Superior adaptations of inferior novels (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince)

Reviewing a film based on a book you haven’t read is always a dicey proposition—you likely missed or misread the winks and nods aimed at the readers surrounding you—but I think an exception can be made in the case of a film that works because you haven’t read the source material.  So I begin with an admission: I can’t read the Harry Potter novels.  I got through 100 pages of the first three and stopped once I realized that they are, on the whole, terrible; and that when they rise to the level of unsubtle Dickensian grotesquerie (minus the wit), they’re merely awful.  But I mostly enjoy the films, which dispense the requisite infodumps in digestable bits and—by virtue of being films—relieve J.K. Rowling of the burden of pretending to be Mervyn Peake. 

The best of them is Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but that has more to do with having Cuarón at helm than the quality of the source material, as his filmography consists of superior treatments of the same narratives at play in Rowling’s novels: a tale set in a strict boarding house during a period of great struggle (A Little Princess), about an orphan with an unknown destiny and mysterious benefactors (Great Expectations) who comes of age sexually (Y Tu Mama Tambien) as the fate of the human race is being decided (Children of Men).  But even with Cuarón behind camera, the film felt forced—as if the removal of Rowling’s expository indulgence required a labor so great, evidence of it clung to the film like slight stains in the pits of an otherwise smart shirt.

The same cannot be said of the latest film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in which the narrative excess of the novels becomes a matter of allusion over excision.  The result?  The first film in the series to have the effect the novels are wrongly purported to: it presents an unnerving and captivating account of a world and moment the audience can't fully fathom.  The confusion was compelling: I was drawn into situations whose meaning escaped me, but whose significance was clear, and so I spent the entire film intellectually engaged.  In the previous films, all the guns belonged to Chekov, and you appreciated the arrangement of the firing squad or you didn’t—but in either case, you knew which guns would be fired because the overwhelmed screenwriter removed anything that might be mistaken for a decoy. 

The earlier films never alluded; they either explicated at length or vehemently pointed at the mystery the movie would explain.  In The Half-Blood Prince, David Yates includes scenes whose importance is not established by the mere fact of their inclusion.  The narrative wanders, forcing the audience to debate which of the various elements will ultimately be meaningful.  Will it be the stroking and stoking of Ron’s ego?  The development of Harry and Hermoine’s increasingly complex friendship?  The pangs of conscience Draco Malfoy felt upon murdering a bird?  Or will it be one of the many other expertly-acted, deftly-directed scenes in which, for the first time, everyone not named Alan Rickman seemed comfortable in their character’s skin?  The narrative ambiguity, coupled with a pace that allowed scenes to develop such that motivations were intimated rather than immediately revealed, resulted in a film that was strikingly adult in weight and complexity, to which American critics responded by saying:

Boooooooooring.

And:

A giant two-and-a-half-hour YAAAWN.

And:

This movie went on and on and on and on and on.

Not only did all of those sentences appear in a single review, they appeared in three consecutive sentences:

Boooooooooring. A giant two-and-a-half-hour YAAAWN. This movie went on and on and on and on and on.

Granted, that was Debbie Schlussel, who time and again has proven her intelligence to be inversely proportional to her estimation of it.  But she’s not alone.  Rex Reed, the very bellwether of popular American opinion on film, thinks that

the sixth and worst installment is two and a half hours of paralyzing tedium, featuring another colossal waste of British talent and a plot a real witch couldn’t find with a crystal ball. The kids at Hogwarts no longer have any relevance. They have never heard of iPods, cell phones or the Internet.

He complains about the gorgeous, subdued cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel, who previously worked with the notoriously muted Jean-Pierre Jeunet on visually uninspired films like Amélie and A Very Long Engagement, and is the second untalented cinematographer in a row David Yates has chosen to work alongside—the first being Slawomir Idziak, a Polish hack so dumb his director, Krzysztof Kieslowski, had to name his films after the color of the desired palette lest Idziak murk them up.  I daresay that anyone who complains about the cinematography of The Half-Blood Prince knows nothing about the medium he or she is paid to write about in, say, the Wall Street Journal:

[The film] may suffer by comparison to visual memories of the first film, which wasn’t all that wonderful but teemed with wondrous images.

The film was so dull and so visually unstimulating that, at the New York Times, Manohla Dargis forgot how families work, writing:

The chosen one, Harry has been commissioned to destroy the too-little-seen evildoer Voldemort, a sluglike ghoul usually played by Ralph Fiennes (alas, seen only briefly this time out) and here played, in his early embodied form as Tom Riddle, by the excellent young actors Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Frank Dillane. There must be a factory where the British mint their acting royalty: Hero, who plays the dark lord as a spectrally pale, creepy child of 11, is Ralph Fiennes’s nephew[.]

Ms. Dargis, if I may, you answered your question about this hypothetical actor factory in the previous sentence.  It’s called “the Fiennes family,” and its existence has been known about for the better part of two decades.  It seems that when confronted with anything resembling complexity, the popular American critical establishment falls asleep—by which I mean, they reveal themselves to be whatever it is one becomes after spending a lifetime trying to catch up to the lowest common denominator.

