Direction by David Yates
Screenplay by J.K. Rowling
“For the Greater Good.”
– Gellert Grindelwald Motto
The Wizarding World enters its most self-indulgent phase; a polemical, dark place of rising fascism and dwindling heart. As J.K. Rowling invites us into the first real “Cinema-Only” Potterverse picture, (Fantastic Beasts at least had that guidebook) she reveals how political she’s become, how unwilling she is to let sleeping dogs lie, but most importantly, that her boundless imagination hasn’t dried up a whit.
First Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp, controversially) escapes his transport to gather forces sinister and strange. Then our favorite magizoologist, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne, painfully shy), is dragged into a conspiracy tying together his last love, Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston, mystified), with his first love and brother’s fiancĂ©e, Leta (ZoĂ« Kravitz, character surname a spoiler). Most importantly is Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller, concerned), a wizard of frightening untapped power, and his new girlfriend, the maledictus Nagini (Claudia Kim, another controversy).
Of lesser importance, unless one counts these things thematically, are Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler, robbed of his perfect ending) and lover Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudol, embarrassingly naive).
Of importance mostly for long-term fans must be Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law, buoyant), teacher at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This prequel character revelation may give goosebumps and glee until one considers continuity.
Albus knows Newt because years ago he studied at the school for House Hufflepuff (will Ravenclaw never catch a break), along with Leta. Leta was anti-social, Newt was asocial. The two belonged together.
Rowling once again brings onboard David Yates, his sixth outing for the franchise. What’s impressed me about Yates is his consistency: each odd numbered installment is fantastic, while the even numbers fail to impress me. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince nearly bounced me off the franchise, while Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II had me, unfortunately, laughing out loud at the kids playing dress-up by the end of the movie.
That isn’t to say I hated Hallows Part II, or this movie, overall. I’m merely stating that I completely embraced the others, without hesitation, even the character-driven boredom that permeated most of Deathly Hallows Part I.
And speaking of Deathly Hallows, I do believe that Grindelwald wields the Elder Wand in this film. Nice little Easter Egg, that.
“So what exactly are these crimes of the titular Grindelwald supposed to be,” Friend Mike asked me more than once during the screening. I began to ask myself the same thing. Something seemed a might off about the whole affair, right from the get-go. Ol’ Grindy was asserted as a nasty villain, we knew he had a ‘dangerous’ (read: homosexual) relationship with Dumbledore in his past (great call-back, using the same actors that played the young versions of the characters in Deathly Hallows Part I). But aside from a poor-man’s Voldemort, he doesn’t seem to be that impressive.
Okay, so we do see Grindelwald have a baby killed but that was a current, mostly unknown, crime.
Then it hit me as though Fidelius Charm was unlocked by the seamstress herself: these Crimes aren’t of the burgling variety, they’re ideological!
In the beautiful setting of Père Lachaise Cemetery, Grindelwald holds court. His cronies flank in SS-inspired uniforms while he quite overtly manipulates the wizards to behold his supremist ideals. He doesn’t “hate” the Muggles. In fact, he cares deeply for them. What he hates is that he can’t be his superior self, and maybe show the Muggles a better way — by force, if necessary.
Presumably, we’ll get to that.
Ideological arguments are the most dangerous of all because they motivate action and spread through the mind. Once they find anchor it is nearly impossible to detach yourself, the only source of escape intellectual honesty and its attendant tests. As long as you hold to that principle there is a chance of escape. Since most do not hold, most do not escape.
Rowling uses these scenes to foreshadow World War II in all the most uncomfortable ways.
But that’s not all she’s intoning. Unfortunately, there is an air — more than a whiff, less than a bellow — of certain modern political climates of foreign nations. She never quite comes out with her — *ahem*Â — Trump Card but it’s clear based on her personal beliefs (found laid about and spoken emphatically) that certain comparables exist.
In Crimes of Grindelwald, Rowling stakes out a transitory position, a movie that will only come fully into focus once the entire story is done and told. That makes nailing down the precise importance of this in the five-film serial difficult. She also continues her love affair with words, expositing dialogue with gleeful abandon, particularly when it comes to revelatory monologues. A staple of the franchise, to be sure, but one that grows tiresome once the stylistic tics reveal themselves.
But then there’s those Fantastic Beasts, sometimes escaping from that wonderful suitcase of Scamander’s, other times being captured. The movie lays heavy into myth this time around, giving us a celtic seahorses, a cat-like Chinese spirit, a Japanese kappa, Indonesian serpents, and Antonia the Chupacabra (we hardly knew ye, Antonia).
