I Open at the Close

I just got back from watching Harry Potter and les Reliques de la Mort, Première Partie (as it is called over here) at the local theater.  The last time I went to the Eden Cinema, to watch the La Princesse de Montpensier, I was the youngest person in the theater by about 25 years.  This time, with the exception of a few indulgent and long-suffering parents, I was one of the oldest.  I even saw a one or two really little kids there--which was a little shocking, since there were moments where I was scared watching it.  My ten-year-old self would definitely not have been able to take it.  Harry Potter the series definitely grew up with its protagonist, and with the readership that waited for each book to come out, and by now it is a far darker story.  The majority of the theater-goers tonight, though, were not children but teenagers.  I think I recognized some of my students, and it was definitely date-night for a lot of them.  I felt a little bit like this.

Anyway, the movie: I have an official position of lack of enthusiasm for the HP movies, since I believe that the books are by far the better experience.  There are things you can get from a book that you just can't from a movie--quality of language, complexity of plot and dialog, the power of your own mental images, etc., etc.  Further, nobody could know this when they cast an 11-year-old for the part ten years ago, but Rupert Grint, I am sorry to say, had not grown up into a well-favored young man.

However, despite my grousing, there are things to enjoy about the movies.  I have nothing but admiration for the cream of the British character acting academy who slum so impressively in all the Harry Potter Movies.  Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, Maggie Smith....I love you all.  Further, I don't just want to be Helena Bonham Carter, I want to be her hair. 

This particular installment of Harry Potter I thought fit better into the movie format than some of the previous ones--because they cut the book in half, they were able to fit in more of the plot, and away from Hogwarts (as cool a spectacle as it was) the movie hewed more closely to a character-driven story, and did not get bogged down in flashy special effects sequences.  Of course, as a fan of the books, I would still have felt a strong connection with some elements of the story, even if the movie had been far from what I imagined it should be.  I cried over Dobby when I read The Deathly Hallows for the first time, and I cried in the movie tonight.

One last note, going back to the idea of the generation that grew up as the Harry Potter books--and later the movies--were coming out.  I realized, as I was waiting for the lights to go down in the theater, that I had not been to see a Harry Potter movie on the big screen since number 2 came out at Christmastime 2002.  At that point I was living in Huston, and I went to see it with a bunch of ballet girls.  I sat next to my roommate Jennie Warnick, and I remember realizing, when I had to cringe and close my eyes in the face of the scene with the basilisk, that she was not a girl that you could grab onto for support.  That seems very long ago and far away, now.  Harry is not the only one who left old worlds behind.