Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) ****/*****
A lot of people compared Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 to a camping trip from hell. The characters were lost, scared, without a plan, and spent most of the film sitting around in a tent and sniping at each other. Personally, I liked Part 1, and thought it worked great as a tension-building precursor to a big finale. But whether you agree with that or not doesn’t really matter; everyone should like Part 2. This second half of The Deathly Hallows is the raging yang to the first half’s sober yin. We get an opening scene full of dialogue to help us reconnect with the characters and remember the stakes, but from that point to the film’s epilogue we’re off and running, never stopping to catch our breath. We’re breaking into banks, riding dragons, fighting battles, solving mysteries, dying deaths, and watching everything around us explode. Deathly Hallows: Part 2 is the grand finale to an eight-part series of films; it had a lot to accomplish in order to be satisfying. It had to be huge, it had to give all the important characters moments to shine, and it had to create appropriate closure for the deep relationships we’ve built with them over time. Aren’t we lucky then, that instead of dropping the ball, director David Yates and his cadre of collaborators picked it up and ran with it? Err, but maybe not ball… snitch.
This is the eighth in a series of very long, and very involved movies. The world of Harry Potter is huge, with dozens upon dozens of characters, myriad locations, and countless magical whosits and whatsits. The ties between the people we meet are old, deep, and form a complex web. To try and do a plot summary for the uninitiated would be a joke. You need to get on this ride at the beginning. Potter is an epic story in every sense of the word. There’s good and evil, love, loss, and lots of big action that the fate of the world hinges on. But unlike a lot of the other epic stories made in this day and age, Potter has a sweetness and an innocence that sets it apart and makes it feel like a relic from the past. Harry Potter is a universally relatable character because he is so dang good. He’s the type of person that all of us would like to have in our lives. He was born into a crap situation, abused, neglected, and unloved. He could have become a monster. But at the center of him is such a good heart that he manages to power through it, never giving into frustration, never giving into despair. And he’s eventually rewarded with a real circle of loved ones and a solid sense of his place in the world. This is the sort of uplifting force of positivity that our society desperately needs. Ron, Hermione, and Harry taught a generation of kids to be loyal, to work hard, to make tough choices in the service of being good and just. Hell, they taught them to read. Compare that to what kids learn from watching reality television and it starts to become clear how invaluable the Harry Potter mythos is to our culture.
The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 works as a movie because of the beauty of the photography, the thrills of the action, and the ridiculous amount of talent and skill owned by the actors. A lot of credit needs to be given to the foundation laid before it. I’m not much a fan of Chris Columbus’ first two films in the series, but they came up with the template for the visual design of this world, they cast the right actors in the right roles, and they set the stage for everything that would come later. Potter is a series that grows right along with its actors. Not only do we watch the principles mature from 11-year-old children to 21-year-old adults, we watch the visual effects of the film industry grow and become refined over the course of a decade, we watch a relatively obscure director in David Yates gain a strong, confident voice over the course of four films. The Harry Potter series is like a snowball rolling down a hill, and this powerful finale ends things as a towering juggernaut.
Much like the first part of Deathly Hallows, the second part lends its focus to the three leads, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson. Three names that a decade ago were completely anonymous, and three names that I can now type without double checking my spelling, solely because of this series. Those first couple Potter films were shaky for the child actors, but they’ve grown into their roles so well that I hardly believe anybody could imagine anyone else in the roles at this point. And joining them, once again, is the usual cavalcade of the greatest working actors from the UK. Time after time Harry Potter has given us living legends married to perfect roles; and they all show back up for this finale, some only for a second or two. It was a great temptation, I’m sure, to give every one of these actors a farewell, to give them each a chance to show off as these characters one last time, but The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 makes the tough and necessary decision of sailing past them, keeping the momentum of the plot going, and keeping the focus on the central conflict. Which means that Ralph Fiennes finally gets a good amount of focus as Lord Voldemort. Up to this point he’s lived in the shadows, or appeared in glimpses, but in this finale Voldemort takes center stage. And Fiennes somehow makes him a personality filled, almost relatable character. Even while reading the books I never believed in Voldemort as a Pied Piper, the type of person who good people would be charmed into following, but Fiennes is able to sell it. Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, and all of the rest are back, and they’re all great, but to talk about the virtues of each of these actors could be a never-ending process. Instead I’ll make mention that Kelly Macdonald joins the cast as the ghost of Helena Ravenclaw and probably gives my favorite performance of the film. When acting next to a stable with this pedigree and this amount of history in their roles, that’s no small feat.
This franchise has created such a large fandom, has moved so much product, been seen by so many eyes, and spanned such a large age gap of enthusiasts, that it is destined to become one of those long lasting pieces of cultural cannon that people keep going back to. Harry Potter is our modern fairy tale; these characters are our modern mythological figures. In 50 years J.K. Rowling’s books are going to be sitting in people’s collections next to The Lord of the Rings, these movies are going to live shoulder to shoulder with Star Wars. As individual pieces of filmmaking, some of the Potter movies are better than others, and none of them are truly great in my eyes. But when taken as a whole, these eight films and those seven books are going to be looked at as one of our cornerstone cultural achievements. It’s cool that we got to experience them as they were created, to live in the social climate that birthed them. And at the very least, it’s cool that they didn’t all just suck after the first one, like most franchises. Fifty years from now nobody is going to be showing the Shrek movies to their grandchildren.
