Editor's note: This review may contain spoilers, particularly for those who haven't read the books.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 was an in-between moment of a movie, a picture that left many fans of this most unusual movie franchise -- not to mention the books they're based on -- feeling adrift and forlorn. By necessity, it was only a story half-told: Adapting the seventh and final book in J.K. Rowling's series required splitting the story into two parts. Now, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves guide the story to a graceful and satisfying end. The movie's final moments are the equivalent of the half-jubilant, half-mournful thrill you get when you close the cover of a book you've savored.
Part 2 picks up where Part 1 left off, with little preamble and very few helpful reminders of what went down before: It hits the ground running, assuming its audience is primed and up-to-speed. Instead of following the current trend of spoon-feeding moviegoers as if they were imbeciles, Yates trusts that we're right there, following along with him.
That's important, because there's plenty of complicated ground to cover. With Albus Dumbledore dead -- played once again by Michael Gambon, he appears here in brief flashbacks and in one marvelous, near-climactic afterlife sequence -- Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) has taken control of Hogwarts, in the process turning it all chilly and gray. He gathers the students in the Great Hall, warning them that truly bad stuff will happen if anyone attempts to help the errant Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe). Just as he's issuing this stern pronouncement, Harry, Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) step forward, along with the friends and de facto family members who have joined forces to help them vanquish Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes, with his eerily erased nose, like an aftereffect of the Photoshop of Evil). They already have one dangerous exploit under their belt: With Hermione disguised, cleverly and charmingly, as the Death Eater Bellatrix Lestrange (played by the marvelously loopy Helena Bonham Carter), they've broken into Bellatrix's vault at Gringotts Bank, in search of one of the three remaining Horcruxes -- those would be, for the uninitiated, the vessels of evil in which Voldemort has hidden pieces of his own black soul.
The adventure that unfolds from there involves all sorts of wondrous sights, some of them purely terrifying and others brushed with wonder: A flying, squawking winged serpent; a giant twin-headed fire serpent whose softly outlined, undulating curves are almost soothing to look at, until its horrific set of jaws open wide; and more sightings of the mysterious patronus that appears before Harry in times of trouble, a doe whose contours are formed by threads of silvery smoke.
We already know that patronus means something to Harry. But what Part 2 reveals is that it also carries deep significance for Snape. One of the delights of the Harry Potter movies -- the great ones, like Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, also directed by Yates, and Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and even the chintzy-looking renderings of the first two movies made by the hapless Chris Columbus -- is the way in which each one allows a previously introduced character to shine a little more. That organic sense of character development is built right into Rowling's books, and it offers vast opportunities for smart, creative directors and actors. Rowling laid terrific groundwork, especially, for the younger performers featured in the Harry Potter movies; her stories were built a way that, once they'd been transformed into scripts, provided sturdy roles for actors to grow into.
Here, the shy, nerdy, socially inept Neville Longbottom -- played by Matthew Lewis -- steps to the fore with an eloquent, elegiac speech that hints at the gracefulness that lurks beneath the gawky surface of adolescence. He's only just now becoming the person he was meant to be, an element of the open-hearted, democratic nature of Rowling's work: People shouldn't be written off until we've gotten to know them fully, and even then, they can surprise us. Lewis was at first one of the more awkward of the young supporting players in the Harry Potter movies, though he's also always been one of the most charming. Now, he plays this older, more self-assured Neville with billygoat sure-footedness. And as another of the recurring characters, the wraithlike, spacy-smart Luna Lovegood (played by the wispy-wonderful Evanna Lynch) notices, he's also grown conspicuously attractive, in the way bright, kind-hearted guys so often are.
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.