BRIDGET JONES'S BABY Makes Three

Seeing Bridget Jones’s Baby is like reconnecting with an old friend you thought and hoped would have her life together by now. It’s not her fault. That’s just what life keeps throwing her way. In her case, life is the plot novelist Helen Fielding and filmmakers like Sharon Maguire keep serving up. Each movie forces her to awkwardly relearn the same lessons: to roll with the punches, have self-confidence, and be happy with who she is whether or not there’s a man in her life. Fifteen years have passed since the socially awkward Bridget (Renée Zellweger) first strode on screen in the sweet and charming Bridget Jones’s Diary, the story of sad single woman in London who can’t decide between two rakish men, a slick cad (Hugh Grant) and a cold, but secretly warm-hearted, stuffed shirt (Colin Firth). The sequel, 2004’s Edge of Reason, reset the relationships to have the same men fighting over her in much the same emotional beats. At least Baby makes three a slightly different dynamic, finding Bridget a new fling and a nine-month surprise growing throughout.

For the better part of an hour the movie gets by on nothing more than the sheer pleasure of seeing the twinkly-eyed Zellweger back on the screen. She hasn’t had a role in six years, and hasn’t been Bridget, her most famous character, in over a decade. So when a now-43-year-old Jones walks into a sad, lonely birthday convinced her work life will be her satisfying replacement for romantic travails, it feels awfully nice to have her driven and desirous of nothing more than self-improvement and self-care. Alas, it’s too good to be true, as a hoookup at a music festival with a mysterious billionaire (Patrick Dempsey) and an unexpected rekindling of passions with her old love (Firth) leave her pregnant. Once more, two men fight for her affections, this time with the ticking time bomb of a DNA test (which she decides to make post-partum instead of an amniocentesis) adding an extra layer of squirmy comic tension.

That’s a decent start to a good Bridget reunion, progressing her story slightly, creating new conflict, upping the stakes, and inviting new handsome middle-aged men into her world. Now she’s committed to having a baby (she bristles at being called a “geriatric mother,” but also recognizes this might be her one chance at pregnancy) and settling into a new aspect of life. To help her do so, she faces the Solomon-like task of figuring out which man gets to raise the baby as her co-parent. Will it be the man she has loved, or the man she could love? Not a bad question. This certainly isn’t a calamitous late sequel. But it lacks its original nimble spark. Running a galumphing 122 minutes, co-writers Fielding, Dan Mazer (Dirty Grandpa), and the great Emma Thompson have simply not enough plot or charm to last. Especially lumpy, there are underfed subplots, forced short cameos for familiar faces past (though Jim Broadbent never hurts), and a central farce with far too much dead air for how urgent its mysteries are. Bridget’s dithering about informing one prospective father of the other, and indeed her confusion about whether biology should inform her choice at all, creates a long, awkward stasis.

Beyond the wheel-spinning at its center, the movie can’t quite place Bridget in a believable 2016. There’s tepid social media commentary and millennial bashing in the form a new team brought in to run the newsroom where Bridget works. (A few exhausted swipes at man buns, live streams, and hashtags aren’t as nervy as the movie seems to think.) Similarly, an endless gag in which Bridget doesn’t recognize Ed Sheeran falls flat, but not as deadly behind-the-times as an enthusiastic dance floor “Gangnam Style” discussion. What is this? 2012? Ditto the recurring references to a court case and subsequent protest parade concerning a Russian women’s punk band. These are weak distractions from the questions at hand. Who is the father? Who is best for Bridget? Will she finally get her life together? All is answered, and reasonably satisfactorily if you ask me. And Zellweger and Firth are good enough at selling the long history and misty-eyed potential in their relationship. But the distended phoniness around them is more than I could take.

Welcome to New York: BROOKLYN

“Heartbreak,” as Taylor Swift tells us, “is the national anthem.” This sentiment is the backdrop of Brooklyn, an achingly sensitive little movie, small in scope, but deep in emotional risk. It stars Saoirse Ronan as Eilis, a young Irish woman in the 1950s who finds opportunities dead-ending in a part-time job at a small-town shop. She tearfully and nervously bids her mother and sister farewell, setting sail for New York City, where a kind priest has arranged for her to have a safe place to stay and a nice entry-level job in Brooklyn. What a big step for anyone to make, let alone a young person with no connections or comforts, with only a small suitcase and the clothes on her back. The movie, movingly bookended by boat journeys, finds great power and exquisitely observed emotions in this brave and difficult move. Restrained and heartfelt, the story proceeds simply and delicately.

