Magic & Misfires: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

The Magic

1.   Ralph Fiennes’ Voldemort was the highlight of the final film and one of the highlights of the entire series. Rowling herself is to be congratulated for giving in the books what might have been a rather boring two-dimensional figure of evil incarnate three very robust dimensions. And in terms of his serpentine look, his chilling voice, and the sinuous movements of his arms and fingers, Fiennes brought Voldemort to life with astonishing brio.  

2.   The film takes us as quickly as it can to the Battle of Hogwarts (along the way sacrificing one or two important bits of backstory—see below), but it successfully makes this a compelling climactic sequence.

3.   Although the violence shown is not bloody, the film follows the book in showing the cost of bravery in the deaths of Fred, Lupin, Tonks, etc.  

4.   Alan Rickman, with his voice as deep, rich and melancholic as a viola da gamba, did a marvelous job throughout the eight films in portraying Severus Snape, and this last film’s depiction of his final revelation and death were  worthy of this Dickensian character. Though Snape’s devotion to Lily Potter years after her marriage to another man is, after all, rather unseemly, Snape’s moral ambiguity nonetheless makes him a richly compelling character. Kudos to Rowling for keeping a global audience in suspense for years about Snape’s loyalties.  

5.   A nod of general appreciation to Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson, who did a remarkable job over a great number of years in bringing the three chief protagonists to life and making their characters’ transitions from childhood to adulthood utterly believable. I might have liked to have seen a more ungainly Harry Potter, someone more along the lines, at least in look, of Matthew Lewis (who played Neville Longbottom). But Radcliffe certainly grew into the role, and in the end made a persuasive Potter.

6.   Professor McGonagall (Maggie Smith): “I’ve always wanted to use that spell.”

7.   A nod to Helena Bonham Carter, and the scene at Gringotts in which she spot-on plays Hermione disguised as her character, Bellatrix LeStrange, under the influence of Polyjuice Potion.  

The Misfires

1.   Cutting out the backstory on Dumbledore’s involvement in the accidental killing of his sister, Ariana. Inexplicable. Unacceptable. Dumbledore’s character cannot be understood without this part of his history.

2.   A lack of visual inventiveness on the part of the director, David Yates. One of the things that made Deathly Hallows, Part 1 so interesting was the freshness of the cinematography—e.g., the use of Cinéma vérité technique—but none of that freshness was on display in this film (Cinéma vérité, for example, would have worked quite nicely in the Battle of Hogwarts sequence.)

3.   Connected to this last point is the fact that some of the most important scenes failed to exploit all their emotional potential. Harry should have said a “final” goodbye to Ron before going to his certain death. The scene between Harry and Dumbledore at King’s Cross was—except for the portrayal of that bit of Voldemort’s soul—visually and emotionally pedestrian. The final scenes in which we say goodbye to our heroes also lack the emotional punch one would expect after eight films. As compared to the closing scenes of the film version of The Return of the King (the third installement of The Lord of the Rings), Deathly Hallows, Part 2, goes out, if not with a whimper, then not with a bang, either.

4.   Michael Gambon’s Dumbledore. I’ve liked Michael Gambon in everything else I’ve seen him do, but I’ve disliked pretty much every decision he’s made in playing Dumbledore—including in this final film. One sorely misses the twinkling eye of Richard Harris’s Dumbledore, his composure, his soft, raspy voice redolent of wisdom and serenity.

5.   Of all the films, this film exerts itself the least in helping the audience along with Rowling’s at times very complicated backstory (understandable to a point, in that a goodly part of the galaxy has been consumed with that backstory for four years). When it comes to Horcruxes, those a little fuzzy on the details will be okay. But when it comes to the Deathly Hallows, forget it. Best to re-read portions of the seventh book, or watch again Deathly Hallows, Part 1, before embarking on this final film.

But it would be churlish to bid farewell to the original run of the Harry Potter franchise without congratulating all the filmmakers, and above all J.K. Rowling herself, for giving so many of us so many years of enjoyment with this truly enchanting story. 

Why Harry

As the last installment of the Harry Potter film franchise opens today, it is worth summing up why the books and films have been so wildly successful. There are many reasons, some having to do with the marketing mechanisms of global pop-media culture. But I believe the deepest reasons are these:

5. Their irresistible picture of intimate, loyal friendship.

4. Their equally irresistible picture of a tight-knit community of families and friends working for the common good.

3. Their whimsical, charming, and innocent humor, a particularly British sense of humor more potent to the reader and viewer than any depictions of magic.

2. Because they draw upon an archetypal story that moves the human spirit like no other: that of a small, humble person summoning up great courage in order to overcome a seemingly invincible evil. It is a story in one sense as old as the world, but in another as fresh as evening air after rain. Christianity, of course, takes the story to its greatest possible achievement, simply because it tells us that the story is true. Somewhere in The Everlasting Man G.K. Chesterton writes that the human heart above all desires “romance” (understood as adventure, including the adventure of love), and “truth,” and what Christianity offers is the most captivating of all combinations: a true romance. Harry Potter is captivating because it is a shadow and an image—imperfect, yes, but still remarkably enchanting—of the one True Romance. (For more on this point, see here.)

