by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
As just about the whole world
knows by now, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the latest work by British author Joanne K. Rowling set
in the Harry Potter universe, though
she insisted in an interview about the film that it is neither a sequel nor a
prequel to the Harry Potter books but
simply another story set in the same fictional universe — though apparently
there are direct references to the film’s central character, Newt Scamander
(Eddie Redmayne) — the character name is an obvious pun on the fact that a newt
is the larval form of a salamander — and the book he wrote, Fantastic Beasts
and Where to Find Them, in 1927, a year
after the events of this film take place. What makes this different from the
eight Harry Potter films, based on
Rowling’s seven novels in the series (the last one was divided into two
separate films, a practice the makers of the Hunger Games movies also adopted), is that Rowling wrote the script
herself and she conceived it as a
screen original, though a book has since been published. (I don’t know if that
is simply a publication of the screenplay or if Rowling novelized it.) What’s
more, she originally intended Fantastic Beasts as the first of a trilogy, though (no doubt encouraged by
Warner Bros., who are obviously hoping for a series of box-office winners that
will continue the Potter franchise even
though Rowling insists that Potter’s own saga is finished) she later expanded
her plans to encompass a five-part series.
The film was widely reported as a
prequel to the Potter series, since it
takes place in New York in the 1920’s (70 years before the Potter books themselves, which are set in the U.K. in the 1990’s,
when Rowling started writing them), but Rowling has said Fantastic Beasts “is neither a prequel nor a sequel to the Harry
Potter series, but an extension of the
wizarding world. Newt’s story will start in New York, seventy years before
Harry gets under way.” Charles and I wondered if we’d be hopelessly confused by
Fantastic Beasts because for some
reason the whole Harry Potter
cycle eluded us — neither of us have seen a Harry Potter movie or read any of Rowling’s books — but the film
turned out to be occasionally confusing but mostly easy to follow. It begins
with Newt taking an ocean liner from his native Great Britain to New York City
with a small suitcase in hand containing the titular fantastic beasts, who
among other things can shrink themselves to fit the available space. He goes
through customs, whose officials are as mean-spirited and officious as they are
now, and when the customs inspector insists on inspecting the inside of his
bag, Newt hits a lever on its side that says “Muggle-Worthy” and so when it
opens, all we and the inspector see are perfectly innocuous personal
possessions. (“Muggles” is the term used in the Harry Potter books to mean ordinary people without magical
powers, but in this U.S.-set offshoot of the franchise they’re called “No-Maj”
— short for “no magic” — instead, perhaps because in America in the 1920’s
“muggles” was a slang term for marijuana cigarettes and either Rowling or Steve
Kloves, the screenwriter who adapted all but one of the Harry Potter movies and worked on this one as one of the
producers, didn’t want their wizarding world to be associated with pot.) Alas,
one of Newt’s fantastic beasts — something called a Niggler, who consumes
silver, gold and anything containing them (and therefore keeps getting Newt
into trouble as it raids banks, jewelry stores and any other high-security
repository of its favorite food) — escapes when Newt doesn’t quite close his
magic suitcase all the way, and the others get let out when his path crosses
with Kowalski (Dan Fogler, whose no-nonsense proletarian performance is a great
antidote to all the cutesy-poo wizardry we see in the rest of the film), a
cannery worker who applies for (and gets turned down for) a bank loan to open a
bakery just as Newt is there chasing down the Niggler before it eats all the
bank’s coin.
The two end up with each other’s suitcases (with an overly high
dose of irony, Charles said, “I bet that’s never happened in a movie before — two people get their suitcases
mixed up!”) and Kowalski ends up palling around with Newt as the two chase
through New York trying to re-collect all the fantastic beasts before they
wreak havoc on the civilian population and break the omertá with which the wizarding population has maintained
utter secrecy about their existence because if ordinary people knew about them,
they’d pass laws against them. The magic people have founded a secret society
called MACUSA whose president, Porpentina (Katherine Waterston) — “Tina” for
short — “arrests” Newt for having a wand without a license (wands are important
enough in the Harry Potter
universe that every actor who used one in the film had to go to “wand school”),
and their fears are justified: among the quirkier dramatis personae are Mary Lou Barebone (Samantha Morton, who looks
enough like Katherine Waterston you really have to listen closely to the
dialogue to realize which one is which and what side they’re on), who at the
beginning of the film is leading an anti-wizard protest rally demanding a new
round of Salem-style witch trials to get rid of the magic people forever. (In
an indication that the script is by a British writer, Mary Lou’s initial speech
contains a listing of modern technological marvels that prove the world doesn’t
need wizards anymore, including “the wireless” — of course a speaker in New
York in 1926 would have said “the radio”!) Newt and Kowalski are taken in by
Tina and her sister Queenie (Alison Sudol) — imdb.com claims that Queenie was
deliberately dressed like Blanche Du Bois in A Streetcar Named
Desire, appropriate because the male lead
in that story is also named Kowalski — and together the four of them try to
collect the fantastic beasts and also deal with the all-powerful evil wizard
named Gellert Grindelwald who fled England and hid out in New York, ready to
cause havoc.
There’s also a human baddie named Graves (Colin Farrell) who’s
working in association with Mary Lou and her foster kids Credence (Ezra Miller,
a good performance in a morally ambiguous Gollum-like role), Modesty (Faith
Wood-Blagrove in her film debut), and Chastity (Jenn Murray), who turn out to
be magical themselves and to have been abused by Mary Lou so systematically she
makes the people who ran Lowood in Jane Eyre and the orphanages from hell in Diary of a
Lost Girl and Little Orphan Annie seem like model caregivers by comparison. That’s
about all there is to it plot-wise, and I could certainly have used a stronger
story, but the whole conception is so charming it’s hard to hold anything
against this movie — and there are marvelous bits and pieces in the film,
directed by David Yates from Rowling’s original script, like the scene in which
Eddie Redmayne as Newt pets one of the “fantastic beasts” — and the contact
between Redmayne’s real hand and the CGI being is absolutely flawless and
utterly convincing. The cast is good, with Fogler and Miller standing out;
Eddie Redmayne is effective as a pretty milquetoast character (even though at
the start he’s depicted as so endearingly incompetent that one wonders why he was entrusted with so important a mission as to
bring the Fantastic Beasts to New York and get them across the Atlantic with no
no-maj’s the wiser) but after seeing him in his tour de force role in The Danish Girl it’s a bit disappointing to see him back to playing
a pretty routine character. At some times Fantastic Beasts gets too
cute for its own good — just what can you do with a movie with a character named Seraphina
Picquery (Carmen Ejogo)? — and the big revelation at the end that Graves is
really the renegade wizard Grindelwald (even though the physical transformation
is so great different actors play his two identities — Colin Farrell is Graves
and Johnny Depp is Grindelwald) is nowhere nearly as much of a surprise as
Rowling clearly intended, but nonetheless Fantastic Beasts is a lot of fun and well worth seeing.
