Gone to Potter

Kyle Smith
Blog: Movies

Sitting unmoved and uninterested through all eight Harry Potter movies over the last decade or so, I often had the thought: Please don’t let this all be leading up to Harry P. and Lord V. standing a few yards apart zapping each other with their wands until one of them buckles.

It’s all leading up to Harry P. and Lord V. zapping each other with wands. The end. Aren’t you glad you spent a significant chunk of your life goggling over these books and movies?

The central problem with this unbearably childish, trite and moronic series of expensive tableaux is this one: It’s all just a magic show, isn’t it? At any point at which the children appear to be in danger, they always have the same solution: They remember they’re magicians, they cast a spell, and they drift into the next excruciatingly similar scene. We all endure some backstory mumblings about the next great riddle, they flick their wands, and do it again. For 20 hours of screen time.

HARRY POTTER

At one point in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2,” Kelly MacDonald appears as a supposedly scary ghost (at no time is she scary) who spends three or four minutes of screen time being coy about passing along her secret to Harry. Then she passes along the secret, as you and everybody else knew she would. Why? Because Harry asks her for it.

The ghost clues Harry into where he should look for the next tchotke in this 5,000-page scavenger hunt with words something like, “It’s in the place where everything is hidden.” You’re thinking: the human heart? The subconscious? Dreams? No: What she means is, it’s in a really big storeroom. With a lot of other miscellaneous flea-market junk. If she had said, “Look behind the microwave, that’s usually where lost stuff is,” the scene could not have been more vapid. But it culminates in kids flying away from ghostly fireballs on broomsticks. So it’s really cool.

Harry-ism means, with some variation, repeats of the same basic dopey gag over and over and lots of irrelevant tangents. (Remember how complicated the rules of Quidditch were? And how none of it winds up mattering at all because whoever finds the snitch wins?) In “Deathly Hallows,” statues of knights come to life and march against Voldemort’s evil army. This looks smashing and means nothing.

There was a similar scene in “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” in 1971, but when the suits of armor come to life to fight the Germans in that movie it’s a comment adapted to a kid’s level on how Britannia’s glorious heritage steeled itself to defeat the Third Reich, fortifying and sustaining itself in a proud display of civilization’s will, resourcefulness and might. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” was not only about World War II, it was about Christianity.

“Harry Potter” is, like Red Bull and Twitter, simply a product or curse of this attention-deficit age. Children are, as a whole, no longer brought up to locate God at the center of their lives. They are discouraged by their teachers from getting too excited about their country. If anything, British and American schoolchildren are more likely to spend school days getting gradually imbued with a queasy feeling about their nations’ past sins.

There is no agreed-upon foundation underlying our Anglo-American culture, hence there can be no base for Harry Potter, and there isn’t. The series is solely about hocus-pocus and abracadabra, about spooky lighting and splendiferous settings, about giants and goblins and invisibility cloaks and characters going poof in wreaths of CGI smoke. The series can’t even muster the wit to go as far as praising childhood (a la the original “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”). Nor does it make more than a tepid case for the English public school system (which, of course, abetted British inequality and imperialism for hundreds of years and is somewhat defensively reimagined here as a multicultural land that welcomes working-class children).

In the end, the series doesn’t really even acknowledge the idea of death, and not because it is trying to say something doctrinal about the afterlife but because, hey, dead characters may occasionally be needed to return to the plot to jolly things along. Nowhere in any of the films will you say, “Aha! I thought it was just an entertainment spectacle but it sneaked up on and taught me something!” Hogwarts isn’t a school. It’s a playground. You’ll find more transcendent experiences in massage parlors, saloons and racetracks.

Kyle.Smith@nypost.com