Don't let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the generally grim, occasionally startling, and altogether enthralling sixth chapter in a movie franchise that keeps managing to surprise just when one would expect it to be puttering along on auto-broomstick. Going a few shades blacker than 2007's already funereal Order of the Phoenix, this penultimate Potter picture includes the firebombing of a series regular's home, an episode of demonic possession that wouldn't look out of place in an Exorcist movie, and multiple attempts on Harry's life. The greater threat, however, is those unseen forces that compete for the hearts and minds of impressionable boy wizards.
Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros.
Radcliffe, with Watson at right, looks ever more the adult.
Details
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Opens Wed., July 15 at Meridian and other theaters. Rated PG. 153 minutes.
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You can credit J.K. Rowling with some of the darkening mood, but also director David Yates, the British TV veteran and feature-film neophyte who brought a nightmarish jolt to Order of the Phoenix. His gritty, tactile images seem of a piece with the story's descent into what Joseph Campbell termed "the belly of the whale." By the end of Phoenix, Harry had once more narrowly escaped the clutches of the resurrected Lord Voldemort, witnessed the demise of his last living relative, and beheld a prophecy that says when it comes to Harry and the Dark Lord, only one can survive.
Whereas the previous Potter was structured as a coming-of-age tale, here we get a double-barreled detective story, with Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) searching for clues to Voldemort's apparent invincibility, while Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) ferrets out an assassin lurking among the student body. Mostly, though, the film concerns itself with matters of destiny and the origins of evil. Like many a mythical archvillain, Voldemort was (we learn in flashback) once a boy, too, and a star student at Hogwarts, until the tree of wizardly knowledge tempted him with its forbidden fruit. Now, a present-day Hogwarts student may be preparing to follow in the Dark Lord's footsteps.
The movie isn't all gloom and doom, mind you. Quidditch is back, and so are the adolescent hormonal stirrings (see: Goblet of Fire) that wreak havoc on longtime BFFs Ron (the ever-ganglier Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), which periodically turn Half-Blood Prince into something like Fast Times at Hogwarts High. There's an expanded role for Harry's moon-child classmate Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch, who has the dingbat charm of the young Carol Kane).
Jim Broadbent joins the faculty as potions teacher Horace Slughorn, a former Hogwarts professor returned to the fold. With his quivering voice and fusty, absentminded charm, Slughorn is the sort of teacher who endears himself to his students by treating them as equals rather than peons. He validates himself through his students' successes, but he also carries a deep, private shame. And Broadbent, who plays the part quite brilliantly, lets it infect his character's entire physicality, from his slightly stooped posture to his skittishness around those who ask too many questions—especially about one particular ex-pupil. Unpleasant memories have always weighed heavy on the denizens of Potter-land, but who knew they could be stored in medicinal vials and re-experienced at will—the magic world's equivalent of Proust's Madeleine?
Prince won't make converts out of those who can't tell a thestral from a Dementor, and the series as a whole lacks the enveloping, full-scale mythos of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But I'd be lying if I didn't say this movie gave me as much innocent pleasure as any I've seen this year—the pleasure of a ripping good yarn well-told; the pleasure of the Radcliffe/Grint/Watson ensemble, who by now have the relaxed back-and-forth of the leads in the original Star Trek series; and the pleasure of knowing that, in these troubled times for magic people and Muggles alike, brave, selfless Harry is there to remind us of our best selves. So I for one eagerly await the two-part finale, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, coming in the fall of 2010 and summer of 2011.
Yet, curiously, Prince closes on the incongruous image of sunlight poking through parted clouds, burnishing Hogwarts in a radiant autumnal glow. Surveying the landscape, Harry comments on its beauty, even as he realizes that his supreme ordeal still lies before him, and that it is sometimes dawn just before the darkest.
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