We see Eilis make tentative connections, to the opinionated landlady (Julie Walters) and chatty lodgers at the all-female boarding house for Irish immigrants at which she lives, to the intimidating but decent boss (Jessica Paré) at a department store at which she finds work, to the avuncular priest (Jim Broadbent) who checks in on her and helps find new opportunities for education and advancement. There’s a lovely sense of community slowly developing around our main character, as she navigates a foreign world she’s slowly ever more determined to make her home. In the early passages, she is shy and withdrawn, ill with homesickness, tearing up over letters from home, or when hearing a Celtic singer at a Thanksgiving supper for Irish-American homeless men. The tug of her safe and comfortable past is strong, but will she let it interfere with gaining a foothold in a new, scary future?

Her most significant new relationship is with a charming young Italian-American man (Emory Cohen) who draws her in with his flirtatious teasing, sweet empathy, and loveable lopsided grin, all tangled up in his chewy accent, broad and bold. They start going out, chastely dating, attending church dances, family dinners, and the movies, like Singin’ in the Rain, which excites him enough to perch on a lamppost in the park while he walks her home. The boss notices a change in her demeanor and, upon learning it’s because of a fella, asks, “Does he talk about baseball or his mother?” “No.” “Then keep him.” The blushing excitement of young love merges with the excitement of making a life for herself that’s entirely her own, and tempered by the fading but still present pull of Ireland, where her family is increasingly only distant but powerful memories. She’s still deciding who she wants to be, and how best to define herself.

Soft, but deeply felt, the movie keeps a tight focus on Eilis, considering Ronan’s face, possessed with a placid maturity revealing flickers of feelings turbulent underneath a surface of great propriety. Eilis is a quiet character, who feels intensely, but still takes her time making up her mind. Ronan allows this to be her source of strength, a studied and reserved exterior projecting kindness and thoughtfulness. It’s a film that prizes such quiet contemplation, studying Ronan’s eyes for subtle sparkles, and allowing the ensemble to exude universal warmth. Tenderly developing relationships are watched growing, shifting, and evolving, in a plot animated by humorous charm and realistic sentimentality, arriving at big moments of grief and elation with a softly insistent tugging on heartstrings. It’s a grade-A weepie, not only because of any particular moment of sorrow or grace, though it has those well-done, but from the spectrum of small moments, colored in with emotional specificity.

John Crowley directs with great easy rhythms in poised pacing and bright, warm colors. Tasteful period detail is neither fussed over nor show-offy; it’s simply a fact of life, a time and place the oldest in the audience can still remember, conjured up with the edges sanded down. It’s not exactly a reflection of 50’s politics or unease. It’s far too personal and intimate for that, attuned directly and pleasingly with its lead’s innermost feelings. Crowley is a filmmaker with a penchant for sensitive character studies, especially his 2007 feature Boy A, which followed a young ex-con adjusting into his new freedom. There’s a different sort of dramatic change at play in Brooklyn, but it’s no less carefully considered. Nick Hornby, adapting a novel by Colm Tóibín, has a great ear for internal conflict teased out through conversation and calm, capably and movingly brought to life by an exceptional cast. It’s a film about a big transatlantic move, rich with heartbreak and isolation slowly thawed through warm friendships, then complicated by the temptation to give up and move home.

Hornby first became known for novels about men in relationships vividly externalized (High Fidelity, About a Boy), but has become a fine writer of screenplays about women finding themselves through internalized decisions (An Education, Wild). He and Crowley may have authored the film, their respective bests, but it belongs to Ronan, who dominates every frame with a gentle inescapable magnetism. She’s able to communicate the subtlest of feelings through subtle changes of expression, and yet somehow the effect is anything but obscure. She’s found happiness, and yet feels divided loyalties. No matter her American successes, there’s the strong call of Ireland, where her mother would love to see her, and the locals would be happy to set her up with a nice boy from the village. She has the understandable confidence it takes to move across the world, and the fear of failure. Brooklyn gets big effects out of small gestures, a comforting classical melodrama shorn of nostalgia, except, perhaps, for how much easier it was then to live in New York on a clerk’s salary. The result is a terrifically involving empathetic and emotional excursion. 

