This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 18, 2010 - Before going to see "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," I had two questions: The first, of course, was whether this movie would be comparable to those before it in the series. The second was the effect of being half a book. Those were easily resolved, but I came out with a different question. The resolution first. (Spoiler alert)
"Deathly Hallows Part 1" holds up very well, and that is due in no small part to the three youngsters having grown as actors as well as wizards. Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Emma Watson (Hermione Granger) and Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) have to hold this movie. Dumbledore is dead; and most of Harry's other allies appear but briefly, save Dobby, oh but could they have saved Dobby. Even the Dark Lord's minions are subdued. Lucius Malfoy has lost his swagger; Severus Snape smolders without any acidic putdowns; and Dolores Umbridge is more a plot point than a poisonous headmistress. Only Belatrix -- the marvelous, barely under control Helena Bonham Carter -- jolts the screen with evil energy. Well, there is Nagini.
What matters in this movie is tension because it is building toward the finale -- the great, coming battle between good and evil. But slightly more than two hours of slowly building tension would be a bit much. To break it up, while never letting it go entirely, we see explored the bonds of friendship and purpose that have drawn Harry, Hermione and Ron more tightly over the series.
Ron's insecurities play themselves out in a vision of Harry and Hermione as, well, more than friends. And later, the boys' playful banter sounds right. But the scene that, to me, struck the perfect note was an awkward one. Harry reached out to comfort Hermione by persuading her to dance. They were as gawky and unpolished as two teens are likely to be in real life.
As for where the movie ends. It's right, even though the stream of light from the wand or sword or light saber is a cliche. The line is drawn. Voldemort, whose malevolence has been a mostly constant, background presence in this movie is ready for war.
The new question, which I can't answer, is whether this movie holds together on its own. What if someone came into the theater who had never read one of the books or seen a previous movie?
My fear is that they would be lost. What's a patronus? What's a horcrux? What, even, is the significance of Harry's scar?
"Deathly Hallows Part 1" is needed as a transitional movie. For those who have followed the story of the boy who lived, it's a fast-moving 146 minutes that follows the book with less edited out than more recent films. Given the fan base, that's enough.
Opens Nov. 19
--Donna Korando
Fair Game
"When we didn't find weapons I felt terrible about it, sick about it and still do, because a lot of the case in removing Saddam Hussein was based upon weapons of mass destruction." - George W. Bush, on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Nov. 9, 2010.
If President Bush actually was surprised - indeed, sickened -- by the failure of the 2003 invasion of Iraq to turn up any nuclear weapons, the only reason would have been that his top aides, including vice president Dick Cheney and political guru Karl Rove, intentionally misled him. They, at least, had plenty of reason to believe that the weapons did not exist.
That is the premise that guides the action of "Fair Game," a riveting feature film that focuses on a married couple - CIA agent Valerie Plame and former diplomat Joseph Wilson - who were nearly destroyed for insisting, on the basis of evidence gathered in the field, that Saddam had neither nuclear weapons nor the uranium to make them.
The movie, directed with dispatch and a close attention to detail by Doug Liman ("The Bourne Identity"), is based on memoirs by both Plame (Naomi Watts) and Wilson (Sean Penn), and clearly represents their point of view.
One of the reasons the film is so convincing is that underlying the suspenseful story is an intimate, totally believable portrait of a marriage, complete with a house in the D.C. suburbs and the requisite two children. The family was almost torn apart by the crisis created when Plame and Wilson were attacked by the Bush administration.
Watts and Penn play skillfully off one another, adding to the verisimilitude of the film. And seldom has the quietly ferocious infighting that occurs daily among bright, ambitious, high-level Washington bureaucrats, always alert for the hint of a change in the political weather, been so convincingly presented.
The basic story is familiar to anyone who paid attention to the news in the period of the Iraq invasion. The Bush administration was pushing the CIA hard to link Iraq to nuclear weapons. Wilson, a former ambassador to Niger, was sent to that West African nation to check on a report that it was shipping huge amounts of "yellowcake" uranium to Iraq for bombs. He found strong evidence that the report was not true.
Separately, using her Iraqi sources, Plame came to the same conclusion as her husband: Saddam had no Iraqi nuclear weapons and no growing stockpile of yellowcake. Nonetheless, the Bush administration used the purported nuclear program to justify the invasion of Iraq. Of course, no nukes were found, but by then the long war was underway.
Wilson, in a nice bit of type casting, is portrayed by Penn as tending to fly off the handle. When the former diplomat went public with his story, accusing the Bush administration of ignoring evidence that there were no Iraqi nukes, his wife was fired and, even more serious, she was identified by a newspaper columnist as a CIA agent. The unmasking of a secret agent is serious stuff - some might call it treason -- and a vice presidential aide named Scooter Libby took the fall for leaking the information to the columnist.
Libby was tried for obstruction of justice and perjury, convicted, fined and sentenced to prison. The prison sentence was commuted by President Bush.
In "Fair Game" - "she's fair game" was Karl Rove's casual justification for the attack on Valerie Plame -- Director Liman skillfully mixes newsreel footage with dramatic action to propel the action. He and screenwriters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth enrich the story with a rounded portrait of the lives of the two protagonists outside of work - small, argumentative Beltway dinner parties at which much is said and much concealed are key to the development of a nuanced but viscerally effective story that is worthy of John Le Carre. Of course, the story, like the war in Iraq, is by no means over.
Opens Friday Nov. 19
--Harper Barnes
Harper Barnes is the Beacon movie reviewer.