REVIEW: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 Guides the Franchise to a Graceful, Moving End
Yates and his actors navigate all the young-love stuff in Deathly Hallows: Part 2 sweetly and nimbly without belaboring it: The young actors pull off their characters' awkward first kisses in a way that makes them PG-13 chaste without denuding them of potential passion. As it turns out, romantic love isn't just for the young in Part 2. Snape himself -- reptilian, skulking, duplicitous -- has harbored one particular secret for a very long time, and Rickman transforms the character he's been playing for so long now into a convincing romantic figure. Suddenly, even with his lank ebony hair and softened jawline, Snape looks just a little like the Rickman we knew so long ago, the ghost lover of Anthony Minghella's 1990 Truly Madly Deeply. Snape has always been sexy, in that grumpy-goth, bad-boy way; but in Deathly Hallows: Part 2 Rickman gives him yet another twist. He's touching in the quietest way.
But there's grandness in Part 2 as well, though its grandness is most definitely the English kind, often involving stiff-upper-lip determination in the face of the greatest horrors. All of the post-Chris Columbus Harry Potter movies -- even those not made by Englishmen -- have preserved the source material's essential Englishness, and Yates's entries into the franchise are no exception. Working with cinematographer Eduardo Serra and production designer Stuart Craig, he stages an enormous, initially disheartening battle whose aftermath borrows imagery from wartime photographs of bombed-out Coventry Cathedral. Yates shows us vaguely identifiable rubble mixed with indestructible remnants of grandeur; he doesn't shy away from showing us the wounded and the dead, though he never overstates the pathos of those images. (He knows he doesn't have to.) This sequence is more mournful than it is exhilarating, though it does hint at the stubborn forward motion of hope. It's an example of a filmmaker tapping into the idea that history isn't just a ribbon of past events, a stretch of things we leave behind us; rather, it's something woven right into human beings, with all their inherent strengths and weaknesses.
Deathly Hallows: Part 2 also gives the great English actress Maggie Smith -- as Professor Minerva McGonagall -- her moment as an action hero, an event I've been waiting for all my life, even though I didn't know I'd been waiting for it until it actually happened. And there, in the way Smith so fiercely and magnificently wields her wand, lies perhaps the most powerful secret weapon of the Harry Potter franchise. This is a series of movies like no other for the way it has honored the integrity and growth of the characters, as well as of the actors who have played them. We've watched Radcliffe, Watson and Grint -- along with many other young performers, in roles big and small -- grow up on the screen before us. Their early moments of clumsiness have segued, almost imperceptibly, into confidence and grace we couldn't have predicted.
The Harry Potter movies have also made a place for marvelous, established English, Irish and Scottish actors -- not just Smith, Gambon and Rickman, but also Robbie Coltrane, Jim Broadbent, David Thewlis, Miriam Margolyes, Emma Thompson and the late Richard Harris -- to act alongside younger, less-seasoned ones. For those young actors, the franchise has been an apprenticeship of sorts. And for the older actors, it has offered a chance to play rich, interesting characters, and also, quite simply, to work. That's significant in a filmmaking climate where, more than ever before, an actor's age is the great enemy.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 brings an extraordinary experiment to an end: The series has, for the most part, favored character development over spectacle and nuance over aggressiveness. These pictures have been costly, yet they leave us with the sense that the money has been spent in the right way. The Harry Potter movies haven't eclipsed their source material, but have instead walked hand-in-hand with it. And as all book-loving moviegoers know from painful experience, it's not every day that a story told well on paper gets the moviemaking it deserves.
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I think I would rather have preferred some discord: unlike LOTR, the series always struck me as too much moved to give people exactly what they want; which wouldn't be a problem, if I didn't think they mostly wanted to be played to and lied to. The most interesting part of the series was when the matronly lady took control of Hogwarths and tortured Harry for a torturously-long period of no respite -- it almost seemed to be asking us why we've "took" to a miracle hero and wonders galore, if not for some kind of magical flight, arisen from having known the same. The director of course, aware of our anxieties and heeding them, made it seem as if this was an episode of no lasting import; the disturbances that ended her weren't deus ex machina from a situation that not even the chosen one was going to look REALLY capable of making a dent in, let alone a wizard, let alone toy twins, but just another example of bubbled-up, expected enterprise by the dogged Hogwarth kids. It WAS deus ex machina, though, a play to those who can't be expected to confront reality (and if you don't like having to straight-faced endure such flight-from-reality, fantasy escapes: brother, I know your pain!): the only people who REALLY go for this series are those who've either put themselves to or have only known pasture. Despite the displays of genuine previous-generation marvels and awesome life, you'll not find, I don't think, a true hero amongst them. Wish them all well, but another reason to dip back at least twenty years, when there really were heroes.
