BuboBlog Reviews 'The Deathly Hallows: Part 1'

(One of the nice things about our family's exile in Santa Cruz is the baby sitting provided by Elliot's grandparents, also known as "Boma" and "Baba" — his highly corrupted version of their names. That allowed us to see "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1" on Saturday night.)

You may have heard this movie has a slower pace than the other installments, and it's true. Ah, but what a relief. I've complained before that the previous movies feel like a highlight reel: There's so much material crammed into them, it's hard to tell if you're watching a story or just seeing plot points checked off. (Though this was really more a problem with the first five films than the sixth.)

Breaking up the last book into two films gives director David Yates the luxury of taking his time. (He also directs the final sequel.) The characters can sit and talk, have long walks, get lost and find themselves. But the slowness has a downside, which I think would be more evident to someone who never read the books: It spotlights the arbitrary and seemingly random machinations of J.K. Rowling's story.

Every problem is solved by some quirk or deus ex machina: An elf appears, a magical object exhibits some new power, or a patronus limns the way. The uninitiated must just spend the film in a perpetual state of "WTF?" For those familiar with the story, you're willing to accept the most absurd nonsense because it is written — it's in the book. The Harry Potter series inspires a biblical reverence, and in fairness, its stories are far less random than much of the bible. (Imagine if I wrote a screenplay based on Lot. I'm pretty sure the producer would make me change the part where Lot's daughters get him drunk so they can sleep with him.)



I can only speculate because I've never gone into a Harry Potter film "cold" (without reading the source material). I have known nonreaders who love the series, so I guess it works on that level. And the latest movie can't have made $219 million in the U.S. alone by appealing exclusively to fans of the books.

There is plenty to look at. The visual effects are as good as ever (Nagini still doesn't quite seem real to me, but they're getting close). I particularly liked the way they rendered the fable of the Deathly Hallows as an animated sequence — really beautiful and creepy.

Yates also did a good job playing up the irony of the trial scene in the Ministry of Magic, where a woman is hunted and tried for not being a witch. Are you listening, Christine O'Donnell?

You'll be sad to see that the broken-wand scene — the subtext of which was illuminated in this blog back in 2007 — is truncated in the film. What a missed opportunity! And yet, the sexual tension between Harry and Hermione is perhaps overdramatized in another scene. During a fantasy sequence, they're shown embracing in the nude (well, there's a lot of fog so you can't really tell). This elicited laughter from an otherwise-reserved Santa Cruz Regal Cinemas 9 audience.

Ron (played by Rupert Grint) continues to get less attractive, following the opposite trajectory of Emma Watson's Hermione. And yet, we all know they'll wind up together in the end. Perhaps that's the film's greatest implausibility.

BuboBlog Rating: 3 asterisks (out of 4).