I apologize for another “OMG, this is so significant because we all experienced it” article. But okay, come on, Harry Potter is seriously culturally significant because we all experienced it together growing up. Unless you lived under a staircase (get it?) or were a total contrarian, and I know of only a few people who truly were, chances are you spent at least one night of your childhood lined up at your local bookstore dressed like a wizard waiting to buy the latest Harry Potter book at midnight. If you were like me, you spent many nights of your childhood doing that, and then repeated it several more times as an adult when the movie came out, including tonight.
The 8pm CAS showing (thanks again, Student Government) was completely full, without an empty seat (trust me I looked) and many of the exclusively 18 and up crowd dressed up as their favorite magical character. When I showed up (unfortunately almost at 8), there was already a line for the midnight showing stretching from the Loews entrance halfway to the corner of Boylston and Tremont St. When I left the theater around 10:30, that line was quite literally around the block.
So yeah, there was a film too. We’re going to have several reviews from more qualified critics later tonight and tomorrow, so I’m going to let them do the dirty work, but here are my few observations. The atmosphere inside the theater was great. This was not going to be a silent audience: they cheered for the Tron trailer (young Jeff Bridges, old Jeff Bridges, whaaaat?); they cheered for the floating Warner Bros. logo, which I swear was made about ten seconds longer than usual just to make sure nobody missed the iconic opening chimes.
Oh right, the film. So yeah, it was pretty good. Earlier today I was discussing what Harry Potter means to the people who grew up with it. We talked about how it can be seen as an allegory for World War II, Gulf War-era terrorist attacks (it was written in the 90s), classism, racism, control of the media, video surveillance in Britain, and more than anything the feeling we seem to have more and more often these days that we’re less safe now than we were yesterday.
There is a lot of that in the film. After opening with one of the best magic action (maction? no, uh, magiction?) scenes of all time, most of the rest of the film deals with Harry, Ron and Hermione not being safe. The Ministry of Magic gets overrun by Voldemort and starts printing “How to Spot a Muggle” pamphlets that are obviously modeled after Nazi anti-Jewish and U.S. anti-communist propaganda. The Ministry’s new police uniforms are clones of the SS. There are lots of lines that remind us of the first few years after 9/11, and especially wiretapping, like “you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.” There’s torture and questioning of what it means to be a wizard that sounds a lot like debates about what it means to be an American.
There is also, finally, an obvious wand/penis joke. Yup, I said it, and it’s true. This Potter may be darker, but it’s filled with plenty of the lighter scenes we’ve become accustomed to. Interestingly, there is also, briefly, a visible cross at a wizard church.
The performances are what we’ve come to expect. The kids continue to get better, but are still a little awkward (who isn’t at 20, though) and the adults are brilliant as always. In the end, this feels like a more complete film than previous ones, even though it ends in the middle of book seven. It’s got more emotion, more complex ideas, more conflict to be resolved. It’s also shot, as has been director David Yates’ tendency since taking the helm of HP5, in a style that enhances the overall atmosphere of the film rather than just being functional as had been the case in earlier films. It is perhaps the first Harry Potter that can be appreciated as a work of art in its own right for the way it delivers on the promise of J.K. Rowling’s extraordinary final tale. It’s a film that deserves to be taken seriously as a standalone entity.
And it should be. It’s a testament to the cultural power of Harry Potter (and Imelda Staunton’s acting) that one shriek from Dolores Umbridge elicited a wave of groans from the audience, that Dobby got a huge cheer mere instants after “apparating” onscreen, that inevitable tragedies still felt poignant. We have grown up with these characters, and now that their cultural dominance may be coming to an end, we are lucky that it is ending with the most relevant, most fun, and most completely realized film yet.
