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The early reports are in: This is Daniel Radcliffe’s finest hour. “You feel everything he’s gone through in all these 10 years — in the story, seven years — you see it on his face, the burden Harry’s had to bear,” says screenwriter Steve Kloves. “It’s pretty powerful.
“I think it’s Dan’s best picture.”
The release of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” is one milestone among many in the boy-wizard saga: The hotly anticipated release of each book, celebrated like a global holiday. The arrival of the first movie, with attendant questions over how well the actors would fit the characters (hard as it is, now, to separate one from the other). The cliffhanger ending of “Half-Blood Prince,” with its shocking murder. The opening of the penultimate film, adapted from the first half of the last gargantuan book.
And now, this is really it: “Deathly Hallows: Part 2” wraps it all up with a big, bloody battle, Harry’s final showdown with Voldemort. This Friday is destined to be a major — and, quite likely, tearful — event, a farewell heard ’round the world for one of the most widely known and loved series of our age.
“It was so meticulously laid out by Jo Rowling that you can’t help but marvel at her imagination,” says director Chris Columbus, who helmed the first two films, “and her ability to have transformed the series into this Dickensian saga.”
Dickensian? As in, one of the greatest bodies of work in the English language? As in, a century from now Harry Potter will be the subject of academic dissertations and BBC dramas, on top of ongoing collegiate Quidditch leagues and wizard-rock tribute bands?
Kloves, who adapted all but one of the books for the big screen, attended the London premiere last Thursday, and says the massive fan turnout at the event — where Emma Watson wept openly and thanked Kloves for writing her role of Hermione so well — was a reflection of the colossal impact the books have had in England, both the home of the author and the setting of the stories.
“The atmosphere in London is brilliant,” he says. “You get up there onstage, and you’re like, this is because of one woman and a book she published. And Jo really is the biggest star there! That’s kind of remarkable.”
Sure, you may be saying, but — all this drama is over a bunch of children’s books?
Hardly. J. K. Rowling’s series may have started out that way, but in light of its global domination, both in the publishing world and at the box office, it can’t be written off as mere kiddie fare. Stories that are this universally known, across nearly all demographics, reside in another genre altogether: the classics.
“‘Harry Potter’ ranks alongside ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’ amongst some of the greatest fairy tales of the 21st century,” says Henry Jenkins, professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. “It seems likely to be a series which will be read by future generations, much as these other works have withstood the test of time.”
Kloves says Rowling’s series arrived at exactly the right point in time. “I think we’re living in an age of irony,” he says. “What Jo did with the books is explore concepts like honor and courage and friendship and loyalty in very earnest ways, but without being saccharine. And I think there was this appetite for that.”
Already, the books are the subject of university courses, exploring everything from faith (Yale’s “Christian Theology and Harry Potter”) to physics (“The Science of Harry Potter” at Maryland’s Frostburg State University) to medieval studies (Georgetown’s “Knights of Old and Harry Potter”).
Karin Westman, a professor at Kansas State University who teaches a class on Rowling’s literary influences, says the author never set out to write childish literature.
“Her favorite author of all time is Jane Austen. She does mention some children’s authors, like E. Nesbit and C.S. Lewis, but she draws as much from adult literature as children’s,” says Westman.
Rowling’s books contain universal themes and couch them in a reality we feel connected to, she adds.
“She’s interested in the big questions, about what’s good and evil, and how do we live in a world that has both — that’s where Rowling intersects with earlier literature. Where you feel most connected is [not fantasy elements] but the moments of reality, like Harry’s emotional experience, or the political corruption at the Ministry of Magic.”
Author Lev Grossman — whose best selling 2010 fantasy novel “The Magicians” has been referred to by “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin as being “to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea” — says Rowling’s place in the big leagues is incontrovertible.
“She’s set herself up as a link in the chain that connects writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis to writers like [science fiction author] Ursula Le Guin. I feel like her place is secure in that tradition,” says Grossman.
The story of Harry’s journey, from his humble beginnings with the Dursley family to being the savior of the world, is an age-old classic, Grossman says — one identifiable in other indelible modern-day tales, like “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings.”
“If you sit down and start tracking parallels between ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Star Wars,’” he says, “you’ll never stop. They’re all versions of the [scholar] Joseph Campbell monomyth story: A young person is summoned from a realm they never knew existed, and endowed with powers connected to their parents, who they never knew they had, and fulfills a great destiny.”
