In Which Sarah Doesn’t Know the Difference Between Blabbing About a Book and Reviewing a Movie

I don’t trust J. K. Rowling. Not, like, in the way where as I say so in the voiceover, we cut to a shot of her looking  past the camera mysteriously and then turning to walk through the door of my enemies’ house/boardroom/hangout. For one thing, I don’t even have any enemies (at least, not that I know of). But for another, from the admittedly little one can know of someone from reading their public output, she seems like a decent and nice person (Edit in 2021: nope!) who writes books I enjoyed reading, a lot.

What I don’t trust her about is payoff.

Once upon a time — before I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — I believed that the energy and emotion I was investing in parts of the epic story would be rewarded by the events of the conclusion. Now, I know that it’s easy for readers to be disappointed when they care about things it’s clear the author has no intention of fleshing out, and I understand that plenty of my feelings on some aspects of some stories are my own fault. I recognize now (and recognized then) that not only are few people as big Slytherin fans as I am, but that there’s nothing in the books that suggests that the Slytherin characters might be as important or, um, protagonist-y as the Gryffindor ones. And I would never fault Rowling for not writing the exact ending I imagined or hoped for or would have best enjoyed.

What I do think can be said about Rowling (I swear to god when I began this blog, it was just meant to be a review of the latest movie, but one thing led to another, and here you are getting some of my personal opinions on narrative before the relevant stuff) is that she has some major plotlines that are set up as such in previous instalments that fizzle away in the last one. The abandoned plotline that had me flipping back through the book to figure out if I missed something was the implied confrontation between Harry and Snape: Snape is one of Harry’s chief antagonists through the entire series, and book 6 ends with Harry making threats about what he’ll do when he and Snape meet again.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the reader to expect a confrontation, whatever its eventual outcome (victory for one, reconciliation, defeat for both). But, without wanting to spoil anything, when Harry and Snape finally do meet again, the last thing it can be called is a confrontation. That plot just kinda peters out. Understandable, on one hand, since there are more important things going on, but unforgiveable, on the other, since Harry’s feelings about Snape have up until now always taken precedence over whatever else happens to be going on, and there’s nothing in the book to show that this new attitude is a deliberate change to demonstrate personal growth through experience.

All this is to say: I will put up with a lot of plotholes and randomness if I love some — any — aspect of the world and the characters and I trust the author to bring it all to some kind of satisfactory conclusion. So if the book version of the Deathly Hallows had been mind-blowing amazing, I’d have forgotten all the niggling bits from the rest of the series. And to be fair, parts of it were very moving. Going back and reading my original reaction (warning: vague but possibly important spoilers), yeah, I was disappointed in the way certain themes were handled, but at least the story made me feel deeply for Harry at times. Unfortunately, as a whole, I found the novel structurally and thematically unsatisfying, as though important plot questions had been answered with, “But it was all a dream!”

So that’s where I was coming from when I watched the Deathly Hallows movie, and I know it’s why some scenes that were meant to be emotional or tense just didn’t affect me. Get worried about these characters? Please, I was worried about them the first time when the interviews were full of hints like, “Characters die! Important deaths!”… and then I felt cheated when, actually, all the deaths were of minor characters, antagonists, people who’d been offscreen for lots of the story, or all of the above*. Rowling, I thought as I closed the book in frustration, is too kind to her characters to consider marring the perfect happily-ever-after ending by offing someone devastating**.

And I know there were plenty of people in the audience who were affected by scenes I found dull or humorous. One guy behind me kept swearing in surprise when new developments cropped up, sometimes to a point I found startling, given that his other comments indicated he’d read the book. In any case, I can’t give you that guy’s impressions of HP7, no matter how more favourable they’re likely to be, since I’m not him. I can give you only mine, and now you know where those are coming from.