Grin and Bear It: PADDINGTON

Based on Michael Bond’s popular picture book of the same name, Paddington is a movie about a bear cub who speaks English, wears a red hat and blue coat, and likes marmalade. You’d think that’s not a lot to hang a feature film upon. But in a pleasant surprise, the result is easily the best live action talking animal family comedy since Babe: Pig in the City, though that might say more about the usual level of quality in this particular subgenre than anything else. In the movie, Paddington and his bear family are CGI creations that at first look creepily real, more Country Bears than Alvin and the Chipmunks. But once I got used to looking at him and his interactions with a real human world, the more adorable he became. He’s an inquisitive little guy, pluckily charging forward hoping for the best. That’s a good description of the movie, too. It’s a pleasant, affable, likable little thing, funny, fuzzy, warm and goodhearted.

Paddington (Ben Whishaw) grew up in darkest Peru, where he was taught about London by his aunt (Imelda Staunton) and uncle (Michael Gambon). They had become Anglophiles after an explorer (Tim Downie) visited years earlier. After an earthquake destroys their jungle home, Paddington is sent off to London in search of a better life. His aunt lovingly places around his neck a note asking the recipient to take care of this little bear. It’s a softly downplayed immigrant story, with the bear washing up on London shores in need of help making sense of a new place, but with plenty of qualities – a killer marmalade recipe, for one – that’ll enrich the lives of those he meets. There’s some quiet metaphor work going on, especially with the cranky neighbor who worries about bears moving into his neighborhood.

Paddington’s found by a sweet family who take him to stay in their house that appears to be on the same street as the Banks in Mary Poppins. It’s definitely a Poppins set up, with a free-spirited mother (Sally Hawkins), stuffy all-business father (Hugh Bonneville), and a daughter and son (Madeleine Harris and Samuel Joslin) who are having troubles of their own. Then in comes Paddington, an openhearted, open-minded little fellow who quite by accident brings the family closer together. It’s a film that has lots of dependable bits of family film plot mechanics, from the boring dad who’s softened up by the events herein, to the kids who find a friend in a magical guest, to a protagonist who’s thrust into a new world and, despite some difficulties, learns to love it.

But it’s all so sweetly done, and writer-director Paul King brings a kind sense of humor and lovely visual style, from intricate whimsical production design, to Wes-Anderson-esque dollhouse constructions, to clever cutting and crisp wordplay. The funniest joke is also the simplest: no one finds the talking bear strange at all, and treat him like they would a human child. There are amusing sequences in which he slowly destroys his surroundings while attempting a simple task, wrecking a bathroom or covering himself head to toe in tape. My favorite was a chase scene in which the bear floats by a schoolroom studying Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. “Exit pursued by a— ” “Paddington!” The amusing slapstick and cute misunderstandings are bolstered by an undemanding plot and a troop of fine British actors (the leads, as well as Julie Walters, Peter Capaldi, and Jim Broadbent in supporting roles) who kids growing up on this movie will later recognize if they ever catch up on old BBC programming or the films of Mike Leigh.

I’m not sure if a film so sugary English, with nicely small character moments and a charming shaggy tone, needs a villain, but Nicole Kidman plays an ice cold taxidermist about as well as she could. She’s a Cruella de Vil type with a Hitchcockian blonde bob, strutting about wanting to add a talking bear to her collection. Her scenes are few, and of a slightly different tone than the sentimental slapstick culture clash comedy elsewhere, but such pro forma kids’ film villainy is the impetus to finally bring all the characters together in support of the bear they’ve come to love. And by then, I’d also found much to love in Paddington, and was glad to see the film resolve so neatly.

What is Any Ocean but a Multitude of Drops? CLOUD ATLAS

Starting with nothing less than a Homeric incantation in which a white-haired old man stares into a crackling fire and seems to summon the fiction into being, Cloud Atlas, an ambitious adaptation of David Mitchell’s tricky novel, is the kind of movie that’s easy to recommend and admire, if for no other reason than that nothing quite like it has ever existed and is unlikely to come around again any time soon. It wobbles at times, but luckily it’s ultimately better than the sum of its gimmicks. This is a complicated film about simple truths: love, ambition, knowledge, power. A major motif is a musical composition that one of the characters writes called “The Cloud Atlas Sextet.” It’s a lush, haunting piece of music that winds its way through the soundtrack and, by its very nature, echoes the major structural conceit of the film. A sextet is a piece of music to be played by six musicians. This film – like the novel before it – contains six stories, any one of which could easily expand into its own film, but together combine into one gorgeous whole.

