The Fantastic Beasts series may be the best example since Annie Hall of a film with the biggest disconnect between the values of its fans and its producers including the (living proof that people do not always improve with prior experience) JK Rowling. It continues a long and confusing annual tradition of the casting of a domestic abuser, found $7 million dollars guilty of beating up his wife, in roles that are a little too on the nose. In case you’re looking for a modicum of bravery and decency in the world, check out Amber Heard’s open letter from after she first filed from divorce from her abuser, which she reread recently at a conference. These are reasons enough to make sure that you do everything you can to avoid paying for this film–stream it illegally, borrow it from your friends, burn yourself a DVD from the library, sneak into the theater after having paid to see Ralph Breaks the Internet (read: my Saturday two weeks ago). With all those caveats, and with the understanding that we will be among the first to dance on that man’s grave when his decisions catch up to him, FB: CoG was kind of a snore, but a dark, brooding snore.
Someone has written about the unfortunate trope of lazy storytelling by way of magical slide presentations (with respect to Ego in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy 2), but after an hour of sleuthing, I can’t find it. So if you find anything that attests to this, send it my way. In the meantime, FB: CoG oftentimes feels novelistic to a fault. Some examples: the way that Leda and her brother argue in the crypt about Credence’s identity is infuriating, because unlike with the convoluted, Shakespearean plot reveals of the HP series, the audience here has not had time to work through the intricacies of the plot reveal ahead of time. The reveal doesn’t have its desired effect of shock and pathos, instead it’s pretty frustrating to listen to these two minor characters quibble over something that happened decades ago, which we don’t have the ability to adjudicate or verify (Roshomon style) to a satisfying end. (Friend brought up the weirdness of how these epic figures from the HP universe are all really invested in nobody C-listers, quoting a reddit post: “Turning Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law and Johnny Depp into side characters for a weird Zoe Kravitz/Ezra Miller family drama was a mistake.”) Ditto the loose end of the murdered house elf scene. Ditto the MacGuffin in the PO Box that basically serves as a magic slide presentation of Leda’s family tree. Ditto Grindelwald snorting an old skull and vomiting WWII. The abundance of magical powerpoints is a real weakness to the momentum of the story.
That being said, CoG does move the ball further down the field. It’s a film that seems to have kept up with the age of its fanbase and is likely flying over the heads of a lot of its younger viewers: infanticide, rape, holocaust abound. We are looking at a (blinkered but) fuller picture of the Wizarding World outside of school and the effete world of Quidditch, Gringotts, and the Ministry. One of my favorite aspects of storytelling is the lack of logical coherence of Grindelwald’s philosophy. Grindelwald is not just an earlier Voldemort. He’s not the Morgoth before Sauron. He’s not rhetorically opposed to mixed marriages of wizards and non-magic peoples. He’s nominally opposed to police brutality and the horrors of war. His laissez-faire attitude toward most of the hot button social issues of the HP series makes him a lot more insidious a villain, because it’s not entirely clear what his Evil Plan actually is.
Whereas the last movie was about stunted desire, CoG takes on more taboo subjects and makes the investigation and the struggle to understand those taboos central to the story, which maybe isn’t the same thing as making an exciting movie necessarily.
Lastly, an apology for the backlog: in the final days of the year before the annual spreadsheet predicting the best (and worst) films of the year, I find myself struggling to write these reviews. While my father-in-law was visiting for a week for Thanksgiving, I worked through the first half of November, and then the pace of our movie-viewing got away from me, so in the malaise of this winter drought, where the choices are “The Grinch,” “Spider Web Dragon Tattoo Reboot,” and “Green Book,” I’m more inclined to look back at some of the reviews I’ve left on the back burner.
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