I really admire Steve Kloves, the Harry Potter screenwriter, for his ability to transmute often overlong and cluttered novels into smooth, relatively fast-paced movies. He streamlined Half-Blood Prince in a way I didn’t think possible, and he does his best with Deathly Hallows, but, unfortunately, IMHO, its structural flaws are insoluble through anything less than major plot changes. The thing about Deathly Hallows is that the only really important part is the very end***, and everything else happens sporadically, rather than as cause-and-effect. When watching the movie, it’s difficult not to notice this: every couple scenes, Hermione or Harry randomly suggests, without any obvious stimulus, that they go somewhere new, or suddenly another character bungee-jumps in to start some action. Why? Why now? Why not two scenes before or three scenes later? IITS.

(It’s particularly difficult not to notice when you’re familiar with the book and thinking “OK, which of these set-piece scenes I remember will happen next?” and then realizing it could be any of them because they don’t connect to one another in a logical fashion. Also, to be fair, the other books have this same set-up to a lesser degree — unfortunately, the structure of the school year has always helped to minimize the sense that things are happening whenever the author wants them to. School stories kinda work that way all the time.)

Kloves has done his best to cut out the worst offenders in the original (while transporting themselves to various wilderness areas around the UK, Harry and co. happen to run into another band of wizards on the run who just happen to talk loudly about important plot points within their hearing and then leave. Really? Really?); his choice of which details to leave out and which to keep helps to ramp up appropriate emotions and play down unintended reactions (Luna’s purportedly charming but in actual fact serial-killer-ish “friends friends friends” mural doesn’t make an appearance); and he quietly ignores details that provided atmosphere in the book but which, upon reflection, seem somewhat ridiculous in the wizarding world (the Trio have to kill and eat their own fish because they can’t figure out to accio canned food from a store? And they really suck at it besides?) .

To be sure, like the others in this series, this movie features a not-quite-canon emphasis on the relationship between Harry and Hermione, which often winds up reading as though he’s her gay best friend, but otherwise, I think the script does a good job of staying true to the spirit of the original while keeping it tight.

Another excellent aspect of the movie was its acting. Seriously, the contrast between movie 1 and movie 7 is mind-blowing****. In Sorcerer’s Stone, the leads’ performances were charming but, well, childish. It’s hard to believe those same cute little kids matured into actors who can offer the depth of feeling on display in Deathly Hallows. Just compare the scene in Prisoner of Azkaban where Harry finds out Sirius betrayed his parents and the one at the end of this movie. And the rest of the cast, adults and kids, is just as good, particularly the older actors who play the Trio’s, um, counterparts in the Ministry scene (la la la no spoilers)… although the movie does sometimes seem like the best older male actors in the UK are competing for an ugliest haircut competition. Sorry, guys, Michael Gambon won the instant he showed up wearing that beard-tie.

So in essence, my problems with this movie aren’t fair ones. Everything to do specifically with it being a movie was great — the performances, the design (what a gorgeous animation of the Three Brothers story!), the adaptation. My big problem was that the original just doesn’t hold up.  There’s tons of extraneous exposition that you can feel weighing down Kloves’s script, despite the fact that he’s done away with as much of it as possible.  There are events that seem to come out of thin air. The important things in it aren’t set up in the rest of the series, and the important things from the rest of the series aren’t followed through in it.

And, hey, ya know, that puts it in pretty good company: I feel the same way about, say, the ending of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. But that still doesn’t make Deathly Hallows move me the way I hoped it would.

Of course, I’ll still be holding my breath for part 2.

* Yes, yes, except one. But if you know enough to point that out, you know enough to know why I don’t think it counts.

** Anti-spoiler, since I’m telling you what doesn’t happen: like any member of the Golden Trio or the Golden Trio mark 2.

*** I’m already hearing arguments from virtual HP fans, but, no, that whole long search for the Horcruxes and the sword and the Deathly Hallows and the truth about Dumbledore was completely unnecessary. It could’ve all been taken care of in a few chapters because nothing that happened in the rest of the book changed the ending. Better, it could’ve all happened in some action sequence that actually affected the story.

**** For one thing, Harry’s eyebrows are GIANT. What’s up with that?