Half-Blood Prince

This entry in the Harry Potter franchise constitutes four-fifths of a great film. The good? First, the art direction and special effects are excellent. The sequences involving the pensieve and the “liquid memories” are gorgeously unsettling. There is a Quidditch match which looks fantastic, and an early sequence in what appears to be a ramshackle manor house is playfully fun. In terms of art direction, David Yates seems to have cast a thick veil of coal smoke over everything. Hogwarts has never looked so dilapidated and distressed. More impressive, Yates ratchets up the emotional angst and agony, capturing strong performances from all and delivering one of the most ominously creepy installments of the series.

Yates particularly does a nice job of conjoining the Voldemort/Death Eaters narrative with the burgeoning hormones which hold sway over the adolescents at the center of the story (something Mike Newell fumbled a couple of films ago). Though Tom Felton has been little more than an unpleasant boy with bleach blond hair in previous films, Yates makes visibly palpable Draco Malfoy’s fear and trembling as he does his best to live up to the Dark Lord’s desires. The actors playing Harry, Ron and Hermione have grown up before our eyes, and there is something satisfying about watching the films respectfully honor their growth into young adults. But the BEST thing about this film is Jim Broadbent. His Horace Slughorn must go down as the greatest of characters in the Harry Potter cinematic universe. Broadbent delivers a comically broken yet tragic portrait of a disheveled old pedant whose love for his “favorites” (students he “collects” and who, in turn, fawn upon him for reasons both personal and strategic) has led him to fear his own shadow. Acting doesn’t get much better than this, and the film deserves to be seen for Broadbent’s performance alone. The Bad? Well, if you haven’t read the novel, you’re apt to be relatively confused, particularly during the last hour as Steve Kloves’ script and Mark Day’s editing discombobulate all notions of temporal logic. The script just cuts too many corners which is disappointing. I could have easily sat through another half-hour.

2 thoughts on “Half-Blood Prince”

  1. I think Jeff’s review is spot on. Every so often over the last 7-8 years, I wanted something different from the Potter movies, but ultimately they are about telling a familiar story in a compact time-frame, all the while maintaining a sense of wonder at the world of wizardry. This is not the place for innovative film-making. In that respect, they deliver.

    Back in June we took a family vacation out West (Zion, Bryce, Arches, Grand Canyon) which entailed a lot of time in a rental car. The audio tapes of the 7th book got us through the journey. Whenever I read or listen to the books, I am reminded of how bloated, poorly written and repetitive the text is. This 6th movie installment effectively strips out the unnecessary material, and tells the story as clearly and concisely as one could hope for. The hormonal story is less cloying than I feared, and the basic architecture of the movie seems about right.

    Two quibbles: 1) why the scene when Bellatrix burns the burrow? It is not in the book and it doesn’t advance the plot in any obvious way; 2) the movie fails to give the big picture of a wizarding world that is at war with itself, and in which the war is bleeding over into the muggle world. The stakes are presented as narrowly focused upon Harry. But that misses the point of the last two books, that this is a civil war, and that disinformation, cowardice, intimidation and fear are the weapons being used to win that war for Voldemort. Using the opening scene of the book — when the Minister of Magic meets the British Prime Minister — could have established the stakes much better.

  2. Yeah, that PM scene from the novel seemed much more clever when Blair was in office (and Bush was sitting in the White House and Iraq was on fire). Gordon Brown in 2009 . . . not so much. But yes, I too wish they had opened the narrative up a bit more to include the “bigger picture.” That being said, I also wished there were more scenes utilizing the pensieve. One thing I liked about the book was the way it pieced together–in great wizard detective style–Tom Riddle’s rise to power.

    Yes, Bellatrix at the Weasley’s house was a silly addition though it did add an action sequence to a novel that was, for the most part, interior driven.

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