In Which We Went To Sleep For Fifteen Years

Hurt Those Creatures

by ELEANOR MORROW

Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them
dir. David Yates
133 minutes

There is an ongoing trend, in the age of climate concern, to attribute human qualities to everything that surrounds us. This attitude extends to every creature in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, J.K. Rowling's not-so-humorous and not-so-exciting jaunt through the world that would eventually give birth to Harry Potter. There are oversized rhinoceroses desperate to mate, duck-billed platypuses who love nothing more than to steal, and mastodon-type creatures who only crave the touch of others. Would that any of the actual characters in this story had such manifestly human motivation!

It is almost shocking to see a Rowling film in which the actors are actually decent performers. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them manages a marvelous cast in comparison to the shit show that was the last gasp of Harry's quest to kill a man without a nose, that fellow who did something completely heinous: left him alive. In those last movies, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint looked completely checked out, not that they were really suited for their roles in the first place.

We desire a real love story, but instead of providing it, none of the characters in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them ever give over to animal instincts. Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) is the actor's usual sexless fop; despite being exposed to several beautiful women who invite him into their home, he can't escape quickly enough. His platonic friend Porpentina Goldstein (Katherine Waterson) lives with her sister (Alison Sudol) and has no man in her life. "What makes Albus Dumbledore so fond of you?" someone asks Newt halfway through the film, but we never get the pleasure of finding out.

Despite being named after the most magnetic iteration of 20th century masculinity, the Muggle at the heart of these events, Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), is a baker/veteran nearing 30 who works in a canning factory and has never had intercourse. During a particularly revealing interchange with Newt, Kowalski asks him whether he likes canned food. Newt just shakes his head.

Well, there is nothing wrong with canned food. Usually it tastes just fine, and it keeps forever. It's pretty good for the environment, but you have to understand that these are the types of people who only care about such things to the extent that they do not actually affect their lifestyle. Newt keeps all the endangered species he collects in his suitcase. In his head he is a progressive, but in actuality he is nothing more than a fancy zookeeper.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them inserts Newt in New York just after the war. In America, Muggles are colorfully referred to as non-Mags. You can tell that Rowling's trips to this country were relatively sheltered, because it is remarkable how completely whitewashed this New York is. Percival Shaw (Colin Farrell) is a magical official trying to track down a devastating cloud of smoke. If that idea excites you, you may suffer a coronary when the time travel yarn Harry Potter and the Cursed Child makes it to the screen.

The best way to do a prequel series would have been to create certain circumstances under which we could finally appreciate why the death of Mr. Potter was necessary – for example, it may have prevented Now You See Me 2 from ever being shown to audiences. If you have read the spoilers for Rowling's return to the character, you know that he has been basically put out to pasture in favor of his son, a spoiled brat with a famous father. There are no more orphans, just beneficiaries from Rowling's tremendous financial success.

I am probably too hard on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Rowling at least does a nice job unraveling the basic mystery here, and Yates' command of the various special effects required by the series has come a long way. The art direction of the animals themselves is immensely pleasing, and Redmayne's use of animals to save the life of a Jewish woman he barely knows is a lot more enterprising than a mere spell. There is one moment where Newt emerges in the Arizona wild where we actually feel the beginnings of a great adventure. A few minutes later, Newt's platypus is robbing a jewelry store, and all we want is to go back.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. You can find an archive of her writing at This Recording here.

In Which We Say Goodbye To Gryffindor

Multiple Personalities

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
dir. David Yates
130 min

Voldemort dies. Through a slightly confusing turn of events, Harry sacrifices the part of Voldemort’s soul that was imprinted on him, dies, comes back to life, and kills Voldemort. Voldemort has an issue with being killed, because he has been trying to kill Harry since roughly 1997. The flesh melts off of his face and turns into black smoke and disappears in the sky. Early on in the film, his bare feet are covered in blood as he passes through rows of corpses. His presence is unsettling, although perhaps not in the ways we would expect of him.

Harry’s life has quite literally led him to this moment, to face off with the most powerful wizard in the world amidst the ruins of Hogwarts. His parents, his friends and his classmates have all sacrificed something to preserve him for this moment. Somehow, he and Ron and Hermione are still alive after chasing the horcruxes and destroying them and meeting up with people who are not on their side.