Spanning centuries and genres, the film breaks apart the book’s chronological and mirrored presentation and instead places the six stories parallel to each other, cutting between the stories with a gleeful, witty, dexterous montage that recalls D.W. Griffith’s 1916 feature Intolerance in the way it so skillfully weaves in and out of varying plotlines. A massive undertaking, three directors, Tom Tykwer (of Run Lola Run and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) and Lana and Andy Wachowski (of The Matrix films and Speed Racer) split the six sections among them, adapting and directing separately but from a shared common vision so that the story flows both stylistically and emotionally. Like some strange geometric object with many sides and layers, the film grows all the more epic by expanding outwards through time and space.

It takes us to the Pacific Ocean in the nineteenth century aboard a ship sailing towards America. Then, we’re in Europe in the 1930s, following a disinherited, but ambitious and talented, music student to the home of an elderly composer. Next, we’re in 1970s America, following an intrepid reporter into a conspiracy at a new nuclear power plant. On to the present, where we find a publisher who is the victim of a mean brotherly prank and stuck in an unexpected place. Then we’re to the future, where a clone slave describes her story of finding awareness of the consumerist dystopia she lives in. Finally, to the far future, where we find a post-apocalyptic world that has returned to clannish living in the wilderness, where the peaceful people are terrorized by a tribe of aggressive cannibals. Tykwer and the Wachowskis present each setting with handsomely realized production design and detailed special effects. Moving between them is anything but disorienting; it’s, more often than not, invigorating.

Almost too much to handle in one sitting, this film is a rush of character and incident, themes and patterns, echoes upon echoes, all distinctive melodies that fade and reoccur time and again. Some sequences play more successfully than others, but the film is largely fascinating and generally gripping as it becomes a symphony of imagery and genre, returning again and again to mistakes humankind makes, the benefits and constraints of orderly society, and the way underdogs try to find the right thing to do against all odds. The themes play out repeatedly in a flurry of glancingly interconnected genre variations. What appears as drama later plays as comedy, as action, as mystery, as tragedy. Tykwer and the Wachowskis have put the film together in such a way that the editing escalates with the intensity of each plotline, bouncing in an echoing flurry during rhyming plot points (escapes, reversals of fortune, setbacks, reunions) and settling down for more languid idylls when the plots simply simmer along. By turns thrilling, romantic, disturbing, suspenseful, and sexy, there’s a fluidity here that makes this a breathless three-hour experience. The film moves smoothly and sharply between six richly imagined stories that connect more spiritually and metaphysically than they do literally, and yet artifacts of one story may appear in another, sets may be redressed for maximum déjà vu, characters in one story may dream glimpses of another. This isn’t a puzzle to be solved, but rather a stylish assertion that people are inescapably connected to their circumstances and to those who lived before and will live after.

In order to underline its insistence upon the connectedness of mankind then, now, and always, the film features the same cast in each story, making it possible to get a sense of the progression of a soul through time, each reincarnation living up (or down) to the example of earlier experiences and choices. Through mostly convincing makeup, actors cross all manner of conventions, playing not just against type, but crossing race, gender, age, and sexual orientation in unexpected ways. (Some of the biggest pleasant surprises in the film are in the end credits, so I’ll attempt to preserve them.) For example, Tom Hanks appears as a crackpot doctor, then again as a thuggish wannabe writer, then again as a haunted future tribesman, among other roles. This is a large, talented and eclectic cast with Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Keith David, Doona Bae, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, James D’Arcy, David Gyasi, Susan Sarandon and Hugh Grant delivering strong performances, appearing over and over, sometimes obviously, sometimes unrecognizably or for only a moment. This allows the filmmakers to dovetail the storylines even further, for what is denied in one (lovers torn apart, say) may be given back in the space of an edit (lovers, not the same people, but played by the same performers, reunited).

