In one of the several sweeping aerial shots across Hogsmeade to survey the destruction that the insidious Lord Voldermort and his army have wrought in this film, we fly over the familiar Quidditch stadium engulfed in flames, as its towers begin to topple one by one.
This is as much of the made-up wizard sport as we get in these last few Harry Potter movies, and that one shot is the crystallization of how far the series has come. What seemed so important in those early movies—indeed, what Harry himself saw as his proudest achievement—is completely insignificant at the end of this boy’s legend. Because, you see, it’s time to grow up.
* * *
I was reminded of a Saturday afternoon back in November of last year. I was snickering at the idea of fourteen young adults running around a field with broomsticks between their legs when I looked up and saw a thickset boy in war paint ramming his shoulder, and with it his entire weight, against a petit girl. She was thrown aside and to the ground like an effigy at the hands of a heretic. Later, I saw a different girl laid out on a gurney, being lifted into an ambulance, still adorned in her Quidditch team’s uniform.
I don't know what exactly I was expecting when I decided to go to my first annual Quidditch World Cup in Manhattan (featuring Muggle Quidditch teams of various high schools and universities from both US and Canada, including Harvard, Yale, NYU and McGill), but it was probably something less violent than what I saw, due to a part of my consciousness still identifying the Harry Potter universe as a product of innocent children's literature. It was a strange momentary lapse of thought, because I'd seen the last few Harry Potter movies by director David Yates, and those contain plenty of blood, torture, nastiness, choking atmosphere, and many, many gruesome deaths.
Those things are more present than ever in The Deathly Hallows, the final chapter of this epic fantasy saga that was split into two movies. The thing that becomes glaring when watching Part 2 is one of the few drawbacks plaguing the conclusion: it simply doesn’t work as a standalone movie, as it’s clearly meant to be one uninterrupted chapter. With a running time fifteen minutes shorter than the first half, when viewed on its own, it’s a movie that just starts out of nowhere and hastily reaches a climax that happens to last for over an hour.
So I’m going to wag my finger at Warner Bros for this shameful and damaging cash grab, born out of franchise-ending panic; but out of admiration for Yates’ accomplishment when the two halves are viewed as a single entity, I will now simply pretend that I’d just dipped into the restroom in the middle of a five hour long movie and stayed there for the past eight months. Pretend with me.
* * *
Fully taking on the identity of a gritty final chapter, it won’t jar anybody anymore when a section of Deathly Hallows looks like it could have been called The Bourne Spellcasting. Harry, Ron and Hermione end up wandering the streets of London, laying low and hunkering in a late-night diner to discuss their next move. Harry notices the two workmen ordering food stealthily pulling wands out of their coveralls, and boom—a closed-space shootout sequence straight out of a spy thriller ensues.
The wands-as-guns motif continues throughout, and the climactic war fought with spells look no different from a war fought with artillery. In the closing shot of the film (disregarding a completely pointless epilogue set 19 years later that features odd-looking computer-generated aging—the only time this chapter evokes the twee of Chris Columbus’ first two movies), we see our surviving heroes in a poetic moment of silence. Holding hands on the bridge to Hogwarts, we take in the history of the friendship they’ve forged in fire for the last seven years in that one gesture, as the screen fades to black. They’re bathing in serenity, but consider their surroundings. The bridge they’re standing on is half blown to bits, their path strewn with rubble, and in the background, Hogwarts is barely standing. Its courtyard, just moments ago, was littered with the dead bodies of their friends, classmates and teachers.
It's Harry Potter going as ugly as it can possibly get.
The cunning of Rowling's narrative over the course of seven books is that, while the series started off as wish fulfillment fantasy (unhappy boy with lousy foster parents discovers that he's the son of powerful wizards and is whisked away to a magical land full of discovery and adventure), there was always the sinister undercurrent that's waiting to boil, namely Voldemort, who’s quickly revealed as the murderer of Harry’s parents, and will one day return to claim his life, too. It's been a war from the start, but both Harry and his readers weren't old enough to be fully exposed to the horrors of said war. A decade later, they are, and the symptoms of war are showing more freely.
* * *
Chris Columbus initiated the movie adaptations. Directing the first two entries of the series, his take was to stick fairly close to Rowling's text, focusing on the fun of the contained adventures and less on the future possibilities of its own mythology. Had the direction of the series continued on Columbus’ template, we might have had a different series entirely. It’s Alfonso Cuaron, though taking the helm of the franchise only briefly for one movie, whose influence arguably runs the deepest—not Columbus.
A director known for confrontational films like Y Tu Mama Tambien and Children of Men, Cuaron introduced a new palette in The Prisoner of Azakaban. He eschewed the bright colors for muted blue and gray and ditched the wizard robes for practical, relatable civvies. He also experimented with meshing the CG imageries with a verite camera style, an aesthetic that's retained in various degrees for the consequent movies.
When David Yates—best known at the time as the director of the excellent BBC conspiracy thriller television series State of Play—took over for The Order of the Phoenix, he introduced a novel but succinct gimmick that treats the wizards' wands as essentially firearms. A battle of magic at the end of that film looks more like a duck-and-cover style shootout. Once this idea is in place, the series truly embraces its place in the action genre. Half-Blood Prince, also directed by Yates, carries a pretty intense scene where Harry and brat-turned-thug Draco Malfoy engage in a bathroom duel that left Draco cut up and bleeding to death.
