Before proceeding with my review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, the first installment in the two part series finale, let me answer the inevitable question right away: No, I have not read the books.About halfway through the second Potter film, I pretty much lost interest in J. K. Rowling’s convoluted narrative and mythology and have barely kept track of what’s happened since then. The reason I’ve stuck with the franchise since 2001, however, is that the films are all consistently entertaining, with enough imaginative fantasy adventure to please even a curmudgeon such as myself, who, for some reason, has always had a hard time warming up to the sword-and-sorcery genre. Despite Steve Kloves’s overstuffed and clunky screenplays, not to mention Chris Columbus’s typically banal direction of the first two films, the series has been nicely shepherded by talented directors such as Alfonso Cuarón, Mike Newell, and David Yates, the latter of whom returns for the third time behind the camera and will direct Deathly Hallows: Part 2 scheduled for release in July 2011. More compelling than the plot is how these filmmakers have stylishly envisioned the darkening Potter universe onscreen, and yet the films themselves remain mostly uneven and forgettable even at their most diverting in the noise of the holiday/summer blockbuster season.
Deathly Hallows: Part 1 feels just as incomplete as its predecessors—and, as the subtitle tells us, it is literally just that—but finally we have an entry that transcends the series and stands as a fine film in its own right. From one of the opening scenes, in which Hermoine Granger (Emma Watson) tearfully erases herself from family photographs in order to protect her parents, we know this is going to be heavier than your younger sibling’s magic show. Calling it the best Harry Potter is an understatement.
So, this is where we came in: Dumbledore is dead, and Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) and the Death Eaters plan to kill Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) as he goes into hiding under the aid of the Order of the Phoenix. After a few close calls, Harry and his fellow wizard companions Hermione and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) flee to London and then infiltrate the fascist Ministry of Magic. There, our trio of adolescent fugitives intercepts a Horcrux locket, one of the magical vessels containing a piece Voldemort’s soul and a source of his immortality. As confusing as all of this might sound for the fair-weather Potter fan, the first half of the film plays like a marvelous chase thriller (complete with a shoot-out at an all-night coffee shop) that absorbs you into its haunted world so completely, you won’t care that you lost your score card a couple movies back.
Once Harry, Hermoine, and Ron escape to the forest and attempt to destroy the Horcrux, paranoia sets in among the three friends and the film slows down to become something else entirely: a quiet, almost mournful tone poem on nostalgia and lost childhood innocence that’s at times beautifully surreal and also downright scary. The legend of the Deathly Hallows, for example, gets retold in the form of a moody CGI puppet show. Ron experiences a lakeside hallucination in the woods that forces him to confront his own sexual fears and desires, testing his relationship with Harry and Hermoine. And how about that ghostly scene in which Harry visits his parents’ graves and falls into Voldemort’s trap in an abandoned church, a sequence that inexplicably ends with him on the floor of a child’s bedroom? This isn't the Harry Potter I remember.
If Deathly Hallows elevates the most popular movie franchise of the millennium in terms of the overall approach to the material, it also reminds us of the key to its success from the beginning. The special-effects cannot compete with Radcliffe, Watson, and Grint, who have become the most appealing young stars of their generation through Harry Potter alone. When peerless British character actors like Fiennes, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, Jason Isaacs, Bill Nighy, Rhys Ifans, and John Hurt are the additional star attractions, you know you have something really special. We believe in magic simply because it seems they do, too.
Rating: ***1/2 (out of ****)
Review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
