Review: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Less than halfway through Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I turned to Amanda and whispered, “This movie has a lot of sex in it!” I don’t remember what scene that was, but I’m sure it involved one teenager staring longingly at another teenager and sighing deeply. I was joking of course, but only sort of- considering this is a family movie with no actual sex scenes, or even discussions of sex, there’s a strong theme of sexual awakening running through the film. There’s nothing voyeuristic or lurid in its portrayal of teenage longing, but rather a powerful evocation of what it feels like to be sixteen, looking around at the people you’ve been in school with since you were kids and realizing you’re not kids anymore.
Of course, just like in real life, the adults insist there are more important things going on. Specifically, Lord Voldemort’s power is growing, and he’s sending his Death Eaters out on increasingly audacious missions of destruction. There are also rumors of an impending attack on Hogwarts itself, which may rely on the help of a certain blond mole on the inside. Strangely, Voldemort never actually appears, aside from flashbacks and brief Sauron-like visions. In his place, the primary villain this time around is the almost beautiful but utterly bugfuck Bellatrix LeStrange, who’s played by Helena Bonham Carter, doing that cackling insanity thing she does so well, and in desperate need of some dental care. Fenrir Greyback is around as well, played by Dave Legeno, but he pretty much just stands around and snarls (still a better actor than Christian Bale).
The war with Voldemort stays in the background for most of the movie, while the narrative focuses on the aforementioned teen drama, as well as Harry’s mission to gain a bit of information from the suspiciously friendly Professor Slughorn. Jim Broadbent gives a performance that far surpasses the character as he was on the page, particularly when he drunkenly describes a gift once given to him by Harry’s mother. Even though it was one of the most moving scenes in the movie, I had to be reminded that it was also in the book, which speaks well of Broadbent as an actor.
Visually, HPatHBP is gorgeous. The use of lighting and color make the whole thing feel dreamlike, without seeming clichéd. There are special effects in nearly every scene, but they never take the focus away from the characters. These are people who live their lives so surrounded by magic that it rarely warrants a second glance, and this film reflects that more than the previous installments.
In fact, this is easily my favorite of the Harry Potter movies. It displaces Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which was the first of the film series both to display any sort of visual flair and to give the characters real emotional lives. Unfortunately, in the process quite of bit of world-building and exposition was cut. That’s something I’m fine with in general, but it hurts me on a gut level that Harry and the audience are never told who Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs are. The fourth and fifth movies are still more watchable than the first two, but never compared to the third. Half Blood Prince outshines them all because director David Yates finds the balance between telling a complete story and populating it with complete people, while not forgetting to make it look beautiful.
Wow. That’s pretty hideous. And then Bonham-Carter (the Red Queen) has some kind of digital thing done to her head-body ratio, which puts her squarely in the uncanny valley:
And for some reason Anne Hathaway (the White Queen) looks exactly like she did in her final scene in Brokeback Mountain, when she was playing a seemingly bloodless platinum blonde Texas trophy wife.
Not a look I would expect her to want to return to. For curiosity’s sake, I do wish they’d included a portrait of Alice herself, since she’s, you know, the lead character and all.
