Directed by: David Yates
Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Ezra Miller
Rated PG-13, 134 minutes
The Harry Potter universe is complicated, but it isn’t subtle. J.K. Rowling’s ubiquitous series taught us simple life lessons—love is good, hate is bad, power corrupts, be nice to your friends—through the lens of an encyclopedia’s worth of spells and potions and, yes, fantastic beasts. And bubbling just underneath the surface of that series was even more supporting detail, a rich historical and geopolitical context that Rowling had developed just as fully as Harry’s war with Voldemort. “The Crimes of Grindelwald,” picking up where 2016’s introductory “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” leaves off, is the deepest dive Rowling has ever taken into this magical backstory, establishing much of the political and social context that laid the foundation for Harry Potter. It’s a remarkable work, but an unremarkable movie.
As an extended exercise in world-building, it’s a unique specimen, the film equivalent of a B-sides and rarities album from a beloved musician. If you wanted to know the origin of Voldemort’s pet snake Nagini, or what Dumbledore looked like before he was wizened and old, or where Nicolas Flamel keeps the Sorcerer’s Stone, “The Crimes of Grindelwald” will provide the answers. (And at this point, the series assumes that you understand these references; if you don’t, “The Crimes of Grindelwald” will be a bewildering place to start.)
The movie also sets up larger storylines and themes that precede Harry Potter, many of which double as direct responses to the trend of nationalism that has grown in the Western Hemisphere in recent years; Rowling has clearly embraced the more explicitly political side of her fiction. Consider that Grindelwald’s (Johnny Depp, “Pirates of the Caribbean”) plan is primarily to take over the world and establish magic’s dominion over non-magical people, and secondarily to discredit the wizarding world’s peace advocates, its moderate voices, by howling high and low about their every misstep. The comparison to neo-Nazism is not just suggested, it’s encouraged.
That said, “The Crimes of Grindelwald” doesn’t devote much breath to the criticism of these large-scale trends; to Rowling, the baseness of xenophobia is a settled matter. What she explores instead is how regular people, people with no axe to grind or ambitions for power, people with no reason to be hateful, end up aligning themselves with the forces of hate. Some enlist out of spite, some out of fear, some because there is nothing else for them in the world, no other club that will have them. Prejudice arises for many reasons, Rowling suggests, but it survives because of the sense of community it creates for those who embrace it. That this community is built on a foundation of lies eventually stops mattering; keeping hateful company is better than keeping no company at all.
Rowling is an incisive and thorough writer, and these meditations give the viewer much to chew on, but the constant problem with “The Crimes of Grindelwald” is that this thematic depth is undercut by the basic demands of the medium. Where we need more development of characters—especially those characters whose allegiances turn throughout the film—instead, because there’s a runtime to consider, we get only hokey symbolic vignettes that oversimplify the internal conflicts that could lead someone to take drastic action. And with so many characters to follow in a single sitting, the storylines themselves get tangled. The film’s climactic revelation lacks the weight it needs because the viewer, running three steps behind the movie, is busy trying to figure out who all these characters are to each other and why the big reveal is so big. This is undoubtedly the messiest film in the Harry Potter canon, and the worst as an actual film.
That “The Crimes of Grindelwald” fails as a film is unfortunate, but like the beasts in Newt Scamander’s spacious suitcase, it still merits attention. After all, what other fantasy franchise could get away with an installment dedicated to an allegorical history of the rise of Nazism? What other franchises are trying to take a stance on anything beyond the usual good-versus-evil platitudes? It’s tempting to think that any new piece of the Harry Potter universe is just another cash grab, but Rowling, now ten films deep, is still keeping our attention with more than just magic.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 11/30/18.