Though some will undoubtedly be turned away by its earnest (if vague) spirituality and messy philosophical bombast, this is the kind of film that, if you let it, opens up an endless spiral of deep thoughts. You could think it over and spin theories about what it all means for hours. To me, that’s part of the fun. It’s a historical drama, a romance, a mystery, a sci-fi epic, a comedy, and a post-apocalyptic fantasy all at once. In placing them all in the same film and running them concurrently Tykwer and the Wachowskis have created a moving and exciting epic that seems to circle human nature as each iteration finds characters struggling against societal conventions to do the right thing. The powerful scheme and rationalize ways to stay on top; those below them yearn for greater freedom and greater meaning. There’s much talk about connection and kindred spirits; at one point a character idly wonders why “we keep making the same mistakes…” It accumulates more than it coheres, and yet that’s the bold, beautiful mystery of Cloud Atlas, that it invites a viewer into a swirl of imagery, genre, and character, to be dazzled by virtuosic acting and effective filmmaking, to get lost amongst the connections and coincidences, to enjoy and perhaps be moved by the shapes and patterns formed by souls drifting through time and space.

London Calling: THE IRON LADY

Meryl Streep gives a great performance as the first female Prime Minister of Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher, in The Iron Lady. It’s another uncanny celebrity inhabitation, like her Julia Child in Julie & Julia, in which what could easily have been nothing but imitation (and don’t get me wrong, it is imitation) goes much further with a genuine spark of emotional interiority. She’s utterly compelling, a flesh and blood human presence at the center of what would otherwise be a totally flat history lesson. What’s a shame about this film is how it so completely lets Streep down. It’s great acting in a film that’s little more than a rote biopic mediocrity. And that’s too bad.

Like Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar, this is a film that tackles a controversial figure of fairly recent history by placing the narrative near the end of life. Here, Streep is in layers of convincing old-age makeup as Thatcher, slowly succumbing to her dementia, has flashes of memories that, luckily for us, progress in a rough chronological order. We see her as a young woman (Alexandra Roach) first getting interested in politics through her grocer father’s conservative stump speeches.

On the evening of her first (failed) election, Thatcher sits despondent until a charming young colleague (Harry Lloyd) that she’s been sort of dating sidles up to her and proposes marriage. That’s quite the consolation prize. They stay married until his death, eight years before we first see the elderly Thatcher in the opening scene. Throughout the film she hallucinates his presence as a sweet, daffy, amiable old man (Jim Broadbent) who gives her someone to talk to as we move in and out of flashbacks.

We see Thatcher as a housewife with two small children who soon wins a seat in Parliament, then becomes Secretary of Education, and, finally, Prime Minister. Key events play out in matter-of-fact reenactments that plod along one after the other. Fighting against institutionalized sexism? Advocating for spending cuts during a recession? Reacting to IRA bombings? Commanding a conflict in the Falkland Islands? Each political scuffle is dramatized and discarded. The film is directed by Phyllida Lloyd, a theater director who made her feature debut with Mamma Mia!, one of the worst directed films in recent memory. Iron Lady doesn’t suffer that fate. It looks rather nice and is an entirely watchable film, a handsomely inert historical scrapbook.

I wasn’t bored; I just wasn’t all that interested. Instead of building into a larger, more nuanced, portrait of a political figure for which there were strong opinions on both sides, the thin script by Abi Morgan tries to walk straight down the middle in a way that only muddles its message and dims the admirable humanity that Streep brings. It’s possible to feel sympathy for a figure of ambiguously negative historical impact without condoning the actions taken. (See the aforementioned J. Edgar). But this film, try as it might, can’t get out of its own way to get there.

The film is devoted to detailing her rise and fall as a political figure but it’s strange to see how glancingly the film deals with her actual politics. This is the biggest source of the film’s muddling. Refusing to take a stance or form an opinion on her policies, let alone fully explaining them, reduces the film to scenes of buzzwords and hackneyed political turns of phrase. We never get a sense from the film as to the substances of her political decisions so that by the time Londoners are rioting we don’t get a good sense as to why. Outside knowledge is a necessity to decoding the film, which only makes its failings clearer. By not exploring the political ideologies and historical context of Thatcher’s reign, it’s an implicit endorsement that doesn’t sit too well with me.

