Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the new puppy you’ve not yet house-trained: It’s cute, it’s endearing, you want to scratch it behind its ears, but it has a habit of leaving messes on the floor and so you also want to bop it on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. But you can’t bring yourself to do it. The little mutt’s just too adorable. Grant that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them will not stain your carpet, chew your couch, or create general havoc in your home. Grant instead that it overstays its welcome and in fits and spurts refuses to just be a movie in the same way the average franchise movie refuses to be a movie: by setting itself up for the next installment.
Franchising isn’t a new thing, but of late it has gotten worse in the sense that movies are becoming more conscious of their serialization. In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, that dynamic splits the production into two parts: one concerning fantastic beasts and, yes, the appropriate methods of finding them, the other concerning Standard Issue Dark Wizard Shit™, the latter of which is all the proof you need of the film’s intrinsic taint prior to buying a ticket. Remember that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is derived from the Harry Potter universe, where it’s nothing more than a required textbook for all first-year students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, rather than a distinct story of its own. Just turning that text into narrative requires major storytelling gymnastics.
Stitching it to the Potterverse’s overarching clashes with the baddest hombres of the wizarding world, though, requires something more, like an insatiable hunger for box office revenue. It’d be a crime of sorts to turn Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them into the story of Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), a hapless, shy, gratingly twitchy wizard who accidentally sets a handful of magical creatures loose in 1920s New York City, and who must catch ’em all before things get out of hand. (The Pokémon GO tie-in jokes are as obvious as they are endless. Unlike that game, though, the film actually has a conclusion, such as it is.) But that’d be more of a misdemeanor than a felony. By contrast, portentous material involving a spate of unexplained and destructive attacks throughout the city, coupled with the search for the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald, feels like murder.
That’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in a nutshell. The film begins with a newspaper clipping montage to spell out Grindelwald’s infamy and emphasize his disappearance before swapping over to Newt’s arrival in America, which feels like a play on John Crowley’s Brooklyn, sans the charm and presence of Saoirse Ronan, plus Redmayne’s overeager artifice and a surplus of CGI FX. Newt’s suitcase is magical in nature, and contains a veritable ark of magnificent, strange and otherworldly animals collected from all over the world. Some, like the niffler, a platypus-like critter with kleptomaniacal tendencies, are cute. Some, like the graphorn, are less so but still enthralling to behold. It’s Newt’s desire to learn about these animals and protect them, and perhaps it’s not much of a surprise that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them works best in that particular capacity: In Newt’s menagerie we find components of the wonder that made Harry Potter such a success on the page and on screen.
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