July 15: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1 (2010 -- David Yates)

★★★

With the last of the Harry Potter movies just coming out and all the summary appreciations of the series in the press, I realized I wanted to see the last one. Seeing Deathly Hallows 2 implied seeing Deathly Hallows 1, so I watched it.There is good to appreciate here. 

The mood is tremendous – dark, dangerous, foreboding. A lot of the atmosphere comes from dangerous creatures of J. K. Rowling’s imagination, creatures like the Death Eaters and Voldemort that we’ve come to know in the earlier movies, and a lot of the atmosphere comes from the direction of Peter Yates, with his dark pallet and growling sound engineering. The movie quickly sets up its tone by opening with the good guys out of power. It’s a dark world out there.

But the script doesn’t hold its own afterwards. Though evil is in overt control of the world, we’re left with scene after scene of Harry and Hermione sitting around a campsite angry at, wishing for, dealing with, or disappointed at Ron Weasley. Scene after scene. And the deus ex machinae of the movie are the house elves who, at least twice, have to drop in to get the plot moving. The elves have no other function in this film and only appear when Hallows 1 needs a way to finally move the story. The movie creaks though overly long dead zones and then suddenly zips through unmotivated action, so there is a certain lack at the center of the film.

My disappointed ambivalence here sums up my general response to the Harry Potter series. It’s not only that I’m turning into a crusty old man -- I liked the Lord of the Rings trilogy a lot, and it’s recent. Maybe it’s the franchise feeling I get in a Potter movie, like eating at Olive Garden instead of some local, authentic Italian place owned by an individual. Maybe the problem is that this series has so much to do with childhood and developmental psychology, a subject that has less appeal to me in film than other themes like myth and heroism.

But there’s no denying that a generation has grown up loving this series and that people around the world enjoy it.  And I certainly won’t miss seeing the last one in a theater  either.