Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 2 hours, 14 minutes
Director: David Yates.
Quick Impressions:
If someone told you, “J.K. Rowling just wrote a new Harry Potter book,” would you scream, “What??!! How soon can I get my hands on it???!” or would you shrug and say, “Cool. When they make it into a movie maybe I’ll check it out”?
If you’re one of the rabid book enthusiasts, you will love Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. (You might find reasons to rip it to shreds afterwards, but you’re going to be deeply invested as you watch.) If you’re one of the casual movie checker-outers, though, you may find yourself casually checking out during this movie, then muttering vague, PG-13 curses as you leave the theater.
I’m not saying it’s wrong to be in the second camp. My nine-year-old fidgeted so much during the film that I was tempted to ask Newt Scamander to come catch her in his suitcase. She declared afterwards that she found the entire movie very boring, to the point that watching it became an unpleasant chore. It wasn’t that the content disturbed her or that she found the story too dark and intense. (Her favorite film last year was The Shape of Water, and she was ecstatic to see it win Best Picture.) She just thought the movie was boring. Keep in mind, though, she’s only read the first Harry Potter book and watched the first few movies with my mother. She recently started reading Chamber of Secrets, then put it down to read something else that interested her more!!! To me, this seems like sacrilege, but at least she’s always reading something. The point is, she’s just not as into Harry Potter as the rest of us, and I think the movie was ultimately too talky for her. (It can’t help that she hasn’t read the entire series and doesn’t know about several storylines and characters.)
Admittedly, The Crimes of Grindelwald is a little overplotted (okay, a lot overplotted), but I mean, J.K. Rowling herself wrote the screenplay. Have you ever read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire? My favorite of the books, Prisoner of Azkaban, has pages and pages of elaborate explanation and backstory near the end, which is much abbreviated and differently presented in the movie version.
Rowling is a great writer, no question, but she does have the tendency to cram in multiple twists and elaborate explanations just before the very end of a book. Even her Cormoran Strike novels are like that. So when a movie written by Rowling herself turns out to have several late reveals that require elaborate explanations, I think it’s disingenuous of her loyal audience to recoil in surprise. I mean, come on, you know her work. You love her work. That’s why you’re there. That’s what she does.
Although my daughter was bored, both my mom and I really loved the movie (and my dad loved the fact that he was able to get gluten free pizza and a cup of coffee at the theater). I’m dying to discuss it with my husband, but he’s not seeing it until Tuesday when he picks up our son for Thanksgiving. We had to split into two groups because our three-year-old would no doubt have (best case) crept all over the theater like a runaway niffler or (worst case) let his obscurus explode us all before the 2 hours and 14 minutes were up.
The Good:
As I considered how to begin this review, I thought, “The movie certainly didn’t make very good use of its setting. It seems easy to showcase the magic of Paris, yet all we see are lairs in the sewers, secret meetings beneath Père-Lachaise, nightlife at the circus, characters staring into the distance at a cafe, a woman sitting alone in the rain…”
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was wrong. This film utilizes Paris not only well but with a great degree of originality and inventiveness. The Père-Lachaise cemetery sequence is particularly good.
Basically Fantastic Beasts 2 eschews clichéd scenes at familiar Paris landmarks in favor of unique and meaningful sequences in other, carefully chosen haunts of the city.
This is not the Paris we’re expecting, perhaps, but it is Paris. (It’s also quite true that if you know only that someone is in Paris, you’re very unlikely to find that person easily without more information, especially if you don’t speak French and know nothing about the city. Sometimes movies give us the idea that if we just make a beeline for the Eiffel Tower, any given person in Paris will be right there waiting with a smile.)
I kind of love that this entire movie is basically just a bunch of people wandering around Paris trying to find each other. No wonder Newt has trouble declaring which side he’s on. What a great visual metaphor for a collective existential crisis! Of course Newt doesn’t really understand what or where the sides are! There seems to be great confusion, in general. And the physical environment is fluid; walls move, crumble open.
In some ways, Newt is a bit like a beast himself, confused by the strange ways of humans. (He makes me think of animals who follow traditional paths and don’t understand why there’s a new road full of cars in the middle of their migratory route.) Honestly, as far as Newt is concerned, this story is about others clearly showing him where and what the sides are, so that he understands which way to go. Wordy explanations will tell him nothing. He needs to look into someone’s eyes and understand.
The first Fantastic Beasts featured a staggering number of important (and often dangerous) characters, some non-wizarding, some magical, some magical creatures. This second installment (of five planned films) features even more characters (though, perhaps fewer of them are literal beasts).
In that aspect, it’s quite similar to Widows, another film I just saw this weekend. The supporting cast is teeming with characters, and like Viola Davis, Dumbledore is busily thinking up assignments and plans for other people to execute.
Jude Law is perfectly cast and brilliant in the role of a young(er) Albus Dumbledore, a wizard who dedicates his life to conscripting other people to do all the most important work for him. I love Dumbledore as much as the next Harry Potter fan, but seriously, is there no act of self-sacrificing heroism he won’t delegate?
