"You could read him as some sort of emblem for all that's gone wrong in the past decade with free market capitalism if you wanted to. His level of venality is pretty devastating and destroys him as much as the things around him," he said.
Yeah. Sure. We're just overwhelmed with an out-of-control free market. That's the problem. Uh huh.
I'm looking forward to the film, but Jackson always makes some bad choices, and his view of the world is not my view, and I suspect that Tolkien would be dismayed by much that is in (and much that is not in) the movies.
That is most certainly true. The spirit of the books is not in any of the movies.