"The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring"

Visual cues like that one give "The Fellowship of the Ring" a glow that's both ancient and redolent of the turn of the last century. They also establish it as a love letter of sorts to England, specifically to the beauty of the English countryside, which Tolkien so loved. Cinematographer Andrew Lesnie ("Babe," "Babe: Pig in the City") shoots the billowing, grassy hills so that they sing out with love for that countryside -- no matter that it wasn't filmed there: Through Lesnie's lens New Zealand is its spiritual twin.

And yet the secret to the great wonder of "The Fellowship of the Ring" lies not just in Jackson's ability to marshal detail and action and panorama to do his bidding. It's in the way he opens his camera to the faces of his performers. Most "big" movies make a human sacrifice of their actors; that's become so common it's almost an accepted practice. (You had to paw through the rubble of "The Phantom Menace" to get any sense of its star, Ewan McGregor.)

"The Fellowship of the Ring" is a big movie in its scope and vision. But Jackson makes it work on a much more intimate level as well, by allowing the faces of the characters to tell the story in its most emotional terms. The great Christopher Lee appears as the once good, now malevolent wizard Saruman, and, with his robes and long white hair, he looks like an evil Jesus. Jackson shoots Lee's face, with its noble, hooked contours, as if it were one of the world's great landscapes. Ian McKellen's Gandalf has a silvery nobility that's never overplayed -- he's a wizard who clearly understands that the glimmering undercurrents of magic are just as powerful as its giant signs and explosions.

Sean Astin's Sam, Frodo's cheerful and devoted companion, has a face that's almost heartbreakingly open. And Elijah Wood's Frodo holds the camera captivated in just about every one of his scenes. He shows equal parts boyishness and gravity. His face, all immense eyes, still glows with youthful innocence, but there's also something fearfully mature about it: If you've read the books, you'll see how that look points the way to the darker, more devastating turns this story will take from here. (The two sequels, "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King," have already been shot and are scheduled to be released at Christmastime in 2002 and 2003, respectively.)

"The Fellowship of the Ring" could have gone wrong in so many ways. As it is, though, I see it as nearly perfect: It's one of the best fantasy pictures ever made. And it's a lovely example of how, with care and thought and not all that much money (Jackson will have made all three "Rings" movies for less than $300 million), a director can successfully capture the mood and feel of a book on the big screen. (I read and enjoyed the books more than 25 years ago, but the details of them had gone hazy. Jackson brought them back more vividly than I could have hoped.)

Most of us are happy enough these days to go to the movies and not get screwed, so rarely does a movie even keep its promises, much less surpass them. That's why "The Fellowship of the Ring" is something of a miracle. It makes the great potentialities of movies seem realistic and achievable. Inventive, magical and relatively inexpensive, it proves that throwing money at a movie doesn't necessarily make it good -- an idea that should be much easier for Hollywood to grasp than it actually is.

Writing about Bernardo Bertolucci's "1900," Pauline Kael identified the distinction between studio-driven big-budget pictures and those that are powered by the skill and vision of a filmmaker. "The artist-initiated epic is an obsessive testing of possibilities, and often it comes out of an overwhelming desire to express what the artist thinks are the unconscious needs of the public. It comes, too, from a conviction, or a hope, that if you give popular audiences the greatest you have in you they will respond."

"The Fellowship of the Ring" throws down a daunting challenge to filmmakers everywhere, and even more so to the studios that back them. Audiences deserve the greatest you have in you. If you've made money off giving them anything less, it was just dumb luck. From now on, they'll know they have a right to magic.

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