Grindelwald may be manipulating Credence Barebone for his own ends, but Dumbledore manipulates seemingly everyone he encounters to counter what he considers evil ends. It’s like the two are playing wizard chess on a global scale.
Another standout among the new cast is Zoë Kravitz who has built an impressive filmography in recent years and stepped out of the shadow of being her father’s daughter. This is the strongest performance I’ve seen from Kravitz, who is immensely compelling as Leta Lestrange, probably the best new character in the film (and another person Dumbledore manipulates for the greater good). Leta is not at all what I expected her to be when I heard her name mentioned in the first film. Her story is extremely interesting, and the effect she has on other characters is important and profound.
My favorite character in the first film was Alison Sudol’s Queenie. This time around, I was puzzled about the purpose of her storyline…until suddenly I saw, and then things starting moving much faster than I expected. I love what’s done here with Leta and Queenie, and actually now I think I need to rewatch the first film. I wish Rowling had written these stories as novels. I think the novels would have found far warmer reception because the story is so literary.
I also loved meeting Nagini (Claudia Kim) in human form, and I’m extremely curious about how her character will develop in future installments. I wish we got to spend more time with her and Ezra Miller’s Credence. I’d love to see more of them together, and I still feel we’ve barely gotten to know them as individuals.
Dan Fogler’s Jacob Kowalski is still a great, sympathetic character whose rapport with Eddie Redmayne’s Newt is excellent just like last time.
Tina Goldstein may have eyes like a salamander, but Katherine Waterston has the face of her father. It looks more beautiful on her, granted, but I swear if you take away the hair, it’s the exact same face. Bafflingly, she seems to look even more like him in this film than the last (maybe because the scenes are so dark her hair seems to disappear). Initially, I found it frustrating that Tina is allowed to persist in her mistaken belief about Newt and Leta for so long, but confusion (about identity and status and relationships) is kind of a central concern of the whole movie. In some ways, entire plotlines are just a big misunderstanding (though I think the idea that some of these things don’t matter to the greater story may be a trick Rowling is trying to play on the audience).
I’m not sure how I feel about Johnny Depp as Grindelwald. I did notice that when I was reflecting back on the movie, I found myself thinking of Dumbledore and and Newt and Jacob and Queenie and Leta and Nagini and Johnny Depp. In the past, Depp used to be quite a chameleon. In each new role, he would find a different way to be an oddball. Here he may look like a dangerous, evil wizard, but he sounds like a blend of Jack Sparrow and Sweeney Todd. There is no forgetting it’s Johnny Depp.
Still, I do find Depp’s Grindelwald a compelling character. He certainly lives up to his reputation for being silver tongued. His speech at the rally near the end of the film is tremendously compelling. He’s so different from Voldemort, too.
“I see,” I thought as Grindelwald stared down a baby, then coolly ordered his murder with a mere gesture. “This guy is scarier than Voldemort. He can best the one enemy Voldemort never could. A baby.” And with so little drama, too.
Actually, Depp as Grindelwald was the only thing my daughter actually liked about the movie.
She explained, “I always like to listen to villains and hear how fake the crap is they’re trying to feed people. They’re always like, “We’re going to have freedom, and we’re going to bring order, and we’re going to kill people. Oh! Shh! Did I say that part out loud?”
When I asked what she liked about Grindewald in particular, she answered, “He had cool hair, and I liked what he was pointing out. He’s almost like a toddler because toddlers don’t tell the whole story. And he didn’t tell the whole story that they were killing a bunch of innocent people. But I like him better than Voldemort. He has cool hair, what he says is way more interesting, and Voldemort doesn’t have a nose.”
Grindelwald is a compelling villain. In fact, he seems to be the only person who knows what’s going on much of the time. He’s the only person who offers people a clear vision for the future. Everyone seems to be lost in this movie. It’s no surprise so many end up hanging off his every word.
Meanwhile, the beasts are a little less showcased this time around, but the enormous creature Newt traps with a cute kitty rattle makes a big impression, and both the niffler and the bowtruckle make themselves useful. I personally was pleased when a kappa showed up since my daughter and I used to read a poem about “a kappa with a carapace” in one of her pop-up books when she was little. If you ask me, two birds prove to be the most fantastic beasts in this story, but their importance doesn’t really become clear for a long time.
Ultimately, this is a story about how identities are bestowed, chosen, and made. I loved watching, always discovering more and more mysteries about familiar characters.
And it was cool to see Nicholas Flamel.
Best Action Sequence:
Grindelwald’s dramatic escape during transport is a dizzying, spellbinding rush that is hard to make sense of completely as it’s happening.
Best Scene:
What’s best in this movie are the scattered moments of human connection. Tina and Newt have palpable chemistry during the salamander eyes conversation. Jacob’s heartfelt talk about Queenie to Newt at the cafe is perfectly played. The best part of the movie isn’t any single scene but the many points of shared understanding that the protagonists manage to experience while lost throughout the city. These meaningful connections are like scattered points of light in the City of Lights.