Added to that, says Danielle Tumminio, author of “God and Harry Potter at Yale: Teaching Faith and Fantasy Fiction in an Ivy League Classroom,” is that “the struggles the characters have, like how to lead a meaningful life, and how to make sense of the loss of a parent — they’re very real for people. Rowling does a masterful job of crafting characters that have lively psychological inner lives.”
When translating Rowling’s sweeping themes to film, Kloves hewed closely to her approach. “What we tried to do in the movies is not to be corny, but to take it seriously — that being loyal, and standing up for things you believe in, actually matter in the world,” he says.
Columbus, as the series’ first director, tried to ignore the growing phenomenon. “I had to basically put on blinders and avoid what people were saying about who we were casting and what the look of Hogwarts would be,” he says. “Had I thought about the importance of those decisions, I probably would never have left my apartment.”
It was Columbus who made the fateful decision to cast Radcliffe, Watson and Rupert Grint, who grew up as Harry, Hermione and Ron. He also started the ball rolling on the collection of A-list British talent featured in the eight films: Helena Bonham Carter, Jim Broadbent, John Cleese, Robbie Coltrane, Warwick Davis, Ralph Fiennes, Michael Gambon, Brendan Gleeson, Richard Griffiths, the late Richard Harris, John Hurt, Jason Isaacs, Bill Nighy, Gary Oldman, Miranda Richardson, Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw, Maggie Smith, Timothy Spall, Imelda Staunton, David Thewlis and Emma Thompson, to name a few.
“It was almost like forming a band,” says Columbus. “Once you had certain people, other people wanted to hop on board.”
That said, “at the beginning, I was practically begging some of these people. Richard Harris was initially slightly ambivalent,” Columbus says. “Alan Rickman felt he didn’t want to be typecast. I think he was one of the great cinematic villains of all time in ‘Die Hard.’ That’s why I wanted to cast him!”
Coltrane, who plays Hogwarts groundskeeper Hagrid, told Entertainment Weekly none of the actors took the job lightly: “Nobody thought, ‘Oh, it’s just a kids’ film.’ Everyone treated it as seriously as Ibsen.”
On set, it seems there was not a dry eye in the house amongst the cast when the last film wrapped. “We knew the day was coming for so long, but it was surprisingly moving for all of us,” says producer David Barron. “Everybody put so much of themselves into these movies, and on this one we all shared the added goal of making it a fitting finale to the series.”
But the effects of Harry Potter have now spread far beyond the books and movies. After Rowling proved readers young and old would gladly shell out for books with thousand-plus page counts, the entire young-adult market changed.
“Rowling transformed the publishing landscape,” says Kansas State’s Westman. “‘Harry Potter’ didn’t start with large marketing, it started in a grassroots way, with kids and parents buying the books. The midnight release parties only started with book four. Then publishers adopted those for other series. The size of the books, and the interest and the fan energy around the books like ‘Twilight,’ was a consequence of the earlier success of ‘Harry Potter.’”
Fan communities existed long before Rowling’s series, but here they took off in an unprecedented way. Sites like MuggleNet and The Leaky Cauldron led the way for the creation of huge Potter communities, devoted to not only discussing the films and books, and writing their own fanfiction extrapolations of the plot (some more G-rated than others), but actually expanding into cultural movements.
“Social activism has resulted,” says Westman, “particularly the creation of the Harry Potter Alliance. Andrew Slack and Paul DeGeorge [lead singer of the rock band Harry and the Potters] take the themes of Rowling’s series — concerns about prejudice and the need to make the world a better place —and move them into the real world.”
31-year-old Slack, a Brandeis graduate and former stand-up comedian, co-heads the organization, which reaches over a million people in an outreach program targeting issues like poverty, genocide, climate change, global literacy (they’ve donated over 88,000 books worldwide) and emergency aid. Recently, the organization funded five cargo planes to Haiti, each named after a Potter character. “We see ourselves as the Dumbledore’s Army for our world,” Slack says, referring to the novels’ underground resistance movement of Hogwarts students.
“Why do we have to just talk about Harry?” says Slack, who views the Potter Alliance as the starting point for a broader activist movement inspired by Rowling’s books. “Why can’t we be like Harry?”
sstewart@nypost.com