1. Because the books and movies argue compellingly for the central value of the Christian story: sacrifice. Isn’t it interesting that so many people around the world, especially so many young people, will flock to movie theaters in the coming hours and stand in line in order to watch a story about a young man   willing to lay down his life for his friends?

What We See at the Movies

In this the third in our Virtual Summer Circle of Thomistic Studies, let’s focus on the theme on which Maritain ends Chapter II of Art and Scholasticism: that art is essentially an activity of reason.

In the final paragraph of the chapter Maritain writes:

The work of art has been thought before being made, it has been kneaded and prepared, formed, brooded over, ripened in a mind before passing into matter. And in matter it will always retain the color and savor of the spirit. Its formal element, what constitutes its species and makes it what it is, is its being ruled by the intellect. If this formal element diminishes ever so little, to the same extent the reality of art vanishes.

Matter? Formal element? Let’s bring these abstract terms to life with some examples.

In talking about art in the passage quoted, Maritain employs the metaphor of bread-making. Art must be “kneaded and prepared.” But in art the kneading and preparing of the dough is done not by the hands, but the mind. In a work of art the mind takes thought and “en-forms” some matter with it. In bread-making itself, the thought involved can be summed up by the word “recipe.” In the writing of a symphony, thought is expressed in the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, counterpoint, etc., en-forming sound.

Thought is the formal or “shaping” element of art. Matter is the “stuff” out of which the work is made. Hence Maritain defines art using St. Thomas Aquinas’s Latin phrase: recta ratio factibilium: “right reason about things to be made.”     

I want to try and make these thoughts even more vivid by applying them to an interesting discussion in this morning’s New York Times by film critic Manohla Dargis, in which Dargis reflects upon the ways in which habits of cognition and visual perception affect the ways in which we see movies. There are many fascinating items in Dargis’s piece about the ways in which our attention is shaped and how that shaping affects the way in which we watch movies. But I’ll just focus on that part of Dargis’s piece in which she considers a comment by film theorist David Bordwell:  

As Mr. Bordwell recently wrote on his blog, davidbordwell.net, “perceptually, films are illusions, not reality; cognitively, they are not the blooming, buzzing confusion of life but rather simplified ensembles of elements, designed to be understood.” Both the real world and earlier movies we’ve seen teach us how to look at films: we look at movies and understand them through their norms.

We see movies, says Dargis, based upon habits attained by our history of movie-watching and by our experience of “the real world.” These two sources provide the “norms” of our movie-going experience.

For most us, our history of movie-watching is filled predominantly with popular films out of Hollywood and the distinctive ways in which those films depict action, are cut, make use of dialogue, close-ups, music, and the like. This helps explains why in watching the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, we don’t notice the pirate who in the one scene left his shades on—because our perceptual habits have us focused on Johnny Depp’s face.

The deep grooves of our cognitive habits also help explain why we become slightly weary when films such as The Tree of Life and Into Great Silence don’t move at the pace or make use of dialogue in the ways in which Hollywood films do. As Dargis quotes Bordwell: “Narrative is our ultimate top-down strategy in watching a movie…specifically, I think, classical narrative principles.” In other words, what we look for first in watching a movie, at least those of us who consume a steady diet of Hollywood cinema, is plot. We want to see a hero desiring a clear goal and encountering ever-greater obstacles in the pursuit of it.

To bring this back round to Maritain: when it comes to movie-watching, all of this perceptual and cognitive shaping is owed, on the one hand, to the thought of those artists who make the film, principally the writer and the director. It is these film artists who seek to “say” something by cutting a scene at just this point, or by adding a line of dialogue here, or, as Hitchcock did in the famous scene from North by Northwest, by eschewing music for an entire scene and relying only on ambient sound. In all of these decisions the artist’s reason is “kneading” the “dough” of his art, exerting “right reason upon things to be made.”

Chesterton once said: “Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.” In this typical bit of Chestertonian hyperbole we find a unique expression of the definition of art. Art does consist of limitation, if by limitation we understand the myriad decisions by which the artist en-forms stuff with thought.  

Recall, however, that our movie-watching history is only one source of the habits we bring into the living room or theater. The other source is our experience of life itself. While it is true that when the house lights go down we tend to look for plot above all else, this expectation is not merely due to all the plot-driven Hollywood movies we’ve seen in our lives. It’s also due to what we know about human beings. Life itself is plot-driven. The narrative structure of human existence is not something filmmakers have invented and wired into our consciousness. It is there wherever a human being exists.

For what else is it to be a human being than to be an agent on the hunt for happiness? 

This insight that life is narrative is the deepest source of “right reason” when it comes to storytelling of all kinds. And to paraphrase Maritain, if this formal element of the art of storytelling diminishes ever so little, to the same extent the reality of the art vanishes.