Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

Graduation.

Like numberless legions of other Harry Potter fans, I went to see the final installment of the movie series this past weekend.  As some friends and I were saying, in many ways, this marks the end of an era on a very personal scale.  In many way, this film in itself, both in its existence and especially in its content, is like a personal graduation -- a commencement -- an end of a kind of childhood.  Underneath the magic, it is about growing up -- about making the hard choices, about becoming responsible adults with a clear-eyed view of reality and a sense of right and wrong even in -- especially in --the toughest of circumstances. Maybe I can explain this way: The time to be delighted and awed by enchanted ceilings and floating candles at that first dinner  at Hogwarts is over. The dining hall has become a battlefield hospital in a full-blown wizard war with life and death, and freedom and tyranny in the balance. 

The themes of sacrifice, loyalty, and doing what is right instead of what is easy ... These are ultimately all about growing up.  I had gone into this film with plenty of apprehension.  I loved the books, and the movie series had been somewhat of a mixed bag.  This final adaptation, though, bore its own unenviable weight of expectation.  I remember grabbing the seventh book when it was published in 2007 and reading nearly nonstop until my eyes hurt.  I desperately wanted the movie version to ... well, maybe "do justice" to the book is too much to ask?  How about ... to be not a total letdown.  It wasn't.  It was magic on an entirely different level and emotional register.  It was riveting narrative magic, and for once the special effects acted in service to the story and the characters. You want an epic conclusion?  I GOT YOUR EPIC CONCLUSION RIGHT HERE.

For those of you in a hurry, I'll just say this: The Battle of Hogwarts itself is worth the price of admission.  For the rest of you: more thoughts after the jump.  < River Song voice > Spoilers.

The Good:
All I'm going to say is: this film does its utmost to bring together all the different threads from the massive narrative of the previous books and films, and it capitalizes on and indeed reifies the vast emotional investment that we as fans have placed into the Potter story over the years. Watch, for instance, for the reappearance of Percy Weasley (Chris Rankin).  He has no lines in this film, but his mere appearance fighting beside the other Weasleys speaks volumes in itself and is a shout-out to his role in the books and the idea that there is an entire world of underlying plots and characters that, while the movie cannot fully include them all, the movie acknowledges.  Also note the final fate of the Elder Wand -- a more perfect meditation on power and the temptation to use it has not been on screen in recent memory.

The Bad:
I've said it before, and I'll say it again.  I just don't buy Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort.  In my imagination, the evil lord of the Death Eaters should be a nightmarish figure who makes Darth Vader and the Witch King of Angmar hide under their beds. He should be far more viscerally terrifying than the English Patient with a taped-down nose and a really bad manicure.  Sorry.

Thoughts: 
Two of the most interesting subplots and character arcs may also be the most underappreciated.  I'm talking about Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis) and Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton).  Neville in both book and film emerges as an unsung hero, the "misunderestimated" one.  Passed over and disregarded and forgotten, too shy and quiet, studious and unprepossessing to attract attention, Neville was there when it counted.  When times were tough, when it mattered, Neville stood firm.  He's like the Rory Williams of the Potterverse -- the seeming nobody who ultimately played a pivotal role in the salvation of the world.  It should make us all better appreciate the quiet loyalty of everyday heroes -- the everyday heroism of faithful friends. The incongruous yet totally bad@$$ vision of a bloodied Neville in a rumpled shirt and striped sweater wielding nothing less than the Sword of Gryffindor should be reason enough to cheer -- the nerd who became a knight come straight from legend to aid Hogwarts in its darkest moment.  It's practically Arthurian. And he takes down none other than Nagini itself, the living serpentine embodiment of Voldemort. The glimpse of the aftermath was its own touch of sweetness: Neville sitting alone on a stone step, the Sword beside him, blood staining his face, smiling quietly to himself.  I've always loved Neville.  I have never loved him as much as I did right then.  The little round-faced boy of the first film has indeed grown -- almost imperceptibly up until now -- into a quiet hero of a young man.

Draco has his own arc, and it is a meditation on the personal cost of bad choices.  I've always had the sense that Draco is not in himself acually committed to the cause of Voldemort -- not in the way that Bellatrix is, for instance. Draco's parents -- especially his father Lucius (Jason Isaacs) -- become a portrait of what happens when an initial act of self-interest and cruelty rebounds and becomes instead a horrifying prison.  Their terror of Voldemort is almost palpable; whatever wicked pleasure they ever had in serving him has long since vanished in the face of a realization of what they have actually gotten themsleves into.  The open arrogance and sleek confidence on Lucius' face in the previous books/films has become in this one the expression of a haunted, hunted animal. Part of his pain and that of his wife Narcissa (Helen McCrory with a weirdly skunk-like coiffure -- its mix of colors all but a visual cipher for the jumble within her own soul) is their fear for their son, swept into Voldemort's wake and now trapped himself.  It's not enough to make you actually sympathize with the Malfoys, but it's enough to make you realize that their "allegiance" to Voldemort has revealed their tortured humanity in the end. 

When in the final battle the three Malfoys simply walk away, it brings up conflicted emotions.  I suppose for them, it is a certain moral victory that they abandon their ties to Voldemort and his evil.  They're courageous enough to do that.  But not courageous enough to fight with the good against him.  They simply walk away -- or slink away, as it were.  It's something they will have to live with for the rest of their lives ... along with the fact that the safety they will have in a post-Voldemort world (have you any doubt that if Voldemort had won, he would hunt them down as traitors?), they owe to the fighting bravery of the Hogwarts defenders -- the very people that they had once in their unthinking pride and self-satisfaction belittled and persecuted?  Think about that.  And Draco lives because Harry saved his life ... because his enemy turned out to be a better man.

The Epilogue:
This both in the book and the movie has caused a certain amount of debate.  Detractors tend to gravitate toward the expression that it closes the Potter story too definitively and turns the Boy Who Lived, the lynchpin of the wizard war against Voldemort, into "too ordinary" a figure -- Harry Potter, husband and father.  Likewise, Ron and Hermione, and Ginny, and Draco too, are all grown and married with kids, living their lives.  At first I was ambivalent about all this, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought that it was actually a rather profound statement.  As in the bit about Neville and ordinary heroes, here is writ larger the idea that facing danger and being flashily obvious is not the point in itself.  In the great scheme of things, good people fought and suffered and bled and sacrificed (and some died) in the war against Voldemort not for the sake of fighting, but so that in a world without Voldemort's terrible tyranny, people could live in peace -- could raise their families -- could live their lives. 

The fact that little Albus Severus Potter and his playmates could happily grow up in loving families is the point.  It should make us all (a) appreciate our own lives, and (b) appreciate those who fought and labored so that we can have lives of safety and prosperity.  Some things are indeed worth fighting for.  And I can't help it -- Raise a mug of butterbeer in honor of Fred Weasley, so readily pigeonholed away as a playful, frivolous, amusing prankster, but who proved himself no less a hero of true substance for all that.

The Verdict:
In terms of an epic conclusion to a beloved book series, this is how it's done. 

Mad Minerva gives HP7 a grade of A.  Well done, people.

Rotten Tomatoes give HP7 the nearly impossibly Fresh rating of 97%.

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2" runs 130 minutes and is rated PG-13 for some frightening images.

Here is the final trailer for this film: