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

[Sri]

Had I not been a reader of the books, I might have enjoyed the movie more. This book happened to be my favorite of all the series and I anticipated the movie to live up to the book, and was disappointed. In addition, I was disappointed in the fact that they didn't spend enough time on why the movie is called THE HALF BLOOD PRINCE. They didn't show how obsessed Harry became with the book, nor did they show how Snape became suspicious of him having the book, or the true identity behind the book. Snape may have been the Half-Blood Prince but the movie didn't reveal why or how, or the fact that the book belonged to his mother 50 years prior, and the fact that Snape is "half-blood" and no one expected that. The movie just very flatly announced at the end that Snape was the Half-Blood Prince, period - the end. My favorite still remains HP3: Prisoner of Azkaban.
Being a great fan I have collected a list of good sites and articles (may be around 200) related to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (movie information, movie schedule, movie reviews, books, games, news, wallpapers and many more). If you are interested take a look at the below link
http://markthispage.blogspot.com/2009/07/all-you-want-to-know-about-harry-potter.html

[The Modesto Kid]

near-anarchist rejection of all official authority figures

Does Dumbledore get rejected as an authority figure at some point? I have only second-hand exposure to the Harry Potter series via my daughter being a big fan, and I guess HBP is going to be the first HP movie I have seen -- Sylvia has watched all of them on DVD, I kept my distance after seeing some of the first one and finding it lame -- but Dumbledore, from Sylvia's descriptions and the bits and pieces I catch (mostly of the first four books), annoys me in the same way Gandalf does in LOTR.

[Rich Puchalsky]

"Does Dumbledore get rejected as an authority figure at some point? [...] annoys me in the same way Gandalf does in LOTR."

Spoilers!

Gandalf dies and comes back. Dumbledore just dies. But there's a more fundamental difference than that. In the adolescent-fantasy-hero subgenre, there has to be a reason why the adults can not protect the children. Classically this is done by killing them off before the action begins, or at least separating them. (The adolescent goes through the door to fantasyland). Rowling plumps early on for the first option; we're told that Harry's parents died trying to protect him, and indeed, as we find out later, protecting him. But this heroic-adult narrative is degraded, as the series goes on, by the resistance of all the other adults to Voldemort. Their resistance can not quite be described as bumbling, because that involves comedy. Instead, it is perhaps best described as inadequate. Harry and friends get involved with a cool secret society of Voldemort-resisters, but what good do they do? None, really, except to enmesh Harry in further problems.

Dumbledore certainly would like to be Gandalf, and the kids would like him to be Gandalf. Perhaps even Rowling would have liked him to be Gandalf. But she can't help writing him differently, or the narrative demands it, or something. If he were Gandalf, he would be a political leader, or capable of controlling political leaders. But he isn't. Instead he keeps falling back to his control of the school, of Harry's immediate environs, although even that is challenged and finally lost. Dumbledore is pretty much a failure, or at least an equivocal success. Rowling gave him a back story that makes him a much more interesting character: he was the lover of another mage who turned out evil, and who he later had to confront and defeat. And that seems to have turned him away from the development that his life could have had. In barely-symbolic terms -- since yes, the evil mage he fell in love with as a teenager was also male, and Dumbledore was gay -- he's closeted. He turns away from that part of himself, the part that could actually exercise power in adult terms, and spends the rest of his life hiding out as the safely sexless=charismaless head of a children's school.

Harry spends a lot of the books being adolescently mad at Dumbledore for not telling him things, and Dumbledore always apologizes later and tells Harry why he had to keep whatever secret it was. And on the surface it's explainable. I mean, Rowling sticks with the conventions of the genre in broad outline; at the end Harry is properly appreciative of dead Dumbledore and his dead parents etc etc. But all those explanations, and the repeated plot element of "Harry doesn't know what's going on because Dumbledore won't just tell him" -- you rather get the impression that he's just become addicted to keeping secrets.

[Ahistoricality]

Rich, as I said over at the Valve:

"the sixth book has much more on Voldemort’s past—some of the best material in the series

The problem is that it belonged in book two. There’s no plausible internal explanation for that information being secret until that late in the story. (The plausible external explanation is that Rowling hadn’t figured it out yet, which is why the later books—which should have been easy if she’d really had the plot worked out from the beginning—took so long and were so awkward.)"

If Rowling had really worked out the plot and characters in advance in anything more than a sketchy outline form, Dumbledore would have been quite different, I think. Your explanation -- closeting and habit -- is as close as anyone's going to get to a plausible internal explanation, but I really don't buy it. The evidence that Rowling thinks that deeply and that far ahead just isn't there.

On that score, I wonder when I made the transition from believing that authors and producers made sense and I had to find internally plausible explanations for everything to the cynical and lazier stance that if it made sense, it should actually not be that hard to make sense of it? Or is it a matter of taste: I'll make the effort for things I like/admire, and not for those I don't?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Ahist, I agree that your explanation of how the books got written that way is probably true. Probably Rowling didn't put that stuff in book 2 because she didn't know it. (However -- I've seen bits of interviews where she talks about making each book age-appropriate, in terms of sex, for a reader the same age as Harry is in the book. So it's conceivable that she didn't bring it up until later because she felt it was too much for the kids.) But I don't think it really matters. If a book is worth reading, it's worth making up the best interpretation that you can for it. Authorial intention is interesting, but not really the determinant of what a work is about.