I respect her accomplishments while not agreeing with most of what she did once she was in power. But the movie neither affirms nor challenges my preconceived notions of Thatcher. By not exploring her legacy, the film hedges itself into a corner. It’s may be a movie about a tough woman, a determined woman, an iron lady, if you will, but it’s a fatally soft movie that all but disappears on impact. It has no point of view, nothing to say, nothing it wants to explore, nothing, even, that it particularly wants to show us. If it weren’t for Meryl Streep giving it her all, the film would be hardly worth mentioning. Her performance is moving and memorable in ways the film can only pretend to be.

Reindeer Games: ARTHUR CHRISTMAS

Arthur Christmas is a bright, colorful, nonthreatening CGI kiddie film about Santa Claus and his family and his elves up at the North Pole. It’s adequate, passable entertainment in that it’s not actively terrible or aggressively annoying, but it’s also bland and with only faint glimmers of personality. It feels homogenized. That’s a shame. It comes from Aardman, the British animation company that brought us the droll, delightful stop-motion Wallace & Gromit films and Chicken Run. I expected more from them.

Still, it’s a perfectly acceptable film that’s in no ways insulting. It tells a sweet story about Arthur (James McAvoy), Santa’s youngest son who’s a bumbling guy always messing up the plans of his older brother (Hugh Laurie), a strict manager who makes sure Santa (Jim Broadbent) and the sleigh run on schedule. In this film the sleigh is a giant spaceship-like construction that hovers invisibly over a town, deposits thousands of black-ops elves to deliver the presents, then, mere seconds later, moves on to the next town.

The system’s perfect. Of course, any movie about a perfect system must throw a wrench in, so this Christmas Eve one present is left behind. That’s within the acceptable margin of error to the older brother and to Santa, so Arthur recruits his grandfather (Bill Nighy), a retired Santa, to help him deliver the present. They borrow some of the old reindeer and sprinkle some magic dust and away they go. Hijinks ensue, as does familial healing and a reinforcement of a deeper, warmer meaning of Christmas.

So, it’s not that bad. The set-up is fun and the follow through is more or less what you’d expect. In fact, in patches, like a fun opening sequence that follows the covert ops as a bunch of elves deliver the presents, the film runs quite smoothly and charmingly. I was expecting something with just a smidge more wit, just a smidge livelier. It’s good enough, but that just didn’t feel like enough.

After some time, I started pondering the ways of the North Pole as presented here. Santa is an honorific passed down the family line from father to son. At one point in the film he’s called a ceremonial figurehead. (Mrs. Claus (Imelda Staunton) seems to be a nickname for whoever happens to be married to Santa). The elves are a vast army of what exactly? Feudal serfs? Indentured servants? Residents of a company town? Clearly this was not what director Sarah Smith and her co-writer Peter Baynham wanted me to be thinking about, but under the low-level antics and red, white, and green Christmas palate I often found little else to distract me.

Quick Look: The Young Victoria (2009)

Jean-Marc Vallée's The Young Victoria is the kind of period-piece costume drama that is stuffed and mounted, often beautiful to regard but emotionally immobile. It’s not exactly airless, but it’s definitely stuffy. This is a facile telling of the early months of Queen Victoria’s reign, with scenes of splendor continually clipped, denying full enjoyment of the film’s best assets. The coronation scene is especially awkward in the way it is chopped off right when it’s getting good. The film is a great excuse to gather great actors with British accents (Jim Broadbent, Mark Strong, Paul Bettany, and Emily Blunt, who has the title role) and let them play dress up in Victorian clothes and romp about chewing the ornate scenery wherever and whenever the script allows. The film strands its cast leaving only a sad little whiff of underexploited potential. This is a dry and flavorless film. Worse than bad, it simply leaves no impact.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

At this point, it is satisfying enough to go to a new Harry Potter movie looking for subtle differences, similar themes and scenes played in different keys and at different tempos. With six films, the series is consistently good in all aspects of its production. It’s simply enjoyable enough to be reunited with these characters, these actors, for another few hours. There’s a joy to be found in merely seeing these people again. Oh, look how they’ve grown, we can say about the child – no, young adult now – actors. More importantly, once we are absorbed into the world, we can say Look, there’s Hagrid! McGonagall! Flitwick! Why ignore the pleasures of entering into a fantasy world and enjoying its texture, its populace, its richness of imagination?

With The Half-Blood Prince, the Potter films have become a firmly mature piece of fantasy storytelling. This movie cannot be dismissed as mere child’s play. It’s a beautifully languid film of great humor and emotional impact, powerful in its exploration of the ways the past intrudes on the present, the ways children of all ages will behave when hoping to carry out the wishes of a parental figure. In this film, there are two students on two separate missions for their elders. There's Potter himself, working for Dumbledore, but Draco Malfoy stands out in a wrenching and tense plotline that gives Tom Felton some real acting to do after five films of practicing his sneering. Malfoy has been chosen by Voldemort to carry out an aspect of his evil plan, which sends Malfoy into an unbearable angst. He becomes more than a stock bully, more than a proxy for his more villainous father (played by the great Jason Issacs). Malfoy gains great depth and becomes a richer, more interesting character through his torment.

All of the characters get richer characterization, more emotional dialogue, this time around. The characters are older once more, sending the teens headlong into fully realized crushes and romances in addition to the usual doom and gloom of the foreboding encroaching forces of darkness. At times the film threatens to become a tad too sudsy or cutesy but pulls back at just the right moments. The lead trio – still Radcliffe, Grint, and Watson – have become more confident and skilled, once again, successfully navigating this tricky tone. Interspersed among the students' antics and the dark wizard’s evil schemes, as usual, is the great adult cast. Some, like Maggie Smith and Robbie Coltrane, have little more to do than show up once in a while to remind us of their presence and their perfect inhabitation of their characters. Others, like the always great Alan Rickman and Michael Gambon, in their best performances of the series, get more to do this time around, meatier monologues, shocking revelations and satisfying moments. Still others, like Jim Broadbent, are new to the series and fit in perfectly. Has there ever been a better cast series of movies? Every role thus far is perfectly filled and perfectly played.

Taking the directorial reins once again is David Yates, who merely competently handled the last installment. Here, working with veteran – but new to the series – cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, he creates one of the finest looking Potter films yet, casting even the lightest, funniest scenes in a haze of melancholy. The compositions are splendid; a charming early scene looks straight up the middle of a winding staircase with different characters at different heights. Later, an underwater scene plays out in a long, nearly silent, take with a beautiful dapple of green and orange. It’s ostensibly a scene of terror, and so it is, but it’s shot through with a deadly hypnotic visual charm. Throughout the film there are scenes of equal skill. It’s as if Terrence Malick was collaborating with the ghost of Orson Welles to create such skillful visual interest. It’s an approach that is vastly different from Cuarón’s work in Prisoner of Azkaban, but an approach that creates an equal effect. With an effortlessly moving camera revealing angles and crannies, gorgeous colors and palpable atmosphere, never before has the wizard world, Hogwarts specifically, looked so eminently livable, explicable, fit to explore.

This is a film in no hurry, drunk on its own mood and tone. At first glance, that may seem like a backhanded compliment, and for a lesser movie it would be, but after so many hours of Potter films, I care about this world, these characters, and I feel a genuine swelling of happiness and familiarity in getting to spend more time here. It helps that the mood and tone are first-rate and evocative. We’re truly in horror territory at times, with long gliding shots down gloomy hallways, creepily distended tension, and even a few great jump moments. At other times, we’re in a great boarding-school melodrama, with easy comedy, moody students, shifting allegiances, and a sinister and strange faculty. This is a magical series indeed, with so much feeling and warmth consistently present amidst its shifting tones. The film feels of one piece, sending warm laughter and cold shivers in equal measure, sometimes shifting in seconds. (Look at the scene involving the love potion cure for an example). Near the film’s end, we are given one of the most elegantly moving scenes in the entire series, a scene that fills the screen with a soft light that, however briefly, chases away the encroaching clouds of darkness. The movie does the same. It's a fine piece of escapism, a fine piece of Hollywood craftsmanship, and one of the finest Potters.

The Half-Blood Prince succeeds not just because it’s a compelling world, a gripping story, or an interesting allegory, though it is all three. It succeeds not just because it has excellent production values, great source material, and a hard-working and uniformly excellent cast and crew, though it has those too. It succeeds because we care about these characters, have seen them grow, age, and change, and are consistently presented reason to have confidence that this series will do them – and their source material – justice.