A lot of people compared Harry
Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 to a camping trip from hell. The
characters were lost, scared, without a plan, and spent most of the film
sitting around in a tent and sniping at each other. Personally, I liked Part 1, and thought it worked great as a
tension-building precursor to a big finale. But whether you agree with that or
not doesn’t really matter; everyone should like Part 2. This second half of The
Deathly Hallows is the raging yang to the first half’s sober yin. We get an
opening scene full of dialogue to help us reconnect with the characters and
remember the stakes, but from that point to the film’s epilogue we’re off and
running, never stopping to catch our breath. We’re breaking into banks, riding
dragons, fighting battles, solving mysteries, dying deaths, and watching
everything around us explode. Deathly
Hallows: Part 2 is the grand finale to an eight-part series of films; it
had a lot to accomplish in order to be satisfying. It had to be huge, it had to
give all the important characters moments to shine, and it had to create
appropriate closure for the deep relationships we’ve built with them over time.
Aren’t we lucky then, that instead of dropping the ball, director David Yates
and his cadre of collaborators picked it up and ran with it? Err, but maybe not
ball… snitch.
This is the eighth in a series of very long, and very
involved movies. The world of Harry
Potter is huge, with dozens upon dozens of characters, myriad locations, and
countless magical whosits and whatsits. The ties between the people we meet are
old, deep, and form a complex web. To try and do a plot summary for the
uninitiated would be a joke. You need to get on this ride at the beginning. Potter is an epic story in every sense
of the word. There’s good and evil, love, loss, and lots of big action that the
fate of the world hinges on. But unlike a lot of the other epic stories made in
this day and age, Potter has a sweetness
and an innocence that sets it apart and makes it feel like a relic from the
past. Harry Potter is a universally relatable character because he is so dang
good. He’s the type of person that all of us would like to have in our lives. He
was born into a crap situation, abused, neglected, and unloved. He could have
become a monster. But at the center of him is such a good heart that he manages
to power through it, never giving into frustration, never giving into despair.
And he’s eventually rewarded with a real circle of loved ones and a solid sense
of his place in the world. This is the sort of uplifting force of positivity
that our society desperately needs. Ron, Hermione, and Harry taught a
generation of kids to be loyal, to work hard, to make tough choices in the
service of being good and just. Hell, they taught them to read. Compare that to
what kids learn from watching reality television and it starts to become clear
how invaluable the Harry Potter mythos
is to our culture.
The Deathly Hallows:
Part 2 works as a movie because of the beauty of the photography, the
thrills of the action, and the ridiculous amount of talent and skill owned by
the actors. A lot of credit needs to be given to the foundation laid before it.
I’m not much a fan of Chris Columbus’ first two films in the series, but they
came up with the template for the visual design of this world, they cast the
right actors in the right roles, and they set the stage for everything that
would come later. Potter is a series
that grows right along with its actors. Not only do we watch the principles mature
from 11-year-old children to 21-year-old adults, we watch the visual effects of
the film industry grow and become refined over the course of a decade, we watch
a relatively obscure director in David Yates gain a strong, confident voice
over the course of four films. The Harry
Potter series is like a snowball rolling down a hill, and this powerful
finale ends things as a towering juggernaut.
Much like the first part of Deathly Hallows, the second part lends its focus to the three
leads, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson. Three names that a
decade ago were completely anonymous, and three names that I can now type
without double checking my spelling, solely because of this series. Those first
couple Potter films were shaky for
the child actors, but they’ve grown into their roles so well that I hardly
believe anybody could imagine anyone else in the roles at this point. And
joining them, once again, is the usual cavalcade of the greatest working actors
from the UK. Time after time Harry Potter
has given us living legends married to perfect roles; and they all show
back up for this finale, some only for a second or two. It was a great
temptation, I’m sure, to give every one of these actors a farewell, to give
them each a chance to show off as these characters one last time, but The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 makes the
tough and necessary decision of sailing past them, keeping the momentum of the
plot going, and keeping the focus on the central conflict. Which means that
Ralph Fiennes finally gets a good amount of focus as Lord Voldemort. Up to this
point he’s lived in the shadows, or appeared in glimpses, but in this finale Voldemort
takes center stage. And Fiennes somehow makes him a personality filled, almost
relatable character. Even while reading the books I never believed in Voldemort
as a Pied Piper, the type of person who good people would be charmed into
following, but Fiennes is able to sell it. Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent,
and all of the rest are back, and they’re all great, but to talk about the
virtues of each of these actors could be a never-ending process. Instead I’ll
make mention that Kelly Macdonald joins the cast as the ghost of Helena
Ravenclaw and probably gives my favorite performance of the film. When acting
next to a stable with this pedigree and this amount of history in their roles,
that’s no small feat.
This franchise has created such a large fandom, has moved so
much product, been seen by so many eyes, and spanned such a large age gap of
enthusiasts, that it is destined to become one of those long lasting pieces of
cultural cannon that people keep going back to. Harry Potter is our modern fairy tale; these characters are our
modern mythological figures. In 50 years J.K. Rowling’s books are going to be
sitting in people’s collections next to The
Lord of the Rings, these movies are going to live shoulder to shoulder with
Star Wars. As individual pieces of
filmmaking, some of the Potter movies
are better than others, and none of them are truly great in my eyes. But when
taken as a whole, these eight films and those seven books are going to be
looked at as one of our cornerstone cultural achievements. It’s cool that we
got to experience them as they were created, to live in the social climate that
birthed them. And at the very least, it’s cool that they didn’t all just suck
after the first one, like most franchises. Fifty years from now nobody is going
to be showing the Shrek movies to
their grandchildren.