[Ahistoricality]

If a book is worth reading, it's worth making up the best interpretation that you can for it.

I agree that you've done that. Conversely, if a book isn't worth reading....

Dumbledore's function as authorial surrogate interferes with his role as a natural character. Hell, he speaks from death just to explain things.

It's not really about "authorial intent" at that point, it's about authorial competency. It's one thing to start a character-driven series without a clear idea of its direction (Snape was nearly the only character in the whole series I actually thought was interesting, maybe because he's the only one who actually struggles with moral issues.); it's another to start a plot-driven series, a planned arc, without knowing how it's going to end.

[Lurker]

Actually, the socio-economic structure of the wizarding world of HP is rather intriguing. Compared to the real world, there are two main oddities:

*First, there is no wizarding working class. Most working-class duties are taken care of by house-elves, a separate, enslaved species or by goblins, a wizard-dominated species. The few exceptions are formed by the magical maintenance, which is, anyhow, an expert trade.

*Second, there is no higher education as such. All wizarding post-secondary education takes place in apprenticeships or as solitary study. This is well in line with the traditional fantasy literature approach to magic, but difficult to console with a semi-modern world. Consequently, Hogwarts is the highest and the only wizarding educational institution of Britain. True-world educational institutions in similar position tend to get a political role much larger than schools usually get. (For example, the University of Helsinki was the only institution of higher education in Finland in the 19th century. As Finland was an autonomic grandduchy of the Russian empire, political discourse was limited elsewhere in the society. In this setting, the university and its professors developed into very important national political actors. Thus, the status of Dumbledore as an influential politician while a headmaster of a school is not utterly inrealistic.) Indeed, the easiest way to hurt Dumbledore would have been to found another wizarding school or to split the existing one into parts.

It seems Rowling never fully thought out the economic structure of the wizarding adult society. However, her work piles up, resulting in a system that resembles the slave-owning society of the early Roman republic: a respectable, politically rather powerless middle class, a powerful, wealthy upper class of old money wielding power and a lower class of slaves and foreign workers (elves and goblins). Indeed, the political struggle of the wizarding world in books HP6-8 has a feel similar to the Roman civil wars at the time of Sulla and Pompey.

When thinking about the wizarding society, it is important to remember the small size of its population. The Hogwarts has less than a thousand students, probably only 500 or so. If the birth rates are normal, as they seem to be, the total number of wizards is around 10,000-20,000, perhaps less. In such population, the politics are, by nature, person-centered. So is everything else. (It also tells why there is no higher education: the population is too small. There is only one wandmaker in the whole country, for instance.) Thus, truly, this is like an ancient city-state resolving its messy political feuds.

[The Modesto Kid]

What does that line you quote from Rex Reed even mean? Lots of movies feature characters who are not familiar with cell phones etc. but we don't say the characters of e.g. "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" or "Shindler's List" or "The Bicycle Thief" or "Weekend at Bernie's" no longer have any relevance. At least not for that reason. Am I missing something?

[Ahistoricality]

Indeed, the political struggle of the wizarding world in books HP6-8 has a feel similar to the Roman civil wars at the time of Sulla and Pompey.

Bad historical analogies to Harry Potter plots: the distinctive combination of overthinking and underthinking.

[Anderson]

"Perhaps that’s just Rowling becoming a slightly better writer as she goes"

I think she does, and I'm puzzled by the general contempt for Rowling's books. Her powers of fancy, as Coleridge put it, are excellent, and while her books aren't immune to criticism, well, neither is Tolkien.

The contempt for her working within established archetypes ("orphan w/ unknown destiny" etc.) is particularly odd. What is a writer of this kind of fiction supposed to do -- ditch every tradition of the folk tale, eschew any element categorized by Vladimir Propp, and write something so blindingly original that no one not enrolled in graduate school actually cares to read it?

[Anderson]

"you rather get the impression that he's just become addicted to keeping secrets"

True enough. Dumbledore's long explanation at the end of book 5 was both interesting and moving. He's aware of the dangers of power, tries to protect Harry from them, but can only do so through his own questionable uses of power.

Consider in this light Dumbledore's efforts to save Malfoy from himself (just as he's been trying to "save Harry from himself" in a different way), leading to his sacrificing himself -- for Malfoy, a development no one would've predicted in book 1. He could've interevened with Malfoy sooner -- why not?

[Rich Puchalsky]

"What is a writer of this kind of fiction supposed to do [...]"

