Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, Part Two (2011)

One should be very skeptical of the well-worn cultural valuation which says that characters should "have depth" and "develop" and that emotional complications and psychological gestures are signs of great art. There are very good reasons to prefer The Pickwick Papers to Anna Karenina.

The Harry Potter series has been applauded by critics and "adults" for taking the embryonic and juvenile characters of the early novels and plunging them into an ever-darker world, showing us their growth and loves and loyalties and adolescent torments. As a reader and a viewer, this has always felt painfully obligatory and even perfunctory. It would be different if, at a deeper level, these stories were "about" adolescence, in the way that Teen Wolf or Twilight obviously are... but they aren't. Harry's problems were never mine, and the confidence he has in mission (revenging the death of his parents and destroying absolute evil) is only ever superficially challenged.

At the same time, the Harry Potter universe is so huge and cool that you can pour pretty much anything into it with a palatable result. The forgettable minor characters, the incoherent political resonances, the comic relief, the uncomfortable racial pluralism (on par with George Lucas'), the needlessly complicated lore of patronus spells and horcruxes and elder wands... none of this can overshadow the basically brilliant premise of a secret wizard world beset by a dark conspiracy.

Through everything, the most interesting thing has been seeing how the present generation is only ever living through the bitter memories, allegiances, and secrets of the last one. Snape, Dumbledore, Voldemort, and Sirius Black... this is all more lively than anything involving the Weasley twins or Cho Chang or Neville Longbottom. This last film really makes something of this (by now fairly dense) network of past survivances... but at the total cost of the Hermione/Ron element. These characters completely fall out of this last installment. Sure, they kiss. But I don't believe it for a second.

Rather, like an unstoppable behemoth, the narrative leading up to the final confrontation levels everything in its path: explanations hang in mid-air and are never taken up, emotional bonds are foreshadowed and never returned to, and the mythology (the most interesting part of the previous movie) is only confusingly alluded to. Instead, we get on one hand a lot of CGI battling, which is not well-managed enough to hold my attention--and on the other hand, a momentum-wrecking lecture by Dumbledore about the power of imagination... This is one of the worst scenes in film this year. But when it is over, we are immediately back in the action.

I guess I'm saying that the great strength of the Harry Potter universe, being JUST the universe itself, means that any narrative resolution, any climax, will not come up to the level of the conception itself. (This is what any child will tell you: they don't want to leave this world.)

But I should qualify this: one character's arc, Alan Rickman's Snape, has been riveting from start to finish, and the final revelation about his role is given appropriate attention and is the best thing in the movie. This is one of the few story lines that has persisted from installment to installment, and the closure is deeply satisfying.

Still, the franchise rests upon what is fundamentally not-story and not-character: the magic, the premise, the geography, the array of good and evil wizards, etc. Built into all of this is a Manichean conception of right and wrong that is substantially less interesting than even Star Wars. When the line is drawn in the sand, and Voldemort demands the allegiance of the Hogwarts students, only the most despicable character crosses the line to join the forces of evil.

These actors may now be able to grow facial hair, but their "world" has not grown up--the basically-decent, shopkeeping, quirky, democratic English who "don't want power" (see the last scene), versus the French-named Voldemort, the openly fascistic and self-proclaimedly evil Death Eaters, whose ideology is the world's clumsiest allegory of racism... The transparency of this obvious divide is Rowling's greatest fantasy, of course, and I wouldn't stop there: this is "bad" for our children, in a way obviously missed by Christian protesters of the novels.

Finally, we don't have "depth" or "development" here--that was covered in Part One--we have stern lectures from Dumbledore plus stuff blowing up. That these are dialectically identical should be obvious to any schoolchild: this is strictly good cop/bad cop stuff. The fantasy that we are "deeper" and more "conflicted" than our (unquestioningly ideological) enemy means that blowing stuff up is only our (regrettable) duty following from our higher conscience. In this sense, Rowling's redemption of Snape is only tossing a bone of humanism (he can cry!) to the other side: Voldemort's betrayal of Snape is the ultimate badge of honor, since Snape learns too late that he was wrong.

When I was a youngster, I would watch the last scenes of Bridge on the River Kwai and Return of the Jedi over and over: I couldn't get enough of these scenes of a suddenly conscientious act of self-destruction. "My life is worth less than what is right." This isn't a possible thought in Rowling's universe, for all of the reasons gone into above. It is, in the last reckoning, super-important that Harry live and that Snape be "taught a lesson."

Every readerly or cinematic trip to Hogwarts is also always going to school.

Persepolis

The inevitable adaptation of the graphic novel into the feature-length animated film. As with all adaptations, it is best to proceed with a kind of double focus. I am not of the school that adaptations should merely "succeed on their own," because I take the translation between media seriously, nor am I made of stone.

Many will wonder why an animated feature, already dubbed into French, could not have been recorded by English or American actors for our shores. The only justifications are 1) money-saving, 2) the prestige of a "foreign film," and 3) artistic necessity. Probably it was a mix of all three. Many of the lines are clearly intended to be delivered in French--it is not, that is, the Persian of Marjane Satrapi's childhood which is being translated into French; the *emotions* and tics here are decidedly French. But, most of that is lost in the subtitles. An idiomatic English-dub would have preserved more than is lost. As it is, if you cannot understand some French, you will likely find it a bit Babar-esque.

The animation itself looks fantastic: it is the graphic novel "come to life." One never feels far from the paneled world of the comic, and yet the movements and scenes are gorgeous and not at all "sketchy." Most animated films today (and this should still be said) are ruined by computer-animation and "rendering" techniques that miss the whole point. Persepolis at least understands what it is to be a cartoon. This is all the more to its advantage, because the illustration does cute kid, puppet shah, sexy 20-something, riot/massacre, and historical summary all very deftly, in different styles but without seeming to be so.

Alas, the movie is too long, and runs out of steam fairly early. As with the graphic novels, part one (her childhood in Iran) is more interesting than part two (an adolescence in Europe and early 20s in Iran). Because it is a memoir, I suppose I can't critique the narrative structure so much, but the pay-off here is very slight. And although adult Marjane has the best scene (an inept, heavily-accented singalong to "Eye of the Tiger" w/ training montage), she mostly loses out to her earlier, cuter incarnation.

In short, I have read three graphic novels in my life, and the other two (Fun Home and Maus) were both better than Persepolis. They probably could not be made into as successful films as Persepolis, because Fun Home treads the same narrative territory over and over, and Maus is split into two stories forty years apart, but overlapping. Persepolis is straightforward and lends itself to this sort of thing (a film version), and if the film captures nearly all the charm of the graphic novels, it also keeps their flawed structure and the drifting of the audience's sympathy and interest.