If I were a more generous person, I’d note that the reason these critics were bored by the film was because they knew what would happened—it being the plot of the only book they read that year—and wanted the film to get on with it already.  Dargis as much as admits exactly that: “[T]he lag time between the final books and the movies has drained much of the urgency from this screen adaptation, which, far more than any of the previous films, comes across as an afterthought.” This impatience with development is a symptom of a collective addiction to novelty in American culture, one which results not only the unwillingness to glory in a studied presentation of the end of adolescence, but in the elevation of incurious, anti-intellectual populists like Sarah Palin to national prominence.  Meanwhile, across the pond . . .

(x-posted.)

Comments

[Ahistoricality]

It may well be that the movie benefits from not reading the book. Since Dargis' review -- aside from that Fiennes thing -- pretty well jibed with my reading of the book, I took it to be a pretty faithful adaptation.

I got through the books so I could discuss them with my spouse, who likes them. I'll get through the movies when the Little Anachronism is old enough for them, and then mostly so that I can describe the action to my spouse. I suppose it's nice to know that there's something to look forward to near the end....

[SEK]

It may well be that the movie benefits from not reading the book.

Ack! That was my point. I'm guessing it didn't come through because of the detour into critical idiocy. Hrmph. That's what happens when I over-write something, burying the point in the first paragraph and an aside in the first sentence of the last.

On another note entirely, what did you think of Zot! . . . the book whose title ends in an exclamation point, thus necessitating I prolong the sentence so I don't slap a question mark right after its title? In addition to moving and revising a paper I submitted almost a decade ago that was accepted last week, I'm still working on that post/paper.

[Karl Steel]

Take a random person, say, me, who read the first 2 books perhaps 8 years ago and found them only readable, and who has therefore seen none of the movies. Assume this person will never read another word written by Rowling unless by some gorgeous accident he's included in her will. Will he--and his wife, who loathes what Rowling she's read--enjoy and/or understand this movie? Or if he wants a film about pedagogues and students, should he stick to what he was watching tonight?

[SEK]

I can't say you'd like it better than that movie you linked to, which is old and thus anathema to me as an American, but you ask a very interesting question, because it pushes my theory that not knowing what's going on actually improves the film to its breaking point. I think, given how familiar the set of cultural narratives Rowling recycles are, that you wouldn't be at much of a loss watching the film. I mean, with the exception of Cuarón's go at it, I haven't watched any of them more than once, so it's not like I was up on the minutiae—but I wonder if my discomfort with the earlier installments factors into my judgment. Which is one way of saying that the depiction of young love isn't in the same league as Freaks and Geeks, merely a damn sight better than the previous films and most of the sanitized nonsense that passes for teen drama these days. Whether that makes it good, is . . . let me sleep on it.

(Also, I edited the post to indicate that I tried to read the first three, got 100 pages in and stopped in disgust.)

[Ahistoricality]

I was agreeing with you -- and admitting that US reviewers may well be wrong about the quality issues as well -- just pointing out that many of us in the (potential) audience pool don't really have the benefit of that ignorance any more.

Zot! was interesting. I liked it, but I was never quite able to shut off my historian brain -- the discussion at the end of "Ring in the New" was pretty much going through my head the whole time -- and his adolescents make just a touch too much sense (I had a bit of trouble remembering what ages they were supposed to be a lot of the time, which is partially an artistic issue and partially the nature of adolescence, but also partially over-simplification). But the storytelling was fascinating, especially the second half when he started to really stretch. His decision early on to vary tone and focus (and his impatience with the form later) makes it quite a ride. There's some very smart genre twisting ... you know all this. What I'm not sure of at this point is how it's going to stand up to a second and third reading.

[Jim]

If you'd read the book, you'd also know that something of what you describe here—especially the more adult character of HP&tHP but also the (re)presentation of a world no longer tied up into neat little bows—is also true of the novel. (Book 7 is even more untidy in this way, although also irritatingly tidy in other respects.)

[todd.]

Manohla Dargis is my nemesis. So often, I want to know what AO Scott has to say about a movie, but I'm disappointed to find that it was instead reviewed by the completely useless Dargis.

[Rick]

I agree Scott, not enough shit blew up. :)

[JPRS]

Read all seven and was left wondering what exactly I had read. They're not so much badly written as forgettably written. Azkaban is the best of the books--this book was the worst. I can't remember a single detail apart from Harry and Dumbledore in the cave. I haven't seen the movie, but I'm assuming the filmmakers, with less to work with, made more up and thus improved what didn't exist yet.

[Martin Wisse]

Meanwhile across the pond, that URL doesn't work...

Maybe I'm closer to my inner eight year old or something, but I didn't think the books were that bad as you make them out to be. Competently written, plot driven but with a lot of meandering around "cool" scenes, engrossing if you can shut up the critical facilities of your brain but really not appropriate for a thirty something year old to read. Spent an enjoyable summer holiday reading the first three, have no desire to read anything more.