Conveniently, it is easy to tell in the wizarding world when somebody is on your side: they don’t disappear trailing a cloud of black smoke or have skulls tattooed on their wrists. The only person in the story with ambiguous allegiance is Snape, but he doubles for Dumbledore at a high price: the woman he loves must be protected. We have no chance to wonder if losing Lily Potter will push Snape to the dark side — he simply crawls back to Dumbledore. When people say they learned more about doing the right thing from Harry Potter than from anything else, I laugh a little bit. What moral isn’t represented in this story? Take your pick.

Yates saw the final two parts as quiet, almost reverent in their solemnity, and bordering on restlessness. The action lacking from the first half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows manifests in short, dream-like sequences. Any dialogue is exceptional, and for the most part, useless. Near the beginning of the film Harry and his friends spend ten minutes talking to Olivander about Bellatrix’s wand, but only three minutes are devoted to Snape’s early memories of Lily, Harry’s mother.

Where was Ron’s comic relief, I wonder, and does Yates know anything about what happened to Ginny Weasley? Or the centaurs? Or Hagrid’s half-brother? Or Dumbledore’s back story? Or anything else that Rowling wrote about in the series, except for Voldemort’s face?

Yates is obviously not afraid of Voldemort or else so afraid of him that he must ridicule him. If he hadn’t given Mother Weasley her “Not my daughter, bitch!” before exploding Bellatrix into a million pieces, we might have all stood up and left.

Choice and its many consequences run like a silver thread through this messy little movie, the final part in the coming-of-age saga we were all beginning to search for circa 1999. People choose to die for Harry for no apparent reason other than they are biased against noseless wizards. Hermione randomly chooses Ron over Harry, although Yates’ tête-à-tête between Hermione and Harry in a tent in Part 1 would have had us believe otherwise.

Slytherin punks choose to spend the duration of the grand battle in the dungeons, Snape chooses to remain faithful to Dumbledore, Malfoy chooses to be the stock coward, the Grey Lady chooses to disclose the location of the lost diadem of Ravenclaw, and Harry chooses to die. Some of it is fate, yes, but most of it is just long shots of Harry looking into the distance with Ron and Hermione behind him and nothing but angst over what should be done.

It was simple when it started. Harry’s voice had not yet changed and Ron was vomiting frogs into a bucket and Hermione was still the obnoxious bookworm. They did things a certain way because they had been programmed to, maybe by their parents or just Rowling herself sitting alone in coffee shops writing while her baby slept upstairs. Maybe a curse had left a scar with a memory in it on their foreheads. Voldemort didn’t have a face back then, he was just pure evil, and when you are little it is so very easy to hate evil and be plucky and play Quidditch and do right.

In a heartbeat you are at King’s Cross station and it is a little bit like Heaven and Dumbledore is there, but there is also a screaming baby covered in blood that has Voldemort’s face, and you feel pity towards it or perhaps a little bit of love. “Do not pity the dead,” whispers Dumbledore. “Pity the living.” No one is totally clear on what that's supposed to mean.

Harry loses himself for a moment in the bright white light and forgets what to do. It is the only moment where he vocalizes any sort of self-doubt. Why go on living, if it is such a pity? Later, he snaps the most powerful wand in the world in two and throws it over the side of a bridge. Suicide. This strange and almost blissfully carefree behavior underlies every current of heroism in the film.

Do you choose your end, or is it chosen for you? Few people complained about the differences between Rowling’s books and Yates’ films until recently. This is so rare in screen adaptations that it would be an oversight not to call attention to it. Perhaps what is most shocking to us is that someone should choose to see a story differently than we have.

We grow up, and realize we have no idea what it means, so we grow our bangs to cover our scar and run around trying to destroy the evidence that we are here, splitting our possibilities in half with every step. There is another film, another Harry Potter, another J.K Rowling out there somewhere where the other choices — the ones we never picked — live until they have names we can say out loud and faces we can see.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about books to read in the summer. She reviewed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One here. You can find her website here.

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