Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
Rating: PG
Three stars (out of four)
Trust is a life-or-death issue as Harry Potter’s cinema swan song begins its two-part telling.
Disguised characters, concealed clues (and motives) and accusations of emotional deceit swirl in this seventh and most brutal chapter of the boy wizard’s 10-year saga.
Viewers of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 also have reason for doubt. Was the decision to split J.K. Rowling’s final (for now) Potter tome based on art or commerce?
It’s a bit of both, actually. But it’s unlikely this will matter much to fans who still have reason to be wild about Harry.
The high quality of the series remains. Returning director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves remain attentive as ever to Rowling’s holy text, and the mood is as magic as always.
Kloves deserves special praise this time. He makes an exciting story out of only half a book (Part 2 hits screens next July), and he does so while negotiating the largest array of characters yet to fill the Potter stage.
Wizardly school chums Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) are back and on the run. So are nearly everyone and everything ever to lend a hand, claw or talon in Harry’s decade-long battle against evil Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), which now approaches its violent conclusion.
There’s a gang’s-all-here spirit to the thrilling opening section, in which Mad-Eye Moody (Brendan Gleeson), the Dark Arts defender, devises a novel plan to have six Potter pals disguise themselves as Harry, to confuse Voldemort’s pursuing fiends while The Boy Who Lived is moved to a rural safe house.
Yet for all the familiarity, there’s one big change: the action is now out in the wider world, and not in the corridors of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where so much of the series has taken place. Harry, Hermione and Ron are almost adults now and school no longer defines their destinies.
Voldemort, played with ferocious intensity by Fiennes, is busily marshalling his own forces. The snake-faced spectre convenes a mob-style meeting of his Death Eater shock troops.
Assembled around a conference table, beneath the horrific adornment of a tortured woman, sit Lucius Malfoy (Jason Isaacs) and his son Draco (Tom Felton), Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter), Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) and other co-conspirators, who plot how best to kidnap Harry so Voldemort can personally deliver the coup de grâce.
Despite the crowd, fresh faces join the fray. Rhys Ifans plays Xenophilius Lovegood, father of the mysterious Harry pal Luna (Evanna Lynch) and editor of The Quibbler, a Potter-friendly publication.
And the movie opens with the new Minister of Magic, Rufus Scrimgeour (Bill Nighy), ominously intoning, “These are dark times, there is no denying,” a warning that seems redundant at this point.
It might be better had he said “these are darker times” since the Potter saga has become ever more gloomy, bloodthirsty and lustful (Harry gets a real kiss this time) as the story has advanced and the original audience has similarly matured.
The very fact that we see more of Voldemort in Deathly Hallows: Part 1 than in all previous Potter films combined should serve ample notice that the proceedings are exceedingly grim — but children already familiar with the Potter books and films will likely have few problems taking it all in.
The decision not to release the film in 3-D may have been due to production constraints, yet it’s a wise one nonetheless, given that many of these horrors don’t require a third dimension to increase their impact. The shadow-puppet animation used to explain the “Deathly Hallows” is another smart move that adds mystery while reducing bloodshed.
Kudos, too, to longtime Potter film production designer Stuart Craig, who really outdoes himself with his depiction of the Ministry of Magic as something from a Fritz Lang expression of nightmare fascism. A tower of Muggles (humans) being crushed by the weight of magical masters could have been taken straight from the workers’ underworld of Lang’s Metropolis. The visuals work well with the ominous score provided by composer Alexandre Desplat, new to the series.
All the same, there are moments in Deathly Hallows: Part 1 where you have to wonder whether perhaps Yates and his crew go a little overboard. A torture scene involving Hermione (mostly not on camera, yet sickeningly heard) and the aforementioned brutalized woman adorning Voldemort’s conference table smack of anti-female animus.
The circumstances are mitigated by the larger role given Emma Watson this time, as she proves herself the wiser and more able member of the trio of Hogwarts pals on the lam from Voldemort’s stooges.
She’s also the better actor of the three, leaving Radcliffe and Grint to do much of the same gaping and gasping as before, albeit far more convincingly now that they’ve grown to near-adults.
Hermione and her bag of magic tricks provide the fizz that keeps the film’s overlong second act from going completely flat. She, Harry and Ron hide away in forests to escape Voldemort while they discuss ways to find and destroy the “Horcruxes” (evil magical objects) that must be eliminated to stop the Dark Lord.
These long and melodramatic forest sojourns make it seem that Yates is attempting a Lord of the Rings or Twilight series tribute rather than a Harry Potter film. It’s here that the crass commercial aspect of this two-parter is most keenly felt.
Much of this repetitive section, and some of Voldemort’s hiss-and-miss machinations, could easily have been excised to allow Deathly Hallows to be a single film, as all previous Potter books have been.
But to do that would likely mean squeezing or dropping important plot details, and also lead to a single-film running time of well in excess of three hours — and this one is already long at nearly two and a half hours.
So to get back to the issue of trust, let’s give all concerned the benefit of the doubt. Applaud their sincere artistic instincts, and pay no attention to that cash cow mooing behind the wizards’ curtain.
Peter Howell is a syndicated Toronto Star movie critic.