The movies work on that level as well, but because they are movies and don't have to rely on the writer's abilities to immerse yourself into a fully realised world, they look more fully realised. The absurdities are less apparant when they're in front of your face...

[Karl Steel]

Whether that makes it good, is . . . let me sleep on it.
Sounds as though a large part of the pleasure is a confounding of expectations?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Re-posting my comment from the Valve here:

One note about the books—I’ve only seen the first couple of movies—it is a bit questionable to rely on an evaluation of the first few books to estimate the source material for movies made for the last few in the series. I’ve read all the books, and Rowling does a pretty good impression of writing the first one for an 11-year-old, the second for a 12 year old, and so on up to 17 or wherever it stops. Perhaps that’s just Rowling becoming a slightly better writer as she goes, but it’s as if she was writing the series for one child who was growing up as she did one book a year.

Therefore the later books, while still clunky, are at least older-adolescence YA. I was actually pretty impressed by one aspect of the series: its near-anarchist rejection of all official authority figures. Sure, it’s a staple of this kind of fantasy that the adolescent hero can somehow succeed where all the adults fail. But here the adults fail really comprehensively, and fail not merely as parent figures but also as government and civic leaders. By the end, Harry is effectively living in the equivalent of a death squad state, in which people are routinely kidnapped, tortured, and disappeared, and constituted authority is either complicit, corrupt, or at best ineffective.

[Jake]

Manohla Dargis is my nemesis. So often, I want to know what AO Scott has to say about a movie, but I'm disappointed to find that it was instead reviewed by the completely useless Dargis.

She seems to know her stuff. I can't decide whether this post is supposed to be serious or funny but I'll go with the latter.

[Jon H]

Dargis wrote: "[T]he lag time between the final books and the movies"

As opposed to the simultaneous releases of the first books and their movies?

Hint for Dargis: just because you didn't read the first HP book until the movie was imminent, doesn't mean they were released without a lag.

[rosmar]

I completely agree with Rich.

I barely liked the books through book 4, so I didn't read the fifth, sixth, and seventh until a friend convinced me to try again. I thought they were much more engrossing than the first four, despite still having some obvious flaws.

[JPool]

I agree with Rich as well, and on both fronts (I wouldn't call the books anarchistic, because at the end there's a restored government, but they definitely sees trust and authority as vested in individuals rather than institutions). I quite enjoy children's and young adult literature and thought that the books functioned really well as that, maturing with the characters. I also think that Rowling has a particular gift for expressing character through dialog, so that you have a whole slew of characters drifting in and out, but they all remain distinct.

My reaction of the film is that it did a much better job of collapsing the novel than the last one: selecting key scenes rather than trying to quick-march through the whole plot. It also ranks as the best adaptation, along with Prisoner of Azkaban, because it understands itself as a film in the middle of an unfinished series. Rather than spending a lot of time explaining all of what went before and all of the referents it leaps right in, and so creates a more immersive and satisfying experience. I wouldn't recommend that anyone start watching the films by viewing this one first, but I'd be curious as to what the experience would be like if they did.

[Luke]

I'll admit to disliking the whole Potter series. And I'll admit to reading other fantasy series all the way through even though I disliked those as well. (Sometimes its nice to give your brain a holiday; Sometimes its nice to drive with a long audiobook.)

As a genre, they seem to have similar flaws. Its not just their "unsubtle Dickensian grotesquerie" but a series of assumptions about how the world works that are disturbing and politically naïve.

[Anthony Cristofani]

JPOOL- your curiosity will be appeased in the case of my parents--they saw none of the HP films or read the books, and enjoyed Half-Blood Prince immensely. I suppose they are in part responding to the same love-of-confoundment Scott speaks of. The blog is funny and critically spot-on, but this insight about not knowing what's going on is my favorite part. We have a contemporary obsession with clarity so acute that it's a wonder David Lynch isn't broke. They should have hired him for all 8 films, by the way.

[Karl Steel]

I wouldn't call the books anarchistic, because at the end there's a restored government, but they definitely sees trust and authority as vested in individuals rather than institutions

In my neighborhood, we call that mystification.

==

They should have hired him for all 8 films, by the way

If anyone tells me there's cat-milking in Bk 7, I'll gladly read the whole series.

[jordan_m]

I haven't read the books but, out of some sort of masochistic curiosity, spent the majority of last weekend watching the movies on ABC Family and HBO (for the most recent). I won't be paying to go see the new one at the theatre but am curious about it enough to put it on my rental list. Wrote a post about it here.

As to book vs movie debate: I try not to get too caught up in the comparisons. In my mind, they are two different mediums and should be appreciated on their merits in doing justice within that space.

With a book, we create the movie ourselves in our heads as we read and imagine that world into being and fit it with our own visions of the characters. Maybe part of the disconnect we feel when seeing the book adapted (esp. badly) is between our subconscious creation and that that we see on the screen.

AV Club does a pretty good feature on book vs. film adaptations