My choice of image here probably gives you some idea of what I loved about the latest Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. And yes, watching Ginny Weasley turn into a confident, proactive woman is a treat–especially in a world that while created by a woman author, provides very few standout heroines.

I adore Hermione. I can relate to the girl who knows the answer to everything in school but feels left out by the attention paid to her male friends, who brushes off the male attention she gets because it’s not coming from the one person she wants. But the rest of the girls in the Potterverse are cackling villains like Bellatrix Lestrange–watching Helena Bonham Carter chew scenery here is a treat, but she’s a one-note character–or giggling girls like Lavendar Brown or Romilda Vane, who serve mostly to teach us that our heroes are indeed desirable, despite their endearing adolescent fumbling. (Molly Weasley’s moment of vengeance in the seventh book is sublime, but until then she’s largely relegated to worrying at home about her family.)

So Ginny Weasley, effortlessly skilled at Quidditch and Bat-Bogey Hexes, popular with the boys, who chooses Harry, not the other way around, is a wonderful character. I find myself for the first time hoping for a change from the books for the seventh installment, because Ginny was cruelly underused in Deathly Hallows.

This is by far the most beautifully shot Potter film, and as Lucas noted, at times it has the claustrophobic feeling and strange angles of a horror movie. For sheer beauty alone the movie is worth seeing multiple times–staggering sets couple with dramatic action and excellent performances by a number of supporting characters. The kids who combine to play young Tom Riddle are chillingly, effetely evil, almost too much so. Would Dumbledore and Slughorn really not pick up on the young Voldemort’s motivations, or were they too blinded by their hope and by flattery, respectively? The question of who is responsible for what lies underneath much of this sixth installment in the series.

The script is whip-cracking smart and funny, retaining its forward motion even in slow, tension-building scenes and the moments of levity that add to the “calm before the storm” feeling of Half Blood Prince. This is the last time that the Hogwarts crew has anything close to a normal life, and the relationships they build and cling to are shown here as much in a look or a closeup as in dialogue, but there are beautiful moments in the dialogue as well, particularly between Dumbledore and Harry. Alan Rickman is particularly stellar here, conveying a multitude of emotions in each scene with a facial expression that seems never to change.

For all that, the film left me feeling like something was missing. All of the previous installments end with a discussion with Dumbledore that fills in a lot of the blanks that were missing in the story, but this film comes to a rather abrupt close without any of the unraveling and setting-up that goes on in the earlier stories. Part of that is the plot point on which this one ends, which I’m not going to spoil for the three people out there who bother to read this far in the review and yet aren’t familiar with the books. But part of it is what was cut from the threads that weave together to make up the story of the Half Blood Prince: when we finally find out who he is, there is little of the dramatic release there because the title story has been toned down to make room for other plot threads.

Key moments that will be absolutely necessary for the seventh movie’s denouement to have the punch it should are missing here, and while I mourn them for selfish reasons–who wouldn’t want more Potter?–I also find their disappearance mystifying. The decision to turn the final book into two films may be more necessary than I originally thought (there’s plenty of deadweight to trim from that story; I suspected that Rowling simply wasn’t ready to let go of her characters) simply because some of the puzzle pieces will have to fit into those movies.

The film moves along so well, so seamlessly, and feels so much shorter than its two hours and thirty minutes that it’s hard for me to make the argument that the cuts made were entirely necessary. Potter fans are hardcore enough to sit through a longer movie that satisfies all of their cravings, so film conventional wisdom should be out the window as far as film length is concerned with these movies. Still, this is an excellent flick–familiar and comfortable as your favorite sweatshirt, you can slide into this world and get lost in it for a couple of hours and still find that no matter how many times you’ve read the books, it has the capacity to surprise.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 8:56 am and is filed under Movies, News & Views, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.