of Saruman is unfortunate, as it deprives a fascinating narrative of its complexity, while also being untrue to Tolkien’s own vision.
I have to disagree fairly strongly. I didn’t get cartoon evil Saruman from the Hobbit movies, still less so with the readdition of the fight in Dol Guldur. He starts off as a slightly stuffy wizard who, may I remind you, is agreeing with Elrond, who is one of the wisest characters in the films. We see nothing of him through Desolation and then when he turns up again, he doesn’t actually start to crack until the moment that Sauron turns up in person with all nine of his wraiths. Christopher Lee’s acting in that scene was flawless. You could see the terror on his face that is the entire reason that Saruman turned in the end. He was terrified, plain and simple, and when you look at Christopher Lee’s Saruman in BotFA, you can almost see the exact moment when that change of heart happens. For me, “Leave Sauron to me,” is the lead-in to what was presumably a showdown between Saruman and Sauron that did not end well for Saruman as he was. I kind of read that as the end of Saruman the White and the beginning of Saruman, lackey to Sauron. I didn’t read Saruman as inherently evil, ever, not even in the cinematic version of Lord of the Rings. I read him as frightened to the point of making very, very poor decisions and ultimately falling to evil because of fear. That may just be my interpretation but I think Saruman’s facial expressions and body language throughout gave the lie to the idea that he was evil to start with. There’s one scene, particularly, in Fellowship, where you see Saruman sitting at the top of his tower, kind of curled up in a chair with his robes gathered around him. He’s not sitting there gloating. His hair’s a mess, his robes are bunched like he’s been trying to pull them up around himself for warmth or just for comfort, and it didn’t read “powerful evil wizard.” It read, “scared wizard doing something he doesn’t really want to do but can’t see an alternative to.”
TL;DR: I think Saruman is fairly clearly shown as not being 100% evil, but that may just be my reading.
Meg's Mumbles 