Lettergrade: C
The Harry Potter books get better the further into the series you get, but I realized while watching this new one, Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, that the films have been doing the opposite for me. I've had that nagging feeling since seeing the fourth movie, Goblet Of Fire, directed by Mike Newell, which distilled its very long (but very good) antecedent novel into a 2.5 hour movie and lost a lot of the soul in the process. I complained about him at the time, but now that we're here, I'd take Newell back in a heartbeat.
Part six was made by David Yates, who also directed part five. Both movies have the same problems, which are almost too numerous to wrap my head around. I'm one to who believes that a movie need not recreate the plot of book precisely as long as the spirit and sentiment are both well honored. My problem isn't with what was changed or omitted: It's more that what is there often fails to have a effective dramatic impact and tends to feel flat and perfunctory, which is to say that several story lines from the book are hinted at, but not given much follow-through. Far too many scenes are messy and without a clear focus.
I have a feeling that Yates is a very emotionally reserved person, and one of the big crimes of his two Potter films is that he's taken books that brim with imagination and sophisticated, interesting characters, and has made them into films that are kinda one-note and dull. Even though the stories have been getting darker, we're still talking about teenage wizards here, and the books have managed to have a great deal of fun while steadily growing more serious. Why is there so little joy in Yates' Potter movies?
The screenplay discards a lot of little, easy-to-film plot devices that might have made everything stick together and flow better. One example is minor, but the principle is very important: Early in the book, Dumbledore tells Harry that he will be taking private lessons with him this year, but does not explain what the nature of those lessons will be. It is exciting because Harry walks around for a bit, wondering with his friends if he'll be learning special defensive magic spells, etc, until the first lesson arrives and he is surprised to find that Dumbledore means to educate him about the history of Tom Riddle, the boy who would grow up to be the villainous Voledmort. Now, in the movie Dumbledore never tells Harry that private lessons are coming: He just calls him to his office one night, and they begin. What's missing is the fantastic lead-up to that first lesson, which both provides the pleasure of anticipating what's going to happen and then makes the moment seem more important when it arrives. This is one of the great "question / answer" devices of dramatic storytelling that J.K. Rowling is great at it: Something mysterious is going on beyond that door in the room that we cannot get to? What in the world is happening in there? Well, we aren't told for a while, so it creates a mini mystery to chew on for a bit.
Draco Malfoy, Harry's arch nemesis at Hogwart's, is up to no good with a secret mission in this story. The book has glimpses of him sneaking around and doing secretive things, but why do that when the movie can just show you everything right away and then treat you to a seemingly endless series of scenes of him doing it? Time and time again, dramatic mysteries like this are omitted from the film, including the biggest one of all -- the one that is practically screamed out by the title: "Who is the Half-Blood Prince?" Oh, that mystery is kept alive here and there, I guess, but it doesn't drive the film the way it drives the book, and when it is revealed toward the end, it is almost out of obligation and free of any dramatic heft. Sort of like, "Oh yeah, and here's what the title was supposed to mean."
The more I think about it, that's the thing that really chaps my ass about the two Yates films: All this masterful plotting was right there in the book, and it would have taken very litlte screentime to do it! In some cases, less! They had already built the sets and bought the actors there and everything -- All that was missing was a good understanding of the text and the will to put it on screen. I mean, the flippin' dialogue was already there too! Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves merely had to copy it over to the script and have the actors say it! In particular, I was very disappointed that the scenes where Harry and Dumbledore analyze what they've seen in the Tom Riddle flashbacks were omitted. One of the great pleasures of this particular book is that it is the first time Harry gets to spend a good deal of up-close and personal time with Dumbledore. The text is very rich: Dumbledore is an intelligent and seemingly warm man from a distance, but Harry finds him to be aloof and difficult to access as he gets to know him better. On another level, Dumbledore knows that Harry has a difficult mission ahead of him, and that he himself might not be around to see him through. Their long conversations are supposed to be about preparing Harry for the future, whether he knows it or not. At the end of the story, Harry is supposed to be much more in the adult world than he was at the beginning, but Yates omits most of these scenes and is not able to make us feel that otherwise. What a waste of some great source material and an enormous budget.
Moving on to technical comments, I thought the cinematography (by Amélie's Bruno Delbonnel) was gorgeous until we neared the climax, and then I started to feel it was way over the top. Things were way too filtered and processed looking... This is a fantasy movie that is predicated on a magical world existing between the cracks and in the hidden spaces of the one we live in. Why shoot it in a way that removes us from reality as much as possible?
Nicholas Hooper wrote the bland musical score for the previous movie, and his his work is even more conspicuously inadequate this time out. Even I, a non-musician, can spot number of places where memorable themes and strong music would have helped the picture immeasurably, and might have even saved it. Hooper had done a couple TV movies and nature documentaries before getting the job on Phoenix. To trust an important job to someone with so few qualifications and only vaguely relevant experience is a real shame. Even moreso when you consider that this is a series which contains excellent scores by John Williams and Patrick Doyle. Warner Bros. has apparently told Yates that they will not allow Hooper to return for further installments, which is great news indeed.
The editing by Mark Day is likewise a fucking travesty. We never get a good look at any of the rooms these characters are in, and important lines are played completely off camera or in wide shots where they fail to land with the audience in any meaningful way. Also, there are many scenes, like Slughorn's first class, where we look at his back pretty much the whole time he's talking! If you look at the scene, there's evidence that the proper coverage was there, but for some reason Day assembled everything in the least dynamic, least engaging way possible. Consistently, there's a ton of space between lines as well, which could have easily been tightened up to play better. Better yet, that valuable real estate could have been used to - oh, I don't know - insert more of the dialogue from the book.
I'm sad that they're sticking with this director for the last book (which will be split into two movies), because he's cheap and reportedly easy to work with. I guess it's the way of the world, but the series was much more interesting when big-name directors were allowed to put their own spin on the material and really interpret the books. Say what you will about Chris Columbus (parts 1 and 2), Alfonso Cuarón (part 3) and Newell, but at least they understood classical filmmaking inside and out and were able to do interesting things within those traditions, albeit to varrying degrees of success.
Part of their success came from hiring a good support team: Good editors, qualified composers, etc. The amazing set design team came pre installed when Yates joined the series for part 5, and the actors have always been top notch. He has hired great DPs for his two movies, and will be working with another great, Eduardo Serra (of Unbreakable and The Girl With The Pearl Earring fame) on the two Deathly Hallows flicks. Nevertheless, he's brought in bush-league semi-pros to handle some of the other key creative roles, and for movies of this kind of scope that's just unforgivable.
My review of Order Of The Phoenix
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