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Harry Porter (Daniel Radcliffe) , Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) are all back in the latest Harry Potter film now playing.

By Sandra Olmsted

While the essence of the story in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1: remains the struggle between good and evil, the problem of adapting the beloved books to the big screen remains the bigger struggle, especially as the novels have grown darker and more complex.  That being said, director David Yates’ style makes for neither a cinematically interesting film nor a good adaptation.

Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), aka the Dark Lord, in all his snakelike grandness, now openly holds court and tortures muggles and mudbloods.  The Ministry of Magic is firmly in Voldemort’s control and has declared Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), aka the Chosen One, an enemy of the state because he is the only one with the power to defeat Voldemort.  Harry, Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) are on the run in the wilderness with a dangerous quest ahead of them.

However, Yates has lost the essential goodness of Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s magic, of their faith in the magic, and of their idealism.  This is not a reflection on the acting, which for those playing the young wizards, and for the rest of the topnotch cast, is still superb.  It is Yates style of direction and his choices of what to show and how to portray it that are problematic.  Despite big action scenes with splashy special effects, the big moments are diminished, thrown away, and the boring bits extended and focused on, as if Yates believes this will create suspense.

Consequently, he is left with teen angst to drive the actions of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, and that’s a poor substitute for the complexities of their motivations in the book.  And teen angst is not suspense; in fact, it is not even interesting.  If I wanted to see moping teenagers, I’d watch a Twilight movie, and if I wanted to see a good movie about moping teenagers, I’d watch Rebel Without A Cause. In the book, Harry, Ron, and Hermione struggle against the usual teenage melancholy and melodrama in order to save the world.  In Yates version, they wallow in it and seem not challenged, but inept.  The lack of believable motivation for the characters is not limited to the young heroes either, and, cinematically, characters whose emotions and motivations aren’t clear and believable are less interesting and sympathetic, or even believably evil.

What conflict there is between Harry, Ron, and Hermione for the first half of the film is because of the Horcrux which one of them must wear at all time.  They must figure out how to destroy this one as the first step in their quest to destroy all the Horcruxes where Voldemort has stored bits of his soul.  Why one of them must wear the evil Horcrux is not adequately explained, but one of them must, and the wearer is then more moody and surlier than usual.  Delightful.  Harry, Ron, and Hermione should have Hogwarts in their hearts and actions because it is both in reality and symbolically what they are fighting for.

While Yates’ main characters lack genuine motivation for their actions, the rest of the characters, and there are way too many of them, lack any motivation at all.  For example, what is at stake for the Malfoys, and what has caused the tension between Draco (Tom Felton) and his father, Lucius (Jason Isaacs)?  Having read the books, I think I remember, but Yates must think that knowing isn’t important if one hasn’t read the books.  Unfortunately, those details, when reaffirmed in subsequent books and films, make the story richer and the characters more real.

There is also the problem of too many characters, a virtual role call, and catching a mere glimpse of a topnotch star is nothing special.  I want to see them act and interact and react!  The book makes all the characters live and breathe and makes the reader grieve when one is killed.  No such emotion exists in Yates’ film.  For example, the death of one important character happens off-screen and merits only a one line mention.  When another beloved character dies, on screen, Yates makes it less compelling then it should be.  Film is about emotion, and Yates avoids both emotion and the conflicts related to it.

The acting is good, the cinematography beautifully bleak, the music okay, and the special effects good in the big action scenes.

However, I think the reason that this film is not in 3D, as promised, is because Voldemort’s digital nose job didn’t work with the 3D conversion process.  In fact, it does not even work in 2D.

Voldemort’s flat, snakelike nose, which is a computer-generated enhancement, gets fuzzy in his closeups.  It is very distracting, or worse, it is more interesting to spend time looking at such details than to watch the film.

The screenwriter Steve Kloves probably deserves some blame for the adaptation, or the lack there of, but I am going with the director is responsible for everything on the film.  While it may seem unfair to compare Yates’ film to the book, it is he, himself, who makes the comparison valid because he expects the audience to fill in the gaps in his film with their knowledge of the books.  He wants it both ways.

The film cannot stands on its own, and Yates has not had the courage to cut the unnecessary and un-cinematic, to combine characters, to trim the story instead of expanding it into two films, and to use the film medium to tell the story and to convey its rich complexities, emotions, and conflicts.  He has not been a good director.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is a Warner Brothers release and is rated PG-13 for some sequences of intense action violence, frightening images, and brief sensuality.  Half of Yates’ disappointing adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s last Harry Potter book part runs 146 minutes.

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