review: harry potter and the half-blood prince

This sure ain't Chris Columbus's Hogwarts anymore.

As with all reviews, SPOILER ALERT. You have been warned.

I have just returned from a second viewing of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. While I cannot say for sure yet that it is my favorite of the films (Prisoner of Azkaban will always have a special place in my heart based on plot alone) I can say with confidence that it is the best.

I can say this with confidence because I have read all seven books. And here is where I have a simple answer for those non-readers who kvetch about being confused about the various plot details: Go read the damn books, already. They're the twenty-first century's first great works of literature, for crap's sake. If eleventy zillion kids can do it, so can you.

I bring this up because Half-Blood Prince is a very fine movie on its own terms, but as an adaptation, it is simply magnificent.

It must be stated that a number of factors came together for this one. David Yates, the franchise's most well-suited director, who also did Order of the Phoenix, teamed up for the first time with veteran screenwriter Steve Kloves, who took the fifth film off and who probably knows more about the Potter universe than anyone save its creator. For the first time since Chris Columbus, a director gets the opportunity to take on more than one Potter film back to back, and the consistency in tone, visual style and the direction of actors shows.

The filmmakers also benefit from the increasing maturity and experience of their young cast, who grow more capable with each film. In Half-Blood Prince, one feels that for the first time some of the cast have learned how to act when they don't have a line to say, and it seems that Yates has paid special attention to getting naturalistic reactions and performances. If Daniel Radcliffe is still not quite up to the emotive challenges of certain scenes, we can take comfort in the fact that he had a whole Broadway run of Equus to practice on before filming Deathly Hallows.

Also, for the first time, cast, crew and audience have the enormous benefit of knowing how it all ends. This allows Kloves and Yates to achieve a level of sophistication in terms of foreshadowing, planting, and manipulation of storytelling elements that is miles ahead of any other Harry Potter film.

The result is that six films in, the franchise has finally hit a virtuoso note. The Kloves/Yates team has achieved a level of fluency with the magical world that allows them to go beyond putting the page on screen to actually creating something new out of Rowling's incredibly rich source material--combining, condensing, riffing, reading between the lines, creating new scenes and whole sequences that were never in any book but feel like they could have been, and in some cases--dare I blaspheme?--actually improving upon the source material by using film's unique ability to communicate incredibly concisely with images.

Yates and Kloves are substantially aided in their mission by absolutely stunning cinematography and lavish production design. I can say without seeing another movie this year that production designer Stuart Craig and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (who shot Amelie and Across the Universe) should both receive Oscars for their work. Witness the insane detail of Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes, Mr. Weasley's junk-filled garage at the Burrow, and the Room of Requirement (one million points if you can spot a diadem anywhere in there!) Each of these locations appear on film for mere minutes, but the amount of detail packed into them is astounding. Delbonnel's camerawork--from the jaw-dropping opening sequence in which Death Eaters zoom through the Muggle world into the magical one and back to destroy London's Millennium Bridge, to a number of still shots that are so exquisitely composed they look like fine art or an exceptional stage play--makes us forget for huge sections of the film that we're on a set in Leavesden Studios and not on location at Hogwarts, the Burrow, or Diagon Alley.

But beyond the technical and aesthetic aspects of the film, which are masterful (Did I mention the special effects? Seamless!) Half-Blood Prince is a tour de force of visual storytelling that should humble any student of film. Just as our young witches and wizards are learning non-verbal spells, it seems the filmmaking team is finally becoming confident in an adaptation approach that condenses some of Rowling's admittedly lengthy exposition into images of incredible conciseness and power.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the film's exquisite first shot, which is actually a flashback to the end of Phoenix--Harry, bloody and in shock, having just seen Sirius murdered and almost been killed himself, is accosted by a melee of reporters in the Ministry of Magic. Dumbledore simply puts his arm around him, to protect him--and in just a few seconds of film, we've set up the tone, the stakes, and the key relationship of the film--all before the Warner Brothers logo appears and without a single line of dialogue. This image is beautifully echoed much later in the film, when Harry and Dumbledore return from the cave. This time it's Dumbledore who's leaning on Harry, and the fact that a wrenching role reversal has occurred could not be more clear.

Amazingly, Yates and Kloves have been able to take what I always found to be the most disjointed of the books and create what is perhaps the most unified film. Out of a witch's brew of expositional flashbacks and vaguely-defined missions and budding teenage romance, they have distilled a potent thematic core, which can be summed up somewhat along the lines of "We were all children once"--with the implication, of course, that the time for childish things is rapidly coming to an end. Because, as we know, in the wizarding world, one comes of age at seventeen.

This is a story about two young men on the cusp of becoming adults, in extremely violent times and perhaps before they are ready. These young men are Harry and Draco, of course, and their twin missions drive the story forward like a well-crafted spy tale. Harry's mission is essentially intelligence-gathering, and requires qualities that are not particularly his strong suit, but that will be essential for the final part of the story. Draco's mission is the dark counterpoint to the main story, reinforcing the urgency of Harry's own task, and the filmmakers balance tension between the two storylines exquisitely.

Tom Felton, who plays Draco, has seemingly grown up overnight since the last film, and here he gets a chance to really shine. Watching the savage confidence--so like his father!--he displays at the beginning of the film crumble under the weight of what he has been ordered to do, seeing the scared little boy still there underneath the swagger and bravado, is truly tragic. The fact that so much of his storyline is handled without any dialogue at all (appropriate given Draco's utter aloneness on his mission) is a testament to the sophistication of the production.

