from complex, rounded characters with strengths and weaknesses to simple types or caricatures. Croft called the film versions of Aragorn and Frodo "strangely diminished"; she noted that Hostetter described Aragorn as less noble, more full of angst, and Frodo more of a wimp. Using the critic Northrop Frye's literary modes, Croft described Tolkien's Aragorn as "the typical hero of romance, who is 'superior in degree to other men and his environment'", whereas Frodo is a hero of the high mimetic mode, superior to other men but not to his environment. She concluded that Jackson's screenplay aims at "Hollywood's lowest common denominator … the pathos of the low-mimetic mode and the irresistible power of the American … monomyth", allowing the audience to identify with the "lone redeemer, riding into town, … saving the day, and galloping off into the sunset", whereas Tolkien challenges his readers to "emulate timeless characters of a higher mode than ourselves". Tom Shippey found Jackson's tendencies for "democratisation" and "emotionalisation" problematic, writing that where Tolkien has a clear hierarchy, Jackson is happy to enlarge the parts of humble characters like the servant-Hobbit Sam, who converts Faramir to supporting the quest, or the young Hobbit Pippin, who (unlike in Tolkien's version) persuades the tree-giant Treebeard to attack the fallen wizard Saruman's fortress of Isengard. Where Tolkien's Denethor is a cold ruler doing his best for his country, Jackson's is made to look greedy and self-indulgent; Shippey calls the scene where he gobbles a meal, while his son Faramir has been sent out in a hopeless fight, a "blatant [use] of cinematic suggestion". Christianity Today wrote that the films "missed the moral and religious depths" of the book, such as when they turned "the awful subtlety and complexity of evil" into something trivially obvious. It gave as an instance the reduction of Tolkien's sadly conflicted Gollum to a "pathetically comic and merely devious figure", and the caricaturing of the powerful Steward of Gondor, Denethor, as "a snarling and drooling oaf rather than a noble pessimist". Preserved by appropriate substitution Some critics and scholars freely admitted that the film version differed from the book, but felt that it appropriately substituted other elements for those that could not be preserved. The scholar Daniel Timmons recorded that the film critics of major newspapers both pointed out the trilogy's weaknesses, as when Roger Ebert said of Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring that