Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

Having re-read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows before seeing the first half of the story in David Yates' latest, I entered the cineplex ready to dub the latest adaptation of the most popular book franchise in the world Harry Potter and the Interminable Holocaust Allegory. This would not be entirely Yates' fault, mind you; there are fundamental flaws in the story that cannot be blamed on anyone involved with the production. The problems inherent in the film version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows are the issues inherent in J.K. Rowling's final entry (one hopes) in her wildly successful series. When I devoured the closing chapter of Harry Potter's saga as an 18-year-old leaving high school just as the most visible pop culture symbol of my childhood came to a close, I loved every page. Absorbed by the action, I plowed through 759 pages in mere hours, sad to see these characters slipping away even as I propelled myself toward the end with breakneck speed.

What I saw upon a second reading, however, was the weakest book of the series since it moved into darker territory in the third entry. Pacing problems mired the first half in directionless muck, wallowing in dystopic Holocaust/post-9/11 allegory until exposition suddenly kicked in and never let up until the end (even the epilogue, which I found deeply unsatisfactory even on the first read, summarizes the futures of the characters with banal resolution). Yates' biggest contribution to the three Potter films he's helmed has been his commitment to retaining as much as possible of the novels while still releasing films at acceptable blockbuster length. Even The Order of the Phoenix, the longest and most meandering of the books, was whittled down to one of the shortest running times of any of the franchise movies without sacrificing the core of the work.

Ergo, his decision to split Deathly Hallows into two parts speaks less to the overflow of great ideas in Rowling's epic than a misguided attempt to use the final entry to give fans what fans always want: the entire book transposed to screen. Of course, fans don't know what they want, and it's interesting that the only fully successful adaptation of Rowling's books, Prisoner of Azkaban, owes its power to sacrificing the familiar plot elements to reach for a more magical and unpredictable atmosphere. There's nothing of the sort to be found in Yates' films, which suck the feeling of wonder from Hogwarts -- this was particularly evident in The Half-Blood Prince, which intriguingly dug beneath the oppressive and despairing tone of Rowling's best novel to find the feeling of appreciation and nostalgia for that which will soon be lost in the coming war, only to bungle this fascinating insight with a drab visual style.

I say all of this negative stuff to come to a surprising conclusion: David Yates got it right this time. More than that, he corrected what has been horribly wrong with the film franchise. If the director's defining trademark on the series so far was to ably cut down on excess while getting the story across unscathed, he proves by giving himself the space to breathe that, while he is still not cut out for the magical side of Harry Potter, he is abundantly capable of doing the one thing that no previous Potter film has managed: delve into the characters.

Whether shackled to the plot or simply under the impression that everyone had already read the books and thus did not need introduction nor updates on the characters, Harry, Ron and Hermione have often felt like spectators in their own saga, ushered from setpiece to setpiece before being made to deliver some line about the necessity of getting some Macguffin, the red herring that is Severus Snape and/or the importance of friendship, usually in the most breathless manner possible (Emma Watson in particular has always spoken her lines as if a mule kicked her in the stomach before the director yelled "Action!"). Here, however, Yates uses his spare running time to focus on the characters, and if Deathly Hallows Part 1 is about anything, it's about how these three young adults react to the horrifying situation in which they find themselves, a predicament so dire that even these battle-tested youths feel hopeless and directionless when confronted with it.

Undoubtedly aiding Yates and his aversion to the more mystical side of the mythos is the fact that Deathly Hallows is by some measure Rowling's most straightforward book, even if it is a tangled web of exposition. More indebted to Lord of the Rings than anything, the final book relies on an epic sweep of action to make up for a confounding and unsatisfying explanation for the final battle and heavy exposition throughout. Its emphasis on Holocaust imagery allows Yates to finally apply his more standard visuals to great usage, managing to turn a color palette that consists primarily of grays and grayer grays into something expressive.

So how does Harry Potter and the List of Schindler turn out? From the opening moments, as the sound of rusting and shrieking metal builds over a black screen before violently cutting out as the screen flashes an extreme close-up (the young woman in front of me actually dropped her popcorn tub in shock at this moment), Yates does a spectacular job of creating a sense of extreme discomfort, using Alexandre Desplat's dissonant score to keep you on edge even when the characters are sitting in a home. Nowhere is safe, no one can be trusted and it's only a matter of time before Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) uses his new control over the Ministry of Magic to track down his prey.

What, then, is a chosen one to do? After unloading a heaping pile of angst onto the audience with the film installment and indulging in puppy-dog teen romance with the sixth, Harry Potter and the Seven Beauties throws young adults into the real world, and the idea that Rowling plundered imagery from the most catastrophic event of modern times is a shrewd statement on how jarring true adulthood can be for increasingly sheltered youth. There are a few light chuckles to be found here as Rupert Grint continues his adorable "aw shucks" goofiness as Ron, but the dominant mood here is one of horror. Every time the kids manage to teleport themselves away from a fight, someone else finds them, and it's a wonder any of their hearts ever stop racing enough for them to sleep. After being decently entertained by the fourth film, bored by the fifth and frustrated by the misplaced emotional focus of the sixth, I was suddenly riveted. I even wanted to cover my eyes at times, so shaken by the world collapsing around these characters.

Mind you, there are a number of stumbling blocks in the film. For all the skill with which Yates handles the downtime, Harry Potter and the Boy in the Striped Pajamas still drags on far too long. A good 20 minutes could and should have been excised from the film for better flow. The gag of Harry's friends using Polyjuice Potion to disguise themselves as him to become decoys leads to some painfully unfunny humor too quickly out of the gate. Moreover, the dialogue in and around this scene is shamelessly expository, recalling not only moments from previous films but bits that were cut from the books for time. Another holdover from the book, Ron's petulant attitude toward the other two, is tired by this point: Rowling had so exhausted Ron's jealousy of Harry by the seventh book that she had to use the MacGuffin of the Horcrux, one of the seven enchanted objects that holds a piece of Voldemort's tattered soul, to bring out that tension again. At least Grint sells it well, and as much as this sort of thing brings back the angst that Rowling and the filmmakers separately beat to death with the fifth installment.

Actually, let's talk about that acting. I've always felt bad for the child actors in this series, forced to grow up and look talented when blanketed by, you know, every major story in modern British film. Still, they've never excelled, and Radcliffe in particular has never proven himself a star. Whether the result of maturation or the desire to go out with a bang, the three principal actors have dug deep and found a well of talent from which they'd not previously drawn. When Grint goes into his jealous fit, his eyes terrified me; I honestly thought he might lunge for not just Harry but Hermione as well. Watson tones down the histrionics and drops the endearingly nerdy side to tap into Hermione's insecurities at being the child of two Muggle parents, a fear exacerbated in the pureblood frenzy engendered by Voldemort (whose own blood is "tainted" with Muggle non-magic just as rumors abound to this day that Jews nested in Hitler's family tree). As for Radcliffe, he's come a long way from the boy who agonizingly ruined the terrifying revelation of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's return in The Goblet of Fire.

Yet these deepened insights come not from me-time showboating but group interplay. The way the three characters play off each other brings out these new traits, and for the first time all are developed in equal measure. Yates inserts a scene that was not in the book, placed after Ron, corrupted by the Horcrux, leaves his friends to try and find his family. As a devastated Hermione hugs a radio, Nick Cave's "O Children" comes on, and Harry, aware that they might both die at any second, extends a hand to his second-oldest friend and the two share a cathartic slow dance. This sequence is so ingenious, so well-executed and so planned-ahead for a later vision of Harry and Hermione kissing that torments the addled Ron that Rowling should call up Yates and writer Steve Kloves and thank them for improving her work.

When the action picks up, its more straightforward style allows Yates to focus less on the awe of a magical duel than the sheer terror of being hunted. After that failed lighthearted scene with the Harry duplicates, the Death Eater ambush that awaits the gang as they move to a safehouse is fantastically executed, harrowing and bewildering in the sudden assault. Harry Potter and the Day the Clown Cried even throws in a noble death that has already inspired various "Never Forget" messages and is a surprisingly tear-jerking moment considering the character in question hasn't shown up in the film series since The Chamber of Secrets. Even when Yates gets a bit too frenetic with a forest chase sequence, the action here is exhilarating and the kind of stuff that makes you grab your seat arm tighter. I also adored a brief animated sequence used to provide background on the titular deathly hallows, a bit of Gothic shadow puppetry that is as dark as anything in the film proper. Ben Hibon, who designed and directed this segment, went all out to make a haunting piece that resembles a sort of Slavic woodcarving of an old fairy tale, the kind that made even the happy endings fatalistic.

Naturally, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I feels incomplete, the setup to a finale that won't come until May of next year. But if having to wait six months is the price to pay for a Harry Potter film that finally passes muster, it's worth it. Previous films have used that who's-who supporting cast as a crutch, cutting to one of Alan Rickman's deliciously drawled one-liners or Maggie Smith's pert, slightly condescending humanism. Here, there's no one to distract from the principal cast, who are working without a net. They succeed beyond my wildest expectations, and after debating whether to see this at all or just wait until I unethusiastically double-bill the two parts of the film in May to break myself of the mediocre imagining of a key part of my childhood, I am thrilled that everyone involved finally got it right. The previous top dog of the films, The Prisoner of Azkaban, had the magic but not the story. This film, which lacks the magic by design, balances the visual impact with solid, if imperfect, storytelling, and it's all buoyed by terrific acting. Who could have guessed that the film to break Hollywood of its string of mediocre, audience-insulting blockbusters this year would be the latest entry in one of the most mediocre and audience-insulting blockbuster franchises of recent years?

Green Zone

From an opening sequence set during the initial bombing of Baghdad through a climactic final chase, Green Zone proves up and down that Paul Greengrass is still the director par excellence of shakycam action. Hot on the heels of the critical success of The Hurt Locker, Green Zone will almost certainly find itself judged by comparison to Kathryn Bigelow’s feature, aesthetically, narratively and thematically. It’s unfair, because the two can cleanly co-exist as counterpoints for each other: Green Zone serves as the political answer to The Hurt Locker’s humanism.

Like Bigelow, Greengrass has the ability to give each brief shot just enough duration to give the audience some semblance of spatial relations while jumping around to maintain a sense of disorientation. Gunshots and explosions break and scramble in the heavy digital grain, particularly in the many night shots, spreading so wide that one could almost mistake the atmosphere over Iraq as being made of gunpowder and shrapnel. The sounds and visuals crash together so violently you wonder how anyone could stay sane in this safe version of combat, to say nothing of the real thing.

Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) knows how to keep his head, though. He leads a unit searching for weapons of mass destruction, and we meet him as he and his team fight through a resistant sector to reach a reported chemical weapons facility. After taking casualties, the unit takes a warehouse, where they find nothing, their third straight piece of bad intelligence. When he voices this in a meeting, his superiors assure him that the intel is good, despite nothing but evidence to the contrary.

From that moment, any question whether the film would play its politics close to its chest goes out the window. Green Zone is all about rubbing America’s nose in its mistake, an approach both interesting and wearisome. “Interesting” because America is long overdue for a public shaming for our arrogance and jingoism, and the notion that this should come from the guy who capitalized on flag-waving, tragedy-appropriating attitudes with United 93 makes the prospect all the richer. “Wearisome” because it frames much of its politics as shocking twists, seemingly under the delusion that its secrets are still unknown. Green Zone’s ultimate reveal is that there were no WMD in Iraq, and I imagine that even the spoiler criers feel no need to protest me now.

Some of the script’s bluntness has a Fulleresque, no-bullshit quality to it, made better when delivered by the superb cast. I knew Greg Kinnear would be playing an officious executive before I even learned his character’s name or found out that he represented the Pentagon, but, credit where credit is due, he is just such a magnificent prick. He speaks most of the best lines of the film, and I suspect that they are the best lines precisely because he says them. Kinnear’s Clark Poundstone manages to spin everything and shut down any attempt to endanger the party line. He leads reporters like Wall Street Journal writer Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) on wild goose chases and stymies Miller’s quest to get to the bottom of the bad intelligence reports. Poundstone advises Miller to avoid CIA Baghdad chief Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson); “He’s been in the Middle East a long time,” Poundstone says, “He’s got a lot of preconceived notions.” For Poundstone and the administration he represents, practical experience and firsthand knowledge are not only unimportant, they can be a liability to furthering a political agenda. Miller gets a chilling line across to Poundstone in the end when he confronts the official about all the lies and asks, “What’s going to happen the next time we need somebody to trust us?” Occasionally, someone makes a less expansive political point that is no less astute, such as the angry reaction of the Iraqi informant, “Freddy” (Khalid Abdalla), at the excavation of a town square in the search for bombs; Freddy curtly tears down the illogic of such an exercise, asking the Americans how the Iraqi army or some insurgents could have buried weapons or chemical agents without the townspeople seeing it.