@Patrick McEvoy-Halston "...you'll not find, I don't think, a true hero amongst them. Wish them all well, but another reason to dip back at least twenty years, when there really were heroes."
In film four (and maybe in the book?) Dumbledore says he has no time for heroes. After all this story is at bottom about ordinary flawed people trying to do the right thing. I would not put my trust in 'heroes' if I was you.
Harry is the chosen one, though -- the one who owing to something along the lines of just having the right DNA, has more magic than anyone else. Hermione is smarter than anyone else. Mr. Ordinary, Ron, is the "football" star, and is more genial and accessible and brawny brave than anyone else. They're not especially ordinary, nor flawed in anyway that doesn't draw out the more starkly their gifts -- they remain magically empowered artificats we can step into, to feel a bit more buttressed against a theatening world. (The castle Hogwarths, too, kept us for awhile feeling a bit more ensconsed and protected too -- our need for such is what drew us all Americans to drift so British private school this long while.) The rest were ordinary and flawed enough to have need for their time of ripening, before showing how they've come to be not so much ordinary anymore, but they're yet all wizards; from the beginning -- all elected, all special.
Have we discarded this need for narcissistic inflation as the series went along? As Hogwarths falls and our heroes become more enfleshed and real, and less simply possessed of, protected by, notable attributes, does the series really become just ordinary people trying to do good in face of terrible opposition? I'm not sure, because something of this feels route too -- simply how it would go for these storybook heroes; simply how we'd have wanted it. There are outside factors cooperating in this -- we're still not so naked and unprotected, only convincingly made to feel we're obviously full right to think ourselves so.
When Harry was up against that pressing matron lady, he very much seemed in need of being more than ordinary and flawed to be able to withstand her. The protective older wizard drew back, Hogwarths was hers, and his magic and special choseness wasn't a factor: here was the ordinary kid, buckling with a not so ordinary inclination to talk back to genuine terror -- and he was so shown as still so way in need of magical enfranchisement that he wasn't permitted to slump back so, to be put at so much risk of being shown as still basically unenfranchised and naked, despite all these years and years of your the greatest wizard Harry! stuff, the rest of the way on. (Voldemort struck me thereafter as the easy way out.) Someone like her needed a young Snape, not sprouting Harry, to know she was up against something she might not ably be able to ultimately handle.
It may have even been a significant generational moment, the key test: do these kids have it for reality? Strip away the nonsense and let' s see ... Er, apparently not so much: it'll be fantasy and lies the rest of the way through, then. "You're all young wizards who've now all grown up who'll succeed against apparently insurmountable foes owing to your inner resourcefulness, bravery, and good and true friendships." This is how we'll let you narrate your life; no one will ever tell you different and you'll never know it; but we'll be looking again, next gen, for the real stuff. Without heroes to look to to balk against all that previous generations created and tried thereafter to ground as the rest of the way, it's all either rehash or regress -- one gen depressing trying to make them as much like their ordinary-but-in-their-own-way-noble grandparents as possible.
Well said, Stephanie.
The Harry Potter film franchise was (for the most part) placed in the hands of English artists and reflects the elegance & nobility of the English people.
One also has to credit Rowling, who used her leverage as creator to steer the films away from Hollywood cynicism.
OMG! Steph, can you put more adjectives and adverbs in your writing please??? did you have a bet with another "journalist" to see how often you could go to the dictionary and thesaurus??? too much fluff and puff... simpleton!
you english are all alike - if it wasn't for us kick-a$$ americans, you would all be speaking german... HA! Stick that in pint and drink it!
"Harry 3356" Your an idiot.
"OMG LIKE!! OMG LIKE!!" That's all I can see coming from your comment. Stupid American.
Grammar. The difference between feeling your nuts and feeling you're nuts.