So
congratulations, nerd, if you knew what even half of the proper nouns
in the preceding paragraph meant. But at the risk of ruining your
fangasm, I probably should mention that I dumbed it down a little bit
anyway. "Muggle," you see, is the
British epithet for "regular
human." In America, however, our grand wizards use a different and much
less credible word, "NoMaj," when
they lower themselves to refer to those of us without magic in our blood.
As
I am me, and I evidently have some kind of legitimate disorder, this
minor linguistic disconnect led me down the dark rabbit hole—trying to
figure out if, back in the 1770s, Wizard America fought a War of Wizard
Independence against Wizard Parliament and Wizard England and Wizard
King George, and, if so, did that mean there was a Wizard Glorious
Revolution? A Wizard Magna Carta?
A Wizard Norman Conquest? And at that point, I realized: why the hell
are the wizard states so incredibly determined to keep the two worlds separate, when it would be easy, and I mean Goddamn
trivial,
for their ancient and powerful orders to have established their own
above-ground polity that didn't see fit to arbitrarily tie itself to
human institutions and boundaries? The reason, naturally, is that the
Harry Potter novels are based in low fantasy, and are therefore required
to bend their mythology around something that appears to be our real
world.
But there is absolutely no
good answer to that vexing question in any of these
Harry Potter movies,
including this one. That remains the case even though this question
forms the fundamental basis of the whole universe's underlying plot,
insofar as just about every villain in the series is some kind of dire
fascist who wants to tear down the barrier and put the human race to the
wand (that is, just as soon as he's finished figuring out which wizards
live, and which ones go to the Wizard Gas Chambers instead). Before,
it was Voldemort; now, in this prequel, it is an offscreened,
Goldstein-from-
1984-like fugitive by the name of Grindelwald. Even so, Grindewald has an obvious onscreen adherent in the form of MaCUSA's mean-minded bureaucrat,
Percival Graves, whom we find being played by Colin Farrell with an
alt-right haircut, just in case we hadn't gotten the picture yet. (Or it's just a 1920s haircut, but either way, repressed memories of
Winter's Tale rise up, threatening
to drag me back down to hell with them.) Meanwhile, on the side of Muggle supremacy, we have Samantha Morton, playing a 20th century witchfinder general. Her goal
is to uncover, persecute, and ultimately liquidate the secret wizarding
community. And, much like the proverbial story of the dog and the
speeding car, you really have to stop and wonder exactly what this bigoted idiot thinks she's going to
do with all these wizards and witches, were she to really, truly
catch them.
Here's
the rub, though: "what's the deal with Rowling's geopolitics?" is
simply not any kind of important question in a film series made for
children. And yet, when the ninth in that series turns
completely
upon the Statute of Secrecy (oh, great, another proper noun), you wind
up thinking about Rowling's Fake Wizard History anyway, and whether
their commitment to invisibility was ever a remotely good idea in the
first place, given that some mighty asshole is just going to tear that
veil to pieces regardless, and in the meantime maybe some of these
all-powerful mages could cure some cancers, or maybe help us fight the
Real Nazis.
Of course, the preceding three paragraphs
strongly suggest two things. One: I have never read a single damned
word that J.K. Rowling actually wrote, and hence I almost certainly come
off as an ignorant jerk. Two: this new Potter-related product is
simply not that interesting or enjoyable on its own merits. Its nominal
premise—that is, the premise that's etched into the title of
thing—is the story of Newt Scamander, wandering the world and rescuing
and/or enslaving various magical animals. Frankly, that seemed like a
pretty cute idea to make a movie about. But director David Yates is
here to disabuse you quickly of any notion that his movie will be about
Scamander's quest (for that part's over before the movie even starts),
or that his movie is going to be particularly fun in any other way.
Yates, turning in his fifth monochromatic Potter movie in a row, has
grown so terrifyingly resistant to any color other than gray—even the
color of Scamander's (allegedly) magnificent menagerie—that his film
would've seemed noticeably livelier had it been shot in black-and-white
instead.
(And yet, please, let's be fair: Yates and his
film's scenarist—that selfsame global sensation Rowling, presently
adapting herself, because what would professional screenwriters know
about writing movies that she couldn't pick up on the fly?—do see fit
to insert a few moments of fantastic beastliness into their movie, which
I'll remind you is called "
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,"
thanks to a few key creatures escaping from the magical geometry of
Scamander's steamer chest. Perhaps needless to say, each of them has
their own silly name, their own arbitrary behavior pattern, their own
uninspired design, and their own multi-gigabyte file worth of
semi-competent CGI rendering; and if you like Rowling's marginalia, I
suppose I really can't imagine that you might find these scenes
unpleasant or boring. But, since I kind of hate Rowling's marginalia,
and since they are clearly not worth talking about in any
other
context, I won't—except that I'll happily admit I did rather appreciate the
miniature Groot thing, who clings to Scamander like he was its mother,
and can also pick locks when called upon to do so.)