It’s not all about increasing the violence. Most important about Cuaron’s contribution is that he painted the characters as blossoming teens with flesh-and-blood concerns, not simply ciphers for wizardry spectacles. It's actually the other way around, with magical going-ons serving as metaphors for real-world developments (remember the great opening scene that uses thirteen-year-old Harry's late-night experimentation with his wand to evoke a sly substitute for puberty’s discovery of masturbation).
You can’t deal with kids hitting puberty without the presence of sexuality, and the films dare to approach the subject without letting it dominate the surface. There’s the friendship that metamorphose into a lover’s pairing, fleeting empty romance, and the cold slap of reality that love alone doesn’t always work out. In Deathly Hallows, sexual envy rears its head when Ron is taunted by a Horcrux with images of Harry and Hermione in naked embrace. It’s the primary theme of this installment: trust.
* * *
The (re)introduction of Voldemort in Deathly Hallows recalls that of a famous scene in The Untouchables where Robert DeNiro's Al Capone brains an underling with a baseball bat, except this one is arguably more unsettling. Voldemort is sitting at the head of a long table, surrounded by dark wizards, contemplating a plan to kill Harry Potter. Suspended upside down in mid-air near them, bloodied and beaten, is a Hogwarts teacher who appears to have been tortured just because she endorsed interracial coupling between Muggle and Magic fellas, which disgusts Fuhrermort. The dark lord pulls her in as she cries, begging for Severus Snape to save her ("Severus, please—we're friends!"), but Snape looks away. Voldemort kills her instantly with the flick of a wand. Her cold, lifeless body drops to the table. Voldermort’s pet snake slides close, then eats her corpse.
I describe these gruesome details not to fetishize the lengths the film is willing to go in terms of violence, but to point out that even with the leeway they were afforded to sharpen their edges (seriously, there’s this one shot of Voldermort walking through a room decorated in blood and dead goblins that’s straight out of an R-rated horror movie), Yates still emphasizes emotional injury over physical ones.
We see this in the opening scene of the film that shows a tearful but determined Hermione using a spell to wipe her parents' memories of her—erasing their family photos in the process—in order to keep them safe from Voldemort's clutches. It's about as desperate and drastic an action as any of those three has ever had to do, and it's only the beginning of their hardship. We again see this in the big decision that Harry has to make in his final confrontation with Voldermort, where he’s required to make a sacrifice not once, but twice.
This is the key in these movies. JK Rowling’s books have the advantage of offering lots of imaginative context to every magical object and unique characters Harry encounters, using however many pages it required her to fully develop them. Not having that luxury, the movies strip a fair share of magic off of the universe, so for it to be anything more than a Harry Potter Wikipedia summary with actors, it’ll have to retain the dignity of the characters above all, even as it butchers the richness of the mythology.
Starting with The Order of the Phoenix, Yates steered the focus away from Hogwarts and onto the lead-ins to the inevitable battle in the final chapter. Even within the franchise, he built himself a hidden trilogy; and like any good trilogy, it begins with the formation of the force of good, continues into a despairing second act where things go horribly wrong, and finally stop at an explosive third.
Deathly Hallows, theoretically, shouldn’t work as a movie at all. It’s one long blind scavenger hunt for items that a movie won’t have time to properly set up or explain, with occasional interruptions for long, sit-down expositions and flashbacks, before whipping away to another scene. Cinema poison. Yet it still finishes with the impression that it’s disturbing, exciting and touching.
It’s finding the memorable moments between characters that can make a script like that tick, and Yates is excellent at it, giving even an infodump scene a rumbling of suspense beneath it. Moreover, stuff like a momentary dance of levity between Harry and Hermione, or the wordless understanding in Snape and Harry’s last meeting, are the ones that effectively resonate above the noise of the plot thundering forward. There are moments of dread and triumph here that Yates carried to a level of majesty that rivals the epic feel of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies.
* * *
As the series closes, and I mull over what a good job Yates did with the final three chapters, all I can think about is how much I would have loved to see him as the director from the beginning, playing architect with this universe and really giving it a consistent escalation of events.
Let’s face it: Harry Potter is far from a perfect film series. It starts out inert, and there are too many falls in its reach to the finish line. Despite my love for Azkaban’s sense of artistry, it was still not much more than a really well done sequel with a largely inconsequential story, sandwiched between childishly silly and deadeningly dull (that would be Mike Newell’s Goblet of Fire, the absolute worst of them all).
But to be sentimental here, I’m glad that the series as a whole leaves a positive impression and what I’m sure will be an enduring legacy, even if the filmmakers weren’t always up to snuff to make that feeling come alive. For some in the right age group, maturing alongside Harry can be life-defining—tracking their own growth by seeing Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, among other young actors on the films, transform from precocious children to charming adults over the course of the series. Questioning the validity of that recalls the scene between Harry and Dumbledore in this film, where Harry meets the spirit of the deceased Dumbledore in a limbo-like version of King’s Cross train station.
“Dumbledore… Is this real? Or is this all just in my head?”
“Of course this is all in your head, Harry. Why should that make it not real?”
Dumbledore appearing before him may not be real, the place they walk around in may not be real, but the conversation, the wisdom, and Harry making his decisions—obviously those are all real.
Similarly, Harry Potter is fiction. He may not be real, the movies may not be real, but the sense of friendship, morality and strength that these movies portray are as real as any. The imagination and wonder it has fostered in kids over the past decade is real. Above all, our experience with it is real.
Harry Potter is leaving, but the world is left a richer place than before he showed up.
Finite incantatem.
