"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" is the story of… who the hell am I kidding? Like anyone on the planet doesn't know exactly who Harry Potter is. The seventeen tribes of the Kwakwaka'wakw know who Harry Potter is. They recite their exhaustive knowledge of Hogwarts' inner workings at the annual potlatch.
The sixth entry in the series wastes no time trying to tell you who Harry Potter is either. It knows you know. Adapting an 800-plus-page, year-long narrative into a film allows no time for the five W's. Director David Yates kick-starts "Prince" with heavy action, jumping right into scenes of Lord Voldemort’s Death Eaters terrorizing wizards and Muggles alike in an almost-colorless London. It’s an auspicious start, especially since these scenes aren’t in J.K. Rowling’s novel. Know what else? Their inclusion makes the movie a superior telling of “Half-Blood Prince”, one of the few examples of a movie being better than its literary inspiration.
J.K. Rowling is an exceptional storyteller with a limitless capacity for imagination and charm, but, as she entered the twilight of her seven book cycle, it became abundantly clear that more editing was needed. The leap from “Prisoner of Azkaban”’s tight, controlled story to the sprawling and unwieldy “Goblet of Fire” was the start of her problems. It wasn’t until “The Order of the Phoenix” that the series’ bloat started to take its toll on the actual stories the books were meant to tell.
“Order” marks the point of “Potter”’s overall narrative, when his world is expanded beyond the purely magical world and Voldemort’s threat becomes more immediate. The story requires tension and a brisk pace to work as a thriller. Rowling instead indulges in countless character asides, like scenes of Harry and his would-be girlfriend Cho on Valentine’s Day. It takes close to one-hundred pages for the action to even start in "Order."
David Yates’ adaptation, on the other hand, gets to the inciting incident of the Dementor attack in less than ten minutes. This economy not only makes the narrative easier to follow, but more interesting as well.
“Half-Blood Prince” suffers from even more basic structure problems “Order” does, with hundreds of pages devoted to incidental character moments that delight fans but rarely serve the actual story. Evil werewolf Fenrir Greyback is a perfect example, a character pivotal to the story of “Half-Blood” who isn’t seen until the novel’s final pages.
Although he has few lines of dialogue, Greyback is featured prominently throughout the film. That opening scene of destruction, missing from the novel, actually introduces him to the audience. We see him again later, during an assault on the Weasley homestead at Christmas (another element that was absent in the novel).
These scenes make Greyback's character more tangible and threatening. More real. Greyback becomes an actual character instead of a plot device to menace the story’s heroes. On the flip-side, these sequences actually take a pivotal character from the novel out of the film's story. Does “Half-Blood Prince” suffer without Minister of Magic Rufus Scrimgeour? Not even a bit, in my opinion.
The truth is that these superficial changes to the structure of “Half-Blood Prince” aren’t what make the film a better telling of the novel. The most important change is that the movie offers story sequences that are free of Harry entirely. Save for portions of the books’ opening chapters, Rowling's stories are bound to Harry Potter’s experience of the events at all times.
In Yates' adaptations, there's more breathing room. To the discerning reader, it’s clear Draco Malfoy is a character being used, someone too young and frightened to be truly evil. The books are so focused on Potter that it’s not something that’s ever actually seen. Readers are just told that’s the case. In the film, we see Malfoy’s internal conflict play out in Tom Felton's excellent performance. He becomes a character to be pitied; a villain to be sure, but a tragic one.
Personally, I’m very much looking forward to the two “Deathly Hallows” films. Yates; track record proves that, rather than just pretty pictures of the story we all already know, we stand a chance of getting something new altogether. What's your take on the director's treatments of "Potter" thus far?
Comments