Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Bébé LeStrange (Losing All Credence)
or
Fantastic Beasts and Where NOT to Find Them.

It is a year after the capture of Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) in New York during the events of Fantastic Beasts, and Where To Find Them, and he has spent that year locked away in the prison run by the Magical Congress of the United States of America. Unable to break him, or even learn what the dark wizard might be planning, they decide to transport him to England's Ministry of Magic, so as to...well, one isn't sure what they can do with him, exactly. But, transport him they must in order to get the plot going. While Grindelwald is sent by flying Kestrel driven chariot, one of his followers in hiding effectively distracts the guards keeping him under lock-and-wand, and the seemingly placid prisoner, manages to take control of the vehicle and send his keepers plummeting to their deaths. Well, it would be their deaths if they weren't wizards...one of them manages to halt his fall before he hits the briney and then *splash* he goes into the drink, while Grindelwald flies off to what we eventually learn to be Paris, as he has business there and people to find and corrupt.

A wizard's work is never done. 

Three months later, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) is back in London, being called on the carpet (flying, presumably) for his part in the events in New York. The Ministry has revoked his travel privileges (as if they can't be worked around) and offer them as the price to work with the Ministry to find young Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), an Obscurial he encountered in New York, but has now been located in London. Despite the Ministry's offer and the entreaties of both his brother Theseus (Callum Turner) and his fiance Leta LeStrange (Zoë Kravitz), an old chum of Newt's from their days at Hogwarts—although it is implied that she thinks she might be engaged to the wrong brother). Newt is a magi-zoologist and "doesn't do sides" in what looks to be a nasty struggle. Famous last words.

On his way home, he runs into his old teacher Albus Dumbledore (you remember him, but either as Richard Harris or Michael Gambon, when he was an even older teacher, not, as here, by Jude Law—who is quite good). Dumbledore also asks him to find Credence, but Newt remains a neutral party. He goes home to tend to his Fantastic Charges—such as the underwater critter, a "kelpie", who has a habit of nipping Newt's fawning helper, Bunty (Victoria Yeates), before retiring for the evening. No such luck.

He finds his friends from the last adventure, Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler, who's starting to remind me of a fuller Alan Arkin) and Queenie Goldstein (Alison Sudol), have traveled to London on their way to visit her sister Tina (Katherine Waterston) who is doing some investigating for the Ministry in the city of Paris. Coincidence? Hardly. Newt notices that Jacob is behaving strangely—he's completely agog with Queenie and he surmises that she's used a hex on him, of which Newt strongly disapproves. Her reason? She wants to marry Jacob, but there's some dumb rule about magical miscegenation that prevents it—and Jacob is too protective of Queenie to let the Ministry punish her for her actions.

Queenie runs off to find Tina on her own—there's some business about Tina not wanting to see Newt because she read somewhere that Newt and Leta were engaged—"fake news"—and despite her being an investigator she still decides to fall for it and have nothing to do with Newt. Well, now there's a reason for Newt to choose sides, so after getting his marching orders from Dumbledore, he and Jacob go off to Paris to find Queenie and Tina and Credence (which sounds like a heckuvan "oldies" concert).

Then, there's the Ministry's business: they're also looking for Credence, as well, as they think he may be the brother of Leta LeStrange, which is ridiculous because Zoë Kravitz looks gorgeous and Ezra Miller looks...like Ezra Miller. Maybe he could be the brother of Adam Driver, but he's not in this franchise. Grindelwald is looking for Credence, too, as he thinks he's the only person on Earth—the wizarding Earth—who could kill Albus Dumbledore (other than Severus Snape, who isn't alive yet). Oh, did I mention there's a half-brother named Yusuf Kama (William Nadylam), who is also looking for him because he thinks he's his step-brother? Credence is the most popular guy in town, but the one who finds him first is Queenie, when she visits a mystical street-circus where a hunched up Credence is acting as the protector of Nagini (Claudia Kim), who will at one point become the snakey familiar of Voldemort...

See? At this point, the movie kinda breaks down and gets lost in some Potter's field of arcana that only a small handful of people might give two wand-shakes about. There are so many people who think Credence is SOME-thing, that most of them must be wrong...in which case, who cares? Credence is the MacGuffin in this one, like the Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone, Chamber of Secrets, Goblet of Fire, or the horcruxes of the Deathly Hallows. It's something everybody wants, but we can't guess at each one's significance until the end.

And this series is set to be five films long.

It makes your brain hurt, sets it rolling with Rowling. But, the film went astray much further than that, at least to my mind. That point came when screenwriter J. K. Rowling decided to abandon the concept of her original "Fantastic Creatures" and make it's font smaller in the title than "The Crimes of Grindelwald." For the truth of the matter is, there aren't that many "Fantastic Creatures" here, after about ten minutes of them, and they are only used as a way out of getting out of a tricky situation, whether as distraction or destructive force. I found this very disappointing. You shouldn't go into any movie with preconceived notions, but after the first, I was hoping the movie would continue its ecology theme of preserving the bewitched bio-diversity of endangered—and vexing—creatures, despite the slimness of the source material.

Instead, the stakes are expanded, creating a world-wide threat by the actions of Grindelwald, which, if we're to believe this movie, are more far-reaching even than Voldemort's: his plan is to unite the many mages throughout the wizarding world and break the 100 year peace established with the Muggles, the unenchanted. 

Newt's greatest fear: "a job in an office"

In a meeting of French wizards in the LeStrange family tomb, Grindelwald makes a case for the magical forces taking over the world out of the hands of the non-magical, starting with telling them that he wants them to live openly and to love openly (which appeals to Queenie). It's how to accomplish that utopia that bubbles the cauldron. That involves taking charge of the Muggles, poor inferior souls, dominating them rather than maintaining any co-existence, then as a capper, Grindelwald plays on their fears by displaying images from the coming second World War that ends with the apocalyptic vision of an atomic explosion. 

But, then, Grindelwald is just telling them what they want to hear—control of their world, making it theirs. You don't have to to walk to the far to the right politically to see a political parallel with today's world—Rowling injected the Potter books with flirtations of authoritarianism. But, here the parallels are far too noticeable and in a series more in line with the blockbuster sensibility of the high-earning Potter films. The studio is Warner Brothers, which used to be known as a sanctuary for letting film-makers be film-makers, but now known for sticking their grubby little hands in their franchise films.

It's a disappointment. There's only a couple of new beasts, only one of which is effectively used and that as a deus ex machina to get the heroes (and the writer) out of a jam. Unfortunately, that would appear to be the template for the rest of the films—re-do the Potter films with their well-connected central villain and just give lip-service to the Fantastic Beasts concept. The idea seems to be it's better to do something that feels more like the popular Potter films than to strike out with something different that might expand the universe and bring a unique experience.

I just participated in a podcast put out by the Large Association of Movie Blogs (LAMB) on the film and the general consensus was that the film was a big drop in quality from the first film, whether you thought the initial movie was good or not. It was amusing that the one thing everybody said was exceptional was the costumes. That sounds like the old trope that you shouldn't walk out of a musical whistling the sets. You shouldn't. But, for a fantasy that should inspire a sense of wonder, it's particularly un-magical.

"Oh! There's one!"

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Global Swarming
or
The Trials of the Mag-ecologist

I saw all the "Harry Potter" films, but didn't read the books; I only made it half-way through the first one, and it was at that point, I "knew" what style of writing I was in for and I didn't want to invest the time in reading the entire series. Plus, I'd had my fill of young mage's learning their trade, having read Neil Gaiman's "Books of Magic."

But, "Potterer" J.K. Rowling has an entertaining, spunky voice to her writing, and she needn't depend on writing "Potter" in perpetuity to make her living. But, as long as the "magic" happens at the bank, why shouldn't she keep up with the "Potterverse?"

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them started out as a Rowling-penned encyclopedia of things odd and ambulatory, scaled and winged in the wizard's world. Rowling has fashioned that "reference" book with some arcana to make a viable screenplay for the film. If there is one criticism of the whole enterprise, it's that they're trying to squeeze a few films out of the threadbare source and have invented yet another Voldemort-style villain arc to create a through-line for the story. It seems like we've been here before and the basic concept is enough to make a couple less films with a strong story-line with a unique cautionary tale about bio-diversity and preservation without having to resort to the villain plot (especially when it seems so unnecessary to the basic thrust of what she's come up with for the "A" story). When you couple that idea with the character-reveal similar to the one in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, one fears that we're going to be making too many trips to the magical well. That's the bad news.

The good news is that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a delightful entertainment, even with its bare-bones structure and shorn of the teen-angst of the Hogwarts alums, and the new film's hero, Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) doesn't have the orphan-drama baggage of Master Potter and his class. There's less soap bubbles mixed in with the fairy dust, keeping the larger issue of magic/non-magic relationships and the specific mission of Mr. Scamander, which is the securing and maintenance of endangered beasts of a special nature.

Call him a mag-ecologist (although Rowling labels him a Magizoologist).

It is 1926, as Scamander travels to New York with a valise that that growls and shudders at the most inopportune times—like at the immigration desk. Newt has traveled from England (he was kicked out of Hogwart's and why is not specified in the film) to track down some escaped critters that might cause problems in the Muggle-world by exposing the existence of the magical one.

Things are already dire; as we learn in an opening montage of animated newspaper headlines (Rowling learned that trick from Alfonso Cuaron, who used the same technique in the third HP film), a magical miscreant named Gellert Grindlewald (???)* has escaped from some porous prison somewhere (magical rules are always slippery and the ones that might apply to Dr. Strange don't in Rowling's world) to do something we know not what—it can't be good, or specified apparently, and that's one of the shortcomings of the film.

The escape of Grindlewald is causing a conniption in magic circles (headquartered in New York at the Magical Congress of the United States of America, or MACUSA) because they want to stay secreted away from the Muggle (referred to as No-Maj's in the States) world—a way of life that seems extraordinarily impractical and convoluted, just to keep Muggle/No-Maj's from asking them to do magic favors ("I've got this thing...right here"). Well, MACUSA is all up-in-arms about Grindlewald, but they also know of the beasts that seem to have got loose and aren't doing much about it, other than to send a disgraced Auror, now investigator, Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) to do some perfunctory looking.

The Magical Congress of the United States of America HQ

Newt and Tina encounter each other as the zoologist tries to trap an escaped "Niffler" (attracted to and given to the pilfering of shiny things) who has inconveniently run into a bank. Getting mixed up in the hi-jinx is Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler, the welcome "explain-to" character), a No-Maj who is at the bank to try and secure a loan for a bakery he wants to open. It becomes inconvenient to mind-wipe Kowalski and in best silent-movie convenience, he manages to swap valises with Scamander, letting loose a couple more creatures that the mage has hidden there.

A "Niffler" caught red-pawed in the act

One should explain that Newt's valise is the neatest space-bending device since the Tardis and provides all sorts of good comedic effects and a truly wondrous touring experience once we "get into it."

Anyway, "hilarity ensues." But, there are dark tidings beyond the levity. There are the Barebone family (led by Samantha Morton), who are the locus for the New Salem Philanthropic Society, a No-Maj organization that is convinced witches are real and should be expunged from society. She is treated as any crackpot but the MACUSA worry what might come of them if they are exposed as real. They, therefore, have a Chief of Security named Percival Graves (Colin Farrell in a nifty performance), whose radical ideas of security involve putting errant wizards to death.

He'd get along great with the New Salemers—and, in fact, he does, using the insecure young son Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller, the once and future movie-Barry Allen) as both spy and potential ally for seeking out information about both the Society and word on the street about wizards. That seems a little odd, doesn't it?

Director David Yates directed the last few Harry Potter movies in a way that did them service, but, to me, didn't do much else. But here, his direction pops, as if everything he learned from the earlier films freed him to do less with special effects—not that he ignores them, in fact there's more magic and imagination in this film than most of the "Potter's" and delightfully so—and concentrate more on telling a story artfully. The cast, especially Redmayne, do great work in the service of the story and everything comes together in a very entertaining package, quibbles aside.

It's a fine expansion of Rowling's wizard's world, and one hopes that the momentum can be sustained in the succeeding films (4 more of them?) to create something truly magical.

* Grindlewald appeared briefly in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, Part 1 and his reveal at the end of Fantastic Beasts...is a little...disappointing.