Anyway,
at least the proper Potters had a justification for their darkening
palette. Yet I guess this one really does go in pretty much the exact
same direction, so I can't say it's entirely inappropriate, even if the
specific choice
here reads a lot less, "this film is serious
business," and a lot more, "this film is set in the 1920s, and
apparently I, David Yates, am a shameless hack."
In the end, what
Beasts
represents is a helplessly anodyne fantasy adventure, with a few good
ideas spread far between, and mired in 21st century action movie tropes
that were already old years and years ago. There is the hero who falls
ass-backwards into heroism; there is the villain who's evil mostly for
the sake of it; and, in the end, there is the great big Thing
in the Sky Above New York. (Indeed, it's even worse than most
such efforts at Septembersploitation, for in
Beast's climax, it hits you like a diamond bullet that, in 1926, the Manhattan skyline wasn't
worth destroying yet.)
Beasts suffers from prequel problems, too, since we know in broad strokes that nothing that happens will really matter.
It seems like it
could
have been fun, though, and yet it escapes me exactly how. Perhaps it
might have been better if Eddie Redmayne, who I am now convinced is a
good actor but also an almost-offensively obvious one, played Newt
Scamander less as a cringing geek—he casts his eyes downward in almost
every scene, as if he's afraid he's going to be struck with a
newspaper—and more as what the scenario honestly seems to call for, a
Doctor Who-type ascended nerd, lost in his own bullshit, and who can
muster up only a tenuous appreciation of or concern for the problems of
his fellows. It might have been better still if Tina were not swallowed
whole by Katherine Waterston's herculean struggle to keep up an
American accent, and if she and Redmayne therefore had some manner of pleasant antagonism between them, rather than what they actually get:
her yelling, and him looking sorry.
Finally, I think there's a decent chance that
Beasts might've been legitimately
good, if it had been reworked from the ground up to foreground the sole
completely
effective element of the whole film. That would be Scamander's
accidental sidekick, the Muggle he neglected to mindwipe, after bouncing
him with a whole bunch of magic. Dan Fogler is in fine form as
Kowalski, all wide-eyed, slack-jawed, "I'll-wake-up-soon-right?"
wonderment. (And there's just something honestly charming, in a
deciedly old-school way, about the cute little miscegenation-fetishist
romance that pops up between him and Queenie, the witchy flapper, whom we
are not remotely prepared to believe when she says she's never met a NoMaj
before, considering that she lives in New York, and is, also, an adult who presumably sometimes goes grocery shopping. In any event,this relationship is rather more charming than the one that "develops" between Kowalski and
Scamander, for this relationship appears to be largely nonexistent outside of their
tepid Screenwriting 101 exchanges. It's
definitely more charming than Scamander's relationship with Goldstein, for
this one exists only in Yates and Rowling's imaginations. And it doesn't show up on the screen until a final farewell scene, the likes of which would come off as genuinely confusing, if it weren't also rote-as-shit pseudo-romantic boilerplate.)
Still, if he were absolutely
nothing
else, then at least Kowalski represents something altogether novel in
this franchise: a human being, whose only defense against wizardly magic
is to punch it right in its stupid, ugly, elfin face. Or maybe it was a
goblin. I can't tell, because
I'm not a
racist.
Of
course, even when you spot the film Rowling's comparatively low level
of interest in what I presume must be, ironically, her most unique
character of all time, Kowalski is pretty ill-served by a script that
forgets he's right there, sitting at the same table, while people talk
(in the third person) about "obliviating" him. So: even in a screenplay
where Rowling jams hatefully self-aggrandizing lines like "I don't got
the brains to dream this!" into Kowalski's mouth, that dinner scene
still has to contain the film's most
arrogant moment—that is, when it assumes that just because the
audience might know what Rowling's made-up English-adjacent jargon is supposed to mean, a layman who
didn't
would simply sit there quietly during the discussion of what to do with
him, without immediately interjecting: "Hey, you swell buncha guys
ain't about to
murder me, right?"
But somehow, the
most arrogant moment isn't also the most condescending, which is to say,
its most outright insulting. That moment comes a few hours after the credits
roll, when you realize, with cold fury, that something like 10,000
people must have died during the climax of this film, yet the only thing
the wizards have really accomplished when they "fix it" is simply
ensure that the Muggles don't know
why so many of their fellows perished. (In the conclusion of
Beasts,
Jon Voigt's grieving father presumably forgets that his beloved son's
organs were crushed into paste by an Obscuris, and one imagines that he
will spend the next several weeks wondering why the lad won't return his
phone calls.) Rowling seems certain you won't notice this nasty
turn—because her wizards
did resurrect some Goddamn
buildings. That's this movie, guys. So magical! So wondrous! So enchanting!
