CINEMA Hello, cruel world


Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 DIRECTOR: DAVID YATES


film episodes have taken to an even wider audience the struggles and japes of the teenage wizard and his friends Ron and Hermione. Now, as the early fans move into the job mar- ket, the tagline for the final film pronounces that it all ends here. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows –


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Part 2 was always going to be dark and vio- lent – thank goodness. The previous film was an exercise in marking time, the meticulous laying out of the pieces in the correct arrange- ment for a final cathartic resolution. Look away now if you have by some chance missed the overall architecture but in brief, the puzzle is solved: Harry and his chums track down the talismanical Horcruxes that are the key to evil Voldemort’s power; the Hogwarts inmates rise up against oppression; there are painful losses but still greater unions. When David Yates arrived to direct the fifth


film, it was time to leave for a while the lunatic cuteness of Hogwarts with its owls, talking portraits and quidditch tournaments. Yates brought a certain hyper-reality to the adoles-


he first Harry Potter book was published 14 years ago; over the past decade, seven


cents’ excursions into the outside world – tak- ing them into underpasses and cafes strange and scary enough to rival the parallel fantasy – but as he guides the series to its close all pretence at realism is abandoned. Designer Stuart Craig pulls off a couple of stunners to top his previous achievements: the Gringotts bank, staffed by watchful goblin functionaries, is gleamingly oppressive and Victorian, a temple to past power with a vault that contains a mythical warning against the accumulation of riches. Then there is a glimpse of what may be the afterlife that is beautifully – and again, Britishly – weird. The constant presence of death and the dead has always been Rowling’s strongest theme. Yet the central paradox of Potter on celluloid is that the least interesting part is the centre – the innocuous trio of Ron, Harry and Hermione. They are a bland medium given flavour only by the snarling complications of the villainous host of fine character actors around them. Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort is superb at the end and Alan Rickman as the ever-ambiguous Professor Snape finally steals our hearts as we knew he must. Severus Snape and the Philosopher’s Stone– now there’s a tale. Once the shared DNA with Voldemort


unravels, Harry is not only artless but, in dramatic terms, arc-less. He’s always been the decent bloke trying to do his best. You can’t fault him as an example, but take away the complexities of the Dark Lord and what is left at the end is a dull conservative advertising the continuity of the private education system. Presumably, Hogwarts is one of the few wiz- arding schools that can guarantee a place at wizard Oxbridge. Hurrah, though, for all the artists and crafts- men who sent him on his way. I doubt there will ever again be a cin- ematic series like it. Francine Stock


Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows –Part 2


them, seeing the fun Peake had had with an absinthe-reddened nose, is supposed to have knocked him out cold. Where exactly did this vivid imagination spring from, a succession of pundits wanted to know, and how was it nurtured? There were inevitable comparisons between


Gormenghast and the macabre, self-sustaining world of Kafka’s The Castle. A war artist’s assignment to the newly liberated Belsen may have played its part. The novelist Joanne Harris, a long-term Peake fan, was disposed to play down these influences. Peake, she declared, didn’t think in terms of symbolism. He simply “collected experiences and char- acters” which then resurfaced, however unrecognisable their final form, in his books. One thing Peake certainly took an interest


in was material success. With the first two- thirds of the trilogy warmly received, and a string of artistic commissions clogging up his daily routine, he returned his family to London


in 1950 in the hope of definitively establishing himself. Somehow, despite critical acclaim and well-placed friends, it all went wrong. After reading the reviews of a disastrous the- atrical venture, To Wit, To Woo (1957), he suffered a breakdown and was installed in a series of mental institutions. A fourth novel, Titus Awakes, discovered


in note form after his death and completed by his widow, Maeve, has Titus fleeing the asylum where he works as orderly for the safety of an island on whose jetty he is greeted by an artist and his family. In the hands of someone who didn’t know him, this kind of tribute would doubtless have hinged on the idea of a tortured soul, whose novels and drawings were the projections of a disturbed personality. So it was good to find his son insisting that he was perfectly normal – friendly, uxorious and the guarantor of an “idyllic” childhood. D.J. Taylor (See Books, page 24.)


Jodie Whittaker as Viv in The Night Watch


TELEVISION Ladies, please!


The Night Watch BBC2


current enthusiasm for the subject. On Channel 5, new proprietor Richard Desmond is giving us the tawdry Candy Bar Girls. And on 12 July, BBC2 brought us The Night Watch, a one-off costume drama set in the lesbian underworld of London during the Second World War. Is it fair to compare Paula Milne’s adaptation of Sarah Waters’ literary novel with Desmond’s lubricious gawping? I think it is. Consciously or not, programme makers reckon that lesbianism appeals both to women, who supposedly admire its feminist strength, and to heterosexual men, whose fantasies supposedly extend to lesbian sex. This would not have mattered so much if The Night Watch’s context – the heroic work of the auxiliary ambulance service during the Blitz – had rung true. Instead, what we got was a concatenation of visual and verbal cliché that succeeded only in caricaturing the era. The drama’s assorted lesbian and male homosexual characters lived unlikely lives: at one point butch Kay (Anna Maxwell Martin) contrived to pick up fluffy Helen (Claire Foy) while rescuing her from a bombed-out building; Wormwood Scrubs, meanwhile, seemed to have been peopled almost entirely by men of the pink persuasion, either acknowledged or unacknowledged. Everyone was unhappy, including the heterosexuals: the relationship between beautiful Viv (Jodie Whittaker) and her married man led inexorably to a plunge down the stairs, contemplation of a pair of knitting needles and an illegal abortion. I liked the acting, and the little glimpses of


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life before television (hobbies, talk, “Animal, Vegetable Or Mineral” on the wireless). But this was Miserabilist fiction, based on the false belief that life before legalisation and sexual liberation was unremittingly grim. Ask anyone – straight or gay – who was alive in the 1940s and they will have a different story to tell. There was sex, and death, and perse- cution, but people also had a lot of fun. And that was true of the homosexual community as well. They called themselves “gay” for a reason. John Morrish


16 July 2011 | THE TABLET | 27


nyone would think that lesbianism had just been invented, to judge by television’s


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