EDDIE MUGGLES THROUGH
Redmayne needs all his charms in a Potter prequel that’s so tricksy it risks losing its magic . . .
NOT FIVE minutes after leaving a screening of the second of what we are told will be five Fantastic Beasts films — spanning almost 20 years — I walked past the London theatre where Harry Potter And The Cursed Child continues to play to packed houses.
Truly, the ever-expanding universe created by J.K. Rowling is a wondrous thing, still eliciting gasps of delight and not only from her accountants.
Those who never fell under young Harry’s spell are entitled to feel cynical about this lavish series of prequels, but when Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them came out, two years ago this very week, I was firmly among the entranced. It was a delightful film.
This sequel, once again directed by David Yates, scripted by Rowling herself and with the same Roaring Twenties backdrop of flappers and Model-T Fords, is a much darker affair. In that respect, it follows the same trajectory as the eight Potter movies, but even so, it is largely and regrettably devoid of the wit that made the first film such a joy, and the fantastic beasts themselves too often seem like adjuncts to the plot, not accessories to it.
Did I say plot? Actually, it’s plots. Lots of them. There is so much going on that you’ll need your powers of concentration set to maximum.
Still, as our hero Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) says of his batty menagerie: ‘There are no strange creatures, only blinkered people.’ Maybe Rowling takes a similar view of those who feel a yard or two off the pace trying to work out who is who and why they’re doing what to whom. Maybe there are no knotted narratives, just inattentive audiences.
Until the opening titles, I was blissfully unflummoxed. There’s an exhilarating pre-credits routine, in which Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp, in splendidly fiendish form) escapes after years of solitary confinement in New York to unleash his scheme to lead a violent wizard rebellion.
He thinks non-wizards can’t be trusted with the planet and there’s method in his terrible madness; a brilliant sequence much later in the film shows glimpses of the havoc human beings are about to wreak on themselves in World War II.
Nonetheless, Grindelwald is himself a demonic portent of the muggle dictators soon to carve up continental Europe and, over in London, the young Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) wants him stopped.
Inconveniently, he can’t do this himself because of a childhood pact forged
when he and Grindelwald were not only best friends but also, Rowling coyly implies, gay lovers.
So Dumbledore hands Newt the task of stopping evil in its tracks. That this appears to be beyond him is no surprise, given that Redmayne, who in practically all his performances has elevated lipchewing diffidence to an art form, is here more bashful than ever.
EVEN in the first movie, I don’t remember Newt being quite so tousled of hair and shy of grin. You will either want to mother him or murder him.
But Newt is more resourceful than he seems, and not only because he can tame a water dragon made out of flailing seaweed.
With his non-wizard pal from the last film, Jacob (Dan Fogler), he defies the travel ban imposed on him by the Ministry of Magic and leaves London for Paris, where Grindelwald is plotting with his protege Credence (Ezra Miller) to take over the world.
That, give or take about 20 other strands of narrative, is the essence of the story. There’s also a fair bit of thwarted romance, at least two sets of brothers being mistaken for each other, and one baby swapped for another in the crib, all of which makes me wonder whether Rowling fancies herself as a modern-day Shakespeare.
Perhaps, along with all those hundreds of millions, she’s earned the right. YET another pair of brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen, are behind The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs, which was conceived as a six-part TV series for Netflix but instead turned into a feature film. The Coens don’t try to make it a cohesive whole, instead presenting it as six unconnected chapters, supposedly lifted from a book of yarns about the Old West. As with even the best collections of short stories, there are some you don’t want to end, and some that don’t match up, but for me, only the last of the anthology, featuring Brendan Gleeson as a bounty hunter, fell a little short. And Gleeson is such a gloriously watchable actor that I really didn’t mind.
The others are all wonderfully compelling, ranging from extremely funny to joyously whimsical to deeply poignant. Taken together, they tackle, and in some cases parody, just about every Western cliche — the saloon brawl, the wagon train, the sinister black-clad gunman, the travelling show, gold prospectors, you name it.
AND in the most memorable and tragic of the tales, The Gal Who Got Rattled, we naturally also see hostile ‘Injuns’ ominously silhouetted atop a distant ridge.
The first chapter tells the story of Buster Scruggs himself (Tim Blake Nelson), a chirpy troubadour who looks like George Formby and also happens to be the fastest draw in the West.
Oddly enough, gravel-voiced singersongwriter Tom Waits pops up elsewhere in a part that doesn’t call for song, as an old man panning for gold.
I first saw The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs at the Venice Film Festival, where not everyone loved it as much as I did, and some thought it barely even deserved to be categorised as a film.
Well, to quote an old Western insult, they don’t know dung from wild honey. It’s a terrific film (also starring Liam Neeson), and whether you see it at home on Netflix, or in the cinema where it is getting a limited release, I couldn’t recommend it with more of a yee-haw!