Maybe my favorite scene is Leta’s exchange with Yusuf Kama (William Nadylam) at the tomb simply because we learn so much information here. These back-to-back flashbacks contain so much story that they honestly could be an entire movie by themselves. (And maybe they should be.)
Best Scene Visually:
I kind of like the bit with the glove portkey, but if you’re into the really “ooh! ahh!” type of visuals, then the early scene at Newt’s home offers the grandest and most magical views.
The haunting image from Leta’s boggart lesson is also stuck in my mind.
The Negatives:
Initially, I thought that the movie was structured in a frustrating way, that we should have received certain information sooner. “Instead of merely hinting about this new prophecy,” I wanted to yell at the screen, “quit interrupting the characters talking about it, and just let them tell us what it is already! Then let us ponder it for a while.”
Perhaps bits of Leta Lestrange’s story should be teased out earlier in the film, so we have time to digest it, to wonder about it.
At first, I thought too much information was crammed into the last half hour of the movie. And I was considering the idea that much of it was just a dead end as I heard some people around me complaining.
But I’ve been thinking a lot about the end of the movie. I’ve been thinking that maybe people are reading it wrong. Maybe the author is trying to trick us. What if we are shown a certain set of (seemingly pointless, dead-end) events for a reason? What if that is to show us an example of what can happen in the great houses of the wizarding world, a template of sorts? If something can happen to one family, that same thing can happen to another. And we know how those wizarding families work now, how their lines work. Consider that much of what we’re told about a certain topic in Deathly Hallows comes second hand. I don’t want to get all spoilery, so I’m being vague, but all I know is if I felt a certain way about someone, and then what happened in that one family happened to someone I was trying to protect…well…
This is just a crazy idea, but the movie is called Fantastic Beasts, and we are given the example of two parallel birds and their opposite trajectories. And it is also called The Crimes of Grindelwald. Maybe the greatest of these crimes are not directly stated. Sometimes bad stories only get worse when you find out more details.
Honestly, before I thought of all this, I was joking to myself, “The Crimes of Grindelwald! The only heinous, unprovoked act I see is when he contemplates a baby, then walks away, and we assume the worst.” Well…I’m a bit more impressed now. I hope what I’m thinking now is close to the truth. (When it comes to predicting Harry Potter, I’ve been wrong before.) This whole process of putting together a theory makes me remember the thrill of trying to guess what would happen next with certain plotlines in Harry Potter books. My feeling is, even if the answer I’m thinking of isn’t correct, there is a satisfying answer that Rowling will reveal to us in a later movie.
Basically the biggest problem with this movie is that it’s the second installment in a five film series, and it’s structured in a way that might not captivate the casual movie goer. If you’re not that invested in J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world, then you just might not care enough about what’s being presented on the screen.
Even if you are invested in the story, you would not be unreasonable to question the way it’s presented to us. Imagine watching Waiting for Godot, but then just before the end, Godot not only shows up, he brings Scheherazade with him, and she decides to spend the last ten minutes telling us every single story she knows. Why is so much material packed into the final act when the entire middle of the movie features nothing but wandering around? I was thoroughly entertained, but that doesn’t mean the structure isn’t strange.
And if you’re looking for whimsy, you won’t find much here. Even that scene from the trailer showing people magically swimming through the air in bubbles–that’s all related to a traveling circus with a really abusive freakshow. This is a dark tale, maybe too dark for some tastes.
Honestly, though, I’m so energized by this kooky theory I’ve concocted about certain late revelations to have negative thoughts about the film anymore.
My daughter is less forgiving. She just listed her major complaints for me (again). She says, “The whole thing was very confusing. Everyone was just wandering around looking for each other. Like literally that was the entire plot. And it was hard to tell sometimes when it was a flashback. It would just jump right into all these flashbacks with no warning. That made it hard to follow.”
I can’t argue with any of that. I did not have trouble following the movie or recognizing the flashbacks, but I’m not a fidgety nine-year-old. And while I find the idea of everyone wandering around Paris looking for each other strangely charming (like a delightful metaphor for the general confusion of the age), that is an accurate description of what happens during most of the movie.
“Also,” my daughter goes on, “the animals were not involved this time. They may show up every now and then, but the movie is not focused on the animals, and those beasts are what made the last movie so fun.”
This is also true, but here’s my take on that. Last time, we all joined Newt as he climbed into the whimsical world inside his suitcase. Newt’s creatures ran amok all over New York and changed the story. This time, the story changes Newt. It’s not about the effect he has on events, but the effect events have on him. Now the time has come for him to climb outside the suitcase and join the rest of us. He’s a kind soul and has a beautiful interior life, but the rest of the world is becoming a nightmarish disaster. He needs to choose a side.
Overall:
If you’re a fan of Harry Potter, then obviously you must see this film. Whether you like it or not is basically irrelevant. You won’t know what happens in this chapter of the story unless you watch the movie. My daughter was underwhelmed by The Crimes of Grindelwald, but I personally found the movie engrossing and entertaining in the extreme. Perhaps it isn’t perfect, but I loved it and will definitely watch it again.