Harry Potter and the Magical Scene That Could Have Saved The Half-Blood Prince

Originally posted January 3, 2010.

I’ve got to stop going to see certain movies at the drive-in.

Doesn’t matter how dark the night, how powerful the lamp in the projector, movies with palettes more monochromatic than most black and white films, movies like The Dark Knight and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, both of which I saw for the first time at the drive-in and both of which are nocturnes in gray and grayer grays brightened only by midnight blues and inky blacks and in the case of The Half-Blood Prince a few splashes of sunlight on tin yellows and dried-mud browns, turn to shadow plays on a cellar wall on the screen.

In short, I missed a whole lot of both films the first time that I caught when I watched them again on DVD.  What I missed of The Dark Knight turned out not to matter, because it was mostly just subtleties of movement in fight scenes and chase sequences.  But director David Yates has as much going on in the backgrounds and foregrounds and sidegrounds of The Half-Blood Prince as you’ll find going on behind and around any building in a model railroad layout.  He’s made sure that whatever’s happening front and center to Harry and his pals we’re aware that there’s something close to a busy normalcy continuing behind them and around them at Hogwarts, in Diagon Alley, on the various levels and platforms of the London underground.

When Harry and Dumbledore go to the village of Budleigh Babberton to recruit Horace Slughorn back to the faculty of Hogwarts, Yates makes us aware of the life that isn’t going there by showing all the empty spaces that ought to be busy with people going about their day to day lives.  It’s one of the eeriest shots in the movie.

Yates does a lot of work in miniature, like a model railroad builder or a designer of museum dioramas or a blogger and his sons assembling their Christmas village.

In one of my new favorite moments that I missed the details of at the drive-in, Yates has his camera move from Harry comforting a broken-hearted Hermione at the foot of a stairwell to following Ron and Lavender Brown up the stairs but not by having the camera go up the stairs with them.

He takes it outside the castle and draws it back from the walls to track their progress in an extreme long shot.  He shows us the lighted windows of the common room where the silhouettes of partiers play against the glowing panes.  Then he moves it slowly up the wall to a turret window where he catches Ron and Lavender hurrying up the stairs, then to a higher window where we see the two stop on a landing to lock up in some passionate snogging…

and then the camera moves right on past them, rising on up to another, gloomier turret with windows that aren’t glassed in where we see a brooding Draco Malfoy leaning on a railing, a tiny, slender figure in gray with a dab of snow white hair, the details of his face and body merely implied, as if we’re looking at a miniature…

and then the camera swoops, turns, and leaves him behind to pick up the snow-filled night sky, only to drop again and move downward, panning the rooftops and towers of the school as the night turns to a bleak and foggy dawn, and comes to rest at last, inside again, to present us with Ron and Harry on their way to their first class of the day.

It’s like watching a wonderful Bavarian cuckoo clock.

The difference between the two movies, though, is that missing the details I missed in The Dark Knight at the drive-in didn’t take away from the plot or my understanding of the characters, while catching the ones I caught on the DVD of The Half-Blood Prince didn’t add to the plot or to the development of the characters.

They did add to the mood, so the movie’s a better cinematic experience than I knew.  But it doesn’t change the fact that Yates left gaping holes in his story, the biggest hole being the one that should have been filled by the Half-Blood Prince himself, and the only reason I can think of for his having done it is that he thought he needed to keep the Prince’s secret to the very end, as if three quarters of his target audience wouldn’t have already read not just this book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but the next and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, as well.

If you don’t know who the Half-Blood Prince is by now, it’s because you don’t care to know.

Yates might have been worried his movie was already too long, but there’s a lot of wasted film that could have been cut in favor of more character and plot development.   There’s too much quidditch, as usual.  Harry’s battle with the Inferi is interminable, as in fact is the whole sequence in the cave.  There’s a short scene of Harry showing up at Slughorn’s door after Slughorn has thrown him out of his rooms that merely restates what we just saw happen and is immediately repeated when Harry returns with a love potion-addled Ron in tow.  There are about six too many close-ups of Helena Bonham Carter overdoing it as Belatrix Lastrange.  Some judicious trimming and there’d have been time for at least one more visit to the Pensieve and more Tom Riddle and more Snape.

Presumably, Alan Rickman will get his due in the two parts of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but Yates has underused him inexcusably in The Half-Blood Prince.

He definitely should have made room for the deleted scene below.

Oliver Mannion watched it first and called it to my attention.  The scene was intended to be the beginning of the build up to Dumbledore’s confrontation with Malfoy, Belatrix, and the other Death Eaters in the Astronomy Tower.  Oliver likes it because of the song Professor Flitwick’s choir sings.  He says it adds to the sense of coming tragedy.  I agree.  It’s a hauntingly beautiful song and something beautiful is about to happen although, technically, no one is supposed to recognize its beauty until the truth is revealed in The Deathly Hallows.

But Oliver and I both like something else in the deleted scene and wish Yates had left it in the movie for that too.

The look in Snape’s eyes.

In the movie as released the scene starts with Malfoy getting out of bed (and with a different musical background) and Snape appears in passing, shown from behind, in silhouette, in a long shot.

But the close up of Rickman in the deleted scene is gorgeous for all the grief Rickman puts in Snape’s eyes.  It’s a look that tells us everything, if we know what’s about to happen and why, and tells us something else entirely, if we don’t know, but either way, it’s a look that marks Snape as a tragic figure, and I don’t know why Yates would have wanted to hide that from anyone.

Here’s the scene.