Harry Potter

Harry Potter and the Half-​​Blood Prince. 2009.

The world seems to have got­ten used to Harry Potter. There is less fan­fare, less hype this time around. Or is it that things are much too seri­ous these days to whip our­selves into a frenzy about movies? Perhaps the death of the king of pop drained some extra reserves of enthu­si­asm, and made peo­ple more self-​​conscious about their likes and dis­likes. Perhaps enthu­si­asm for enter­tain­ers and enter­tain­ment has hit a momen­tary bump in the road.

Or, it may just have been the time of day. I saw the film this afternoon.

The the­ater was nearly full. It was a very good crowd, espe­cially for mid-​​afternoon. Lots of kids, their par­ents, and through­out most of the film, excel­lent responses, laughs, star­tled reac­tions to a well-​​made film. But some­thing was miss­ing. People left the the­ater silently, almost with a somber air. You could feel it.

The direc­tor, David Yates, seemed to know the crowds would be somber this time around. The col­ors in this, the sixth adap­ta­tion from the J.K. Rowling series, are often awash in gray, muted, and there is lit­tle sun­shine to illu­mi­nate the beauty sur­round­ing Hogwarts school. Subtly, the direc­tor builds up the darks, with the help of his cin­e­matog­ra­pher, Bruno Delbonnel. For those who have read the books, there are no sur­prises regard­ing the sub­ject mat­ter. But it’s still easy to have your sub­con­scious tweaked by image, mood, dark­ness and light, the snow, the mist, and the sound­scape. Bad things are on the hori­zon. We’re not in Kansas any­more and we’re swiftly mov­ing away from almost any reminder of child­hood innocence.

We do, how­ever, get glimpses of the inno­cence of ado­les­cence. This chap­ter in the Harry Potter series is filled with teenage angst and love and heart­break, and much of it has to do with mis­read­ing signs and the sor­row of bad tim­ing. Hermoine loves Ron, but he doesn’t see it and is busy with Lavender. Harry loves Ginny, but Ginny is dat­ing Dean. Yates skill­fully weaves this into the larger plot with­out melo­drama. It feels nat­ural, and the actors play their roles as if this were all hap­pen­ing to them, in real time.

Proportion. Context. Background and fore­ground. The light and the dark joust for our atten­tion, and noth­ing seems out of place within the magic of that par­tic­u­lar world. The movie isn’t about teen love, but that part of life carves out a niche inside the film. Time for inno­cence? Yes. But, para­dox­i­cally, it’s never blind.

There is very lit­tle time for any kind of inno­cence, really, when all is said and done. The world is chang­ing far too rapidly. Voldemort and his Death Eaters have entered our world as well, and Hogwarts is soon under attack again. Draco Malvoy is given a task by the Dark Lord and helps the Death Eaters enter the school for wiz­ards. Prior to that, we learn more about young Tom Riddle, and dis­cover his strat­egy for immor­tal­ity and the unwit­ting role played by Horace Slughorn. Horcruxes. Splitting the soul through mur­der and Horcruxes.

Dumbledore and Harry search for the third Horcrux in a cave by the sea, while the Death Eaters do their worst else­where. The art work lead­ing up to the cave, the stormy seas, the high cliff walls, are won­der­fully made and add bad omens to the mix. The movie is filled with beauty, though it’s darker this time, or gray, or muted by the mist and snow. Even quid­ditch is muted by win­ter storm.

Rowling took her read­ers from tween to teen and onto the cusp of adult­hood. Like all the best sto­ries for chil­dren and young adults, there is nowhere to hide, really, ulti­mately, from the real­ity of life and its flow. One more book to make. Two movies slot­ted for that last book. I think when we look back on this movie series from the van­tage point of sev­eral years, we’ll give it its due as one of the best ren­di­tions of pop­u­lar fic­tion ever.

 

 

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