So the recommendation to watch this comes from three places: one is that if you’ve been watching this long you shouldn’t stop now. Another is that the Niffler is still thieving and the Bowtruckler named Pickett is still lock-picking. The final reason is that beneath the traditions set out by Rowling is a yearning to break free to something bigger, deeper, and more dangerous. I respect that yearning, even to applause. I don’t want the game played too safely, nor do I want complete looseness. I want integrity and drive to try something new. I want Rowling to spin her webs and see what comes out the other end.
Who knows? We may get some genuine film magic.
Verdict: Sonorus Imperio Diffindo
Released 16 November, 2018
Rated PG-13
Film Culture: Der FĂĽhrer’s Face (Jack Kinney, 1943). It’s World War II and Walt Disney is in full anti-Nazi propaganda mode. Who could blame him, what with the 20th centuries’ greatest villains so obviously up to villainy. (The real villain of the 20th Century was actually mass-communication virus ideologies such as Communism but at least the Nazis can be punched, right?) This short won Best Animated Film at the 15th Academy Awards (March, 1943) and absolutely deserved it.
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Everyone’s favorite temperamental, anthropomorphic Duck — as in Donald — has one of the great surreal hallucinations of Nazi Germany. Abused on the assembly line (assembling mortar shells), Sieg Heiling endlessly while forced to digest Mein Kampf, the short hits its apex when the oom-pah band, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Hirohito (very exaggerated and yellowish — it didn’t age well), Hermann Göring, and Benito Mussolini brazenly shove their music into Donald’s face. It’s a fever dream that ends with Donald hugging the Statue of Liberty, something we should all remember to do from time to time.
Did You Know: Relativity. Ah, M.C. Escher’s Relativity, the ultimate lithograph of mathematical perplexity. First printed in 1953, Wikipedia tells me there was a woodcut version earlier that year. The image was used every so often in the original Harry Potter heptalogy, so it’s no surprise that Rowling plays with it once again here. The idea is that there are multiple sources of gravity, though I think of it as a single image cut into four (or more) pieces, with some slices rotated around, leaving the others as is. It gives a confusing, multi-dimensional look. Escher (1898-1972) was always one of my favorite artists, if only because he challenged the eye to think. Getting your eye balls to work like that is a fun rarity.
Der Fueher’s Face was once hard to see. Disney didn’t “ban” it, but until home video came along there weren’t many venues for wartime cartoons other than film museums, and the caricature of the Japanese was “un-PC” in a very different sense than we’d use the term today. The politics of the Cold War required their help, and even by the Fifties there was a sense that the buck-toothed stereotype was more of an embarrassment to us than to them at that point.Â
Here’s a film from the same period, Hell Bent for Election, in effect an animated commercial for FDR’s re-election bid in 1944. It’s also a historical curiosity. Take a look at about five minutes in, and you’ll see that caricaturing Republicans as thinly disguised Nazis is nothing new.Â
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Speaking of Escher, twenty years ago I saw an exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington of many of his original prints, and–more importantly–his test prints and original woodcuts. It’s really neat seeing how the various woodcuts combine to become the prints that we know today.
You can see my discussion of it in the film group, but 3 stars is quite generous in my opinion. Honestly, I’m done with this series after this movie, which kills me since I’m a huge HP fan. If Jo keeps writing the scripts, I just can’t.Â
I only recently saw the first film in this “Fantastic Beasts” sequence. Went into it knowing very little about it, and came out the other end pleasantly surprised. Beautiful, sweet ending on it, too. Almost worth watching the whole film for that lovely, touching ending.
I had no idea the plan was to launch a new series, so . . . I suppose I’ll have to see this one. Thanks for the review.
See, 6 and 3 are the strongest films as they derive from the strongest of the books. Interestingly, these are the books which do not directly involve Voldemort, so the lesson we need to derive from this is that Voldemort – to the extent that we can take him seriously as a villain – is something of a drain on the narrative, unfortunately. It’s hard to blame Jo for being unable to properly write such a nasty being into credibility, but she did such a fantastic job of sketching him (almost in the negative) in Half-blood Prince that his overall motivations and ability to carry them out were practically impossible to pay off in Deathly Hallows.
I’ve resisted seeing this particular movie, particularly that I saw the first installment with the deepest trepidation. Rowling has clearly decided that her star has achieved escape velocity sufficient that she can afford to alienate half of her fan base with impunity by weighing in on her standard-issue progressive politics – which have infected and ruined many of the outlets which I used to enjoy.