Sadly, lines like these rub up against chunks of dialogue so obvious and emphasized that they break the often-compelling blend of fact and fiction. Miller finds himself between Brown and Poundstone and remarks, “I thought were were all on the same side” and Brown responds, “Don’t be naïve.” As if this wasn’t clear enough, Poundstone appears in the next scene, denies Miller’s request for transfer under Brown’s command and tells the solider that he “chose the wrong side.” And, frankly, every scene set entirely in the POV of Iraqi Ba’athist officials -- led by General Al-Rawi (Yigal Naor), who seeks to make a deal with the Americans to keep the Iraqi army together to help the U.S. maintain order -- with the exception of the cold open only rehashes points made by the American characters. Setting the film entirely in the American perspective may seem a narcissistic gesture, but it would heighten the suspense by maintaining confusion -- when Freddy first comes to tell Miller about the Ba’athist meeting, we know he is telling the truth because we just saw the meeting occur, thus eliminating the suspense of knowing whether the troops would drive into a trap -- and would avoid the repetitive pontificating of the Iraqi generals, most of whom don’t have anything approaching Iraq’s best interests at heart. Freddy, too, oversteps the boundary between endearing and grating when left to give a monologue, preachy and overstuffed affairs that they are. I wanted to roll my eyes during his lengthy speeches, though perhaps that was a result of the camera movement.

This is all the more bewildering given the skill with which Greengrass conveys the film’s politics through those overwhelming images. Colliding shots of crowds swarming Humvees that subtly exaggerate the size and furor of the indignant populace, barren warehouses meant to store WMD that emphasize the failure of intelligence reports through the cavernous emptiness, an American couple casually posing for photographs in front of tanks in the green zone as Baghdad lies in rubble around them; with such suggestive shots, Greengrass doesn’t need to back them up with clunky, polemical dialogue. His visual placement borders on the ingenious with a pair of shots of a detention center where prisoners are kept without stated purpose. On the fence that surrounds the facility, a placard reads that the assigned unit is “honor bound to defend freedom,” a bitterly ironic sight gag that recalls the looming “Peace is Our Profession” billboard that overlooks the air force base in Dr. Strangelove. Inside the makeshift prison, guards hang a Confederate flag, a symbol of the opposite of American patriotism, of hate and spite. Why the director still cannot use a tripod at any time remains a mystery, but his visceral style has few peers, if any. Only shots of crying children and a needless montage of scanning newspaper articles stick out as sore thumbs in Greengrass’ superb visual presentation of the film’s confrontational politics.

Those politics are so fearlessly spoken, however, that I found my more reserved initial reaction to the film has softened. The Hurt Locker had its political messages, yes, but they were so subtly combined into its character drama that discussions of its politics have only just begun in earnest after numerous appraisers mistook it for an apolitical war movie. Though made long before Bigelow’s film hit theaters and garnered its reaction, Green Zone wants to leave no room for misinterpretation. The Iraq War was a mistake, no, it was a premeditated crime that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and thousands of Americans, destroyed our national credibility and ruined the world economy.

If Green Zone at times loses track of its otherwise taut structure to air its grievances, that is only because there are too many grievances to list. The film wisely implicates journalists for their complicity in the war, for being so enthused about receiving information from the government that would drive up readership that they never bothered to vet the intelligence. That’s right, the so-called liberal mainstream media are as responsible as the politicians who capitalized on panic, and Greengrass drives home the point when Freddy appears at the end of a climactic confrontation to throw a curveball before flatly telling Miller, the liberal do-good soldier who wants to expose the truth in order to help Iraq, “It is not up to you to determine what happens in this country.” Is it any wonder, then, that the most outrageous and sickening moment of the film is the airing of George Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech?

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

All right, then. Now that I've gotten all the background for my feelings on the Harry Potter franchise out in my previous review -- hey, it's almost like an allegory for the film itself! -- I can now fully concentrate on the film at hand, hopefully wasting less of your time with fewer words. Let's see how long I can go until I shatter that promise, shall we?

