A magical return to JK’s wizarding world
WE LIVE in uncertain times, but this Harry Potter spinoff is an escapist fantasy to cherish. on the other hand, J.K. Rowling, making her screenwriting debut, does not allow us to get too carried away. As she noted at Tuesday’s uK premiere, the film also says plenty about the world we live in.
Racial prejudice, establishment corruption and the abuse of power all loom large. Still, there is never any danger of it getting too preachy, largely because it is, from start to finish, such fun.
Set in Prohibition-era New York, the picture opens with a flurry of feverish newspaper headlines. ‘Anti-wizard sentiment on the rise,’ screams one. ‘Is anyone safe?’ Strange creatures are wreaking havoc around Manhattan, causing alarm among the non-magical or ‘nomaj’ population. That’s the American term. You and I know them as muggles and, more to the point, so does Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), a shyly awkward, tousle-haired Brit educated at wizarding school Hogwarts, where he was a
Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them (12A) Verdict: Cherishable Potter spin-off
favourite (long before Potter) of Professor Albus Dumbledore. Scamander sneaks a suitcase full of weird and wonderful pets through u.S. Customs and you don’t need Rowling’s powers of imagination to picture another outlandish creature, Donald J. Trump, growling that it would never be allowed to happen on his watch. In fact, our hero has come to America with the best of intentions. He wants to set free the vast eagle-like Thunderbird in its native Arizona, but gets somewhat sidetracked having to recapture his Niffler, which has the look of a mole and the acquisitive instincts of a magpie. There is a gloriously funny scene, which will be familiar to anyone who has seen the cinema trailers, in which the naughty Niffler, while looting a jewellery store, tries to pass itself off as a shopwindow mannequin. The film’s other fantastic beasts pull off
the considerable trick of making David Attenborough’s new series of Planet Earth II look almost prosaic. Yet this is much more than a digitalage Doctor Dolittle.
Scamander is thrown into an unlikely alliance with no-maj, chubby factory worker Jacob Kowalski (delightfully played by Dan Fogler), and a more likely one with Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston), an agent with the CIAlike Magical Congress run by the unscrupulous Percival Graves (Colin Farrell).
This being a Rowling story, there are destructive forces of darkness to contend with, also yielding a splendidly sinister turn by Samantha Morton as an anti-magic fundamentalist, and a fleeting appearance from Johnny Depp as rogue wizard Gellert Grindelwald.
But it is a more joyful movie than any of the Potters, and the period setting allows Rowling and director David Yates (who also directed several of the Potter films) to unleash, with manifest glee, just about every Jazz Age cliche.
Twenties New York is brilliantly evoked, a city more or less run by a grotesquely powerful newspaper baron played by Jon Voight and plainly modelled, like Citizen Kane, on William Randolph Hearst. And I loved a scene in a speakeasy, where a Mae West-style femme fatale orders ‘six shots of giggle-water’.
Redmayne is just right, too. Criticising his acting has come to seem almost as much like lesemajeste as criticising our other ER, the one in Buckingham Palace, but he can overdo the wide-eyed, lipbiting diffidence. Here, it seems to fit. Scamander needs to be about as unworldly as a wizard can be.
I confess to feeling rather cynical when I heard this is to be the first in a five-film series. The plan to spin Fantastic Beasts, the wizarding manual first referenced in Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone, into a franchise of its own sounded more than a little exploitative. Why not one, two, or even three? Five seems greedy.
But maybe Rowling simply wants to keep on telling stories, which is fine by me. She’s exceedingly good at it.
A version of this review appeared in Monday’s paper.