Ironically (at least within the dramatic logic of the film), it is Harry's unthinking act of violence, the Sectumsempra curse, that ultimately pushes Draco into carrying out his plan. For Harry, growing up means supplementing his raw courage, which at its worst can turn to rage and rashness, with patience, tact, shrewdness and good judgment in circumstances where there will no longer be anyone older and wiser to rely on. For Draco it means being in over his head in a savage, violent and unforgiving world for which he is not prepared. It also means forsaking the teenage diversions and dalliances happening all around him. There is one beautifully composed shot where a crowd of older students linger in the shadows, talking, laughing and kissing, while Draco walks up a deserted corridor, completely alone. And if anything were still in doubt, Draco's pained reaction as he watches his new comrades smash up the Great Hall says it all.

There are, of course, two other young men of approximately the same age as Harry and Draco who haunt the edges of the film. One is Voldemort, seen in several concise flashbacks. Let me just say, both the actors who portray the young Tom Riddle (the younger of whom is Ralph Fiennes's nephew) have a promising career in evil-child horror films if they want it. The teenage Riddle, in particular, displays such an air of unspoken menace that I cared not a whit that he looked completely different from the diary Riddle in Chamber of Secrets, who presumably could not be more than one or two years older.

The other is the Half-Blood Prince himself, who I am very sad to say gets such short shrift in this film that it hardly deserves the title. In one of the few cuts of which I did not approve, the mystery of the Half-Blood Prince's identity is almost entirely excised from the film, to the point that when the final reveal comes (it's Snape) we hardly care.

I am of two minds about this choice. On the one hand, the knowledge of the Half-Blood Prince's identity contributes nothing dramatically to the film the way it has been set up. But on the other hand, it does contribute something thematically, by giving us a glimpse of Snape as a boy, which is kind of a strange idea to even think about. There is a lot we can deduce about the teenage Snape from this book, and from the other scraps of evidence we get about him in books five and seven. He is a half-blood, like two other significant characters. A poor kid from an unhappy family (the decrepit mill town from which Snape hails gets only the briefest visual reference in the film.) The kind of kid who would end up with a used book from the classroom cupboard. The kind of kid, we learn, who was mercilessly teased by cocky bastards like young Sirius and James for being "a greasy little oddball up to his eyes in the Dark Arts." The kind of kid who takes refuge in intellectual superiority and crowns himself a prince in his own private world. The kind of kid who becomes drawn to the Dark Arts out of a sense of powerlessness and a desire for revenge--who, at sixteen, invents a potentially lethal spell and labels it "for enemies." The kind of kid, who, in the Muggle world, might walk into school one day with an assault rifle. The kind of kid who grows up to be a cold-ass mofo who can walk up to one of the greatest wizards of the day and kill him without batting an eye.

What path Snape ultimately chose, and why, is one of the greatest reveals of the entire series, and I won't spoil it here. But it seems like the story of the Half-Blood Prince contributes something to Rowling's ongoing exploration of what attracts people to evil, and I was sorry to see so much of that plotline gone.

Against these heavy and mature themes, the comedy and budding romances sparkle all the more brightly, because they are constantly playing out right under the shadow of death. "Ugh! It was happy, then sad, then happy, then sad! I didn't know what to feel!" complained a teenage girl in line for the bathroom in front of me at the Wednesday night Grove showing I attended. "That's the point!" I wanted to yell. This is both the funniest of the Harry Potter movies and the most melancholy. The mix of comedy and tragedy, of laughing in the face of doom, is a strong component of Rowling's work, and seems to me to be...actually quite true to the way people behave in a world where sudden violence and death lurks around every corner.

There are numerous examples of this lightning-quick tone shift (Ron drinking the poisoned mead, Harry and Ginny's first almost-kiss in the Burrow, the moment just before the Katie Bell incident when Hermione really seems kinda tipsy) but my favorite is the story about Slughorn's pet fish. Here is a story that begins slightly randomly and is played for comic effect. It's even enough of a non sequitur that you might be tempted to dismiss it as clumsy screenwriting. But the funny little story about the fish that went "poof" turns on a dime to become something beautiful, then tragic, then vitally important to not only that scene but to that entire sequence of the film. In fact, holy crap, it's not only the culmination of the sequence (in Script Analysis terms) but of the whole second act of the film! Surprise! It's actually quite good screenwriting!

And--surprise again--this story about the fish is nowhere in Rowling's book. But it fits the world, the characters and the themes so well that it could have been, and in fact makes me almost wish it was.

There is another wonderful image that is not in the book, and this is what I will leave you with. Many people will be disappointed that Dumbledore's funeral is not in the film, leaving the ending feeling all Empire Strikes Back-y and inconclusive. (David Yates has promised we will see it, and many suspect it will be the opening sequence of the seventh film.) But there is a lovely and again wordless moment, in the scene where Dumbledore's death finally sinks in, where Professor McGonagall (the de facto second-in-command of Hogwarts after Dumbledore) raises her wand, lit with a single point of light, to banish the Dark Mark that stains the sky above the castle. One tiny point of light is not enough to do it. But one by one, the grief-stricken students, staff and teachers all around her follow suit, lifting their wands skyward in a silent gesture of unity and solidarity, an unspoken vow of collective resistance--a hundred points of light which together are strong enough to wipe away the clouds of death and terror that hover above them.

This image is so powerful, so beautiful, and so thoroughly Rowling-esque that I can only say one thing, which is that I am very, very excited for what these folks have in store for us in the final two films.