Does "this kind of" mean fantasy, or children's fiction? Because if it's fantasy, there are many literary models of how to do it while remaining near fantasy tropes. James Branch Cabell, for instance, used a sort of ironic witticism; one of his best books, The Silver Stallion, includes as one of its chapters the classic fairy tale of the queen whose hand is promised to the hero who succeeds in the quest, except that this time the protagonist is not one of the questers but instead the hero who purposefully injures himself so he'll be left behind and can carry on a safely illicit love affair with the queen -- safely illicit, because if it were licit it would lead to marriage, and he has in mind instead a sort of long-term suicide. Mervyn Peake used the classic framework of the fated prince growing up to save / change his land, but made it so baroque, so odd both in quality of language and in conception, that he transcended his source material much as a classical composer could start with a folk song as the basis for new, advanced work. It can be done, and it's perfectly fine to point out that Rowling didn't do it.

That doesn't mean that Rowling's work is valueless. But she's really not a very good writer.

[BottyGuy]

I've read all the books (with my 10 year old daughter), and seen all the movies. Up to now Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was my favorite. Cuarón added the most complexity to date, but mostly in characters (emotions finally!), and the added darkness of the visuals.

I think previous films were hampered by the problem of the narritive path being unknown. These last two books really provide the payoff of the story lines, and without that knowledge it would be difficult for a Director and Writer to create something compelling (I've read that they had to adjust their stories based on "hints" from Rowlings). The Rowlings books are too full of details the gleam what will be important in following books.

Here Yates knows the end story and can pick relavent plot paths and emotions that drive the story. This makes the movie much more intriguing, and the time flew by for me because of that.

[Ahistoricality]

while her books aren't immune to criticism, well, neither is Tolkien.

False dichotomy alert! Or is it a threat: if we don't ease up on Rowling, you'll beat up hobbits until we beg for mercy?

[Anderson]

Does "this kind of" mean fantasy, or children's fiction?

The latter. And I would note that Peake is only slightly less forgotten than Cabell.

She's "not a good writer" stylistically -- try reading the books aloud to your kid, and you will cringe every page or two -- but she's creative, and obviously is no slouch at storytelling. And as I implied above, I tend to doubt that she's inferior to the much-more-lauded Tolkien on plot and characterization. Tolkien's world is more richly thought-out, but I don't think his magic or economic systems could sustain the scrutiny applied by some to Rowling's.

[Sri]

Had I not been a reader of the books, I might have enjoyed the movie more. This book happened to be my favorite of all the series and I anticipated the movie to live up to the book, and was disappointed. In addition, I was disappointed in the fact that they didn't spend enough time on why the movie is called THE HALF BLOOD PRINCE. They didn't show how obsessed Harry became with the book, nor did they show how Snape became suspicious of him having the book, or the true identity behind the book. Snape may have been the Half-Blood Prince but the movie didn't reveal why or how, or the fact that the book belonged to his mother 50 years prior, and the fact that Snape is "half-blood" and no one expected that. The movie just very flatly announced at the end that Snape was the Half-Blood Prince, period - the end. My favorite still remains HP3: Prisoner of Azkaban.
Being a great fan I have collected a list of good sites and articles (may be around 200) related to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (movie information, movie schedule, movie reviews, books, games, news, wallpapers and many more). If you are interested take a look at the below link
http://markthispage.blogspot.com/2009/07/all-you-want-to-know-about-harry-potter.html

[Rich Puchalsky]

Anderson, it's sort of a category error to say that Peake or Cabell are forgotten. In terms of literary studies -- i.e. what Scott works on -- there's a whole lot of work done on them, and people who want to read literary fantasy will quickly find out about them. Sure, they are "forgotten" in terms of what people are likely to pick up at a bookstore -- although, actually, my local used book store always sells out of whatever Cabell comes in -- but that's not really the criterion you're talking about when you talk about whether a writer is good or not. Cabell wrote 80 or 90 years ago. That far from now, will anyone be reading Rowling? Maybe, but I doubt it.

And while I think that Tolkien is somewhat overrated, I can't agree with you about that comparison either. If you're talking children's books, then the comparison is The Hobbit. There's really no doubt that Tolkien's book is more adventurous in terms of plot and characterization, better written, more coherently individual and strange. Magic or economic systems have nothing to do with it. It's cheating, a bit, to bring in characters that are later developed in an adult work, but Bilbo Baggins and Gollum and even Gandalf are characters that are going to be remembered, and no one is really going to remember who Harry or Hermione or Dumbledore were except in the most schematic terms.

[Anderson]

no one is really going to remember who Harry or Hermione or Dumbledore were except in the most schematic terms.

Time will tell, then. Tho, in "literary studies," it seems a great deal of literary garbage becomes the subject of dissertations because of its social value; I have no difficulty imagining that Rowling's books will be the object of "literary study" in that sense, a century from now.

(Cf. Wilkie Collins, whose Moonstone for instance is readable, but not going to set anyone on fire for its style, plot, or characterization, whereas its treatment of some gender and racial issues makes it a useful object of academic study.)

... At any rate, the original post did not say that the books have their fleeting charms but will not sustain literary appeal over time; it said they are "terrible." What I've tried, badly it seems, to express is that Rowling's books are *not* terrible, in some meaningful sense, and that a literary appreciation so narrow as to miss the value in her books is an appreciation in need of critical consideration.

[Cruss]

Thank god for this post.