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone nearly bored me to tears; its endless exposition and world building left it without an emotional core, thanks in no small part to the amateurish acting of it three leads (who, to be completely fair, were indeed amateurs). Having not watched either it or this second installment since before the fourth film hit theaters, I found myself dreading the prospect of revisiting the other Columbus adaptation. After all, the first film was downright cloying in its faithfulness, and I didn't remember this deviating too much, either. So, I at last resigned myself to inevitable defeat, comforted slightly by the realization that soon I could move on to the third and fourth installments.

Happily, the film was a noticeable improvement all around. The Chamber of Secrets, working in the same world established in the first novel, freed Rowling to actually explore her characters a bit and, alongside the rambling Order of the Phoenix, contains some of the least plot of the series. Ergo, when Chris Columbus and Steve Kloves treat this book with the same adoring care they did the first, they can, in theory, spend more time with the characters.

Amazingly, Chamber of Secrets is a good 10 minutes longer than the previous movie, though its pace has noticeably quickened. Harry languishes in the Dursleys' home for the summer, kept away from his new friends, who curiously don't even send him any post. One night he's visited by a self-tormenting house-elf named Dobby who plays like a poor man's Gollum (basically, he's all Sméagol, yet he stil fights wth himself). Dobby begs this kind and powerful boy not to return to Hogwarts, lest unspeakable danger befall him. To ensure this, he causes a ruckus which the Dursleys blame on the lad. The Weasleys break him out, though, and soon Ron and Harry are off for another year of adventure.

Newcomers in the film include Jason Isaacs as a note-perfect Lucius Malfoy, who out-sneers even Tom Felton's Draco when he condescends to Harry and the entire Weasley clan. But it's Kenneth Branagh's Gilderoy Lockhart who steals the show. The foppish oaf with a winning smile (literally) takes up the vacant position for Defense Against the Dark Arts, but he quickly reveals himself to be nothing more than a charlatan and a buffoon. Such a role easily calls for some scenery chewing, but Branagh is just restrained enough to make Lockhart work as both comic relief and infuriating sub-villain.

But the main enemy this time is not the Dark Arts teacher but an unknown assailant attacking students with Muggle blood. A message is written in blood: "The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the Heir, beware." Soon, Harry's ability to speak with snakes is revealed, and he becomes the prime suspect. At some point, he stumbles upon a magic diary that can converse with him and even show him memories from the last time that the Chamber was opened.

These events start the ball rolling toward the darker tone of later installments in the series, but Columbus still attempts to create an air of whimsy about the picture, something he couldn't even do when the tone of the novel fit the approach. I mean, Harry and co. have to interview the ghost of a girl who was killed in the previous attack spree, yet that never feels as disturbing as it really is.

When Harry at last descends into the Chamber, though, things pick up considerably. The animation of the basilisk looks nice, but it never blends into the backgrounds convincingly, and Columbus' stabs at action shots lapse into absurdity -- a POV shot of the snake lunging for Harry is particularly laughable. I also picked up on one line, when Tom Riddle, the man in the diary and the basilisk's master, shouts: "The basilisk may be blinded, but it can still hear you!" A problem: snakes don't have ears. Now, it can pick up vibrations, sure, but even a giant snake that can kill with a stare is sill a snake.

On the plus side, the acting gets a bit of a boost this time around. Rickman still has little to do (indeed he is tragically under-used throughout the series) and Harris, though authoritative, fails to capture either Dumbledore's loopy essence or his hardened core. He instead seems more like an English Mr. Miyagi, offering faintly witty nuggets of advice and encouragement. Radcliffe, however, delivers his lines with more conviction, and Grint works as great comic relief if not a strong lead in his own right. Watson too has improved her approach, still capturing Hermione's nerdiness but backing off the more annoying deliveries. Even as new cast members such as Branagh and Isaacs steal their scenes, these kids can finally hold their own, though it helps that the rest of the vets are still either phoning it in or limited by the script.

The entire film's quality in relation to the previous film can be summed up in its score: John Williams' soundtrack for the first film was a garish, clanking affair that fully displayed the composer's worst traits -- overly boisterous blasts of brass and strings that signal triumph even before the battle's been won. And the Diagon Alley music sounded like a lame carnival. Here, he's more subdued, but barely. He still chucks himself in the middle of scenes and robs them of their power, but just not quite as often. That's Chamber of Secrets in a nutshell: still a weak, too-literal movie, but the signs of a positive growth are certainly exhibited.