An English Wizard in New York

Rating: 8/10 (14 December 2016)

So no Harry Potter. No Hogwarts. No Voldemort. And a film based on a throwaway Christmas cash in from a few years back. Not a promising start. However in many ways the lack of a "Potter" novel to fall back on is the strength of the film. Allowing it to take new directions and explore the wider world of Magic in the Rowling universe. Setting it in New York is a good move. As well as making it more appealing to American audiences it breaks the mould of English eccentricity and delivers a world of magic with more bite and a hint of social conscious. Set in the time of the Great Depression this world of magic has a more jagged raw feel than the whimsy of the Potter sagas. Newt Scamander (Redmayne) is the English man in New York, a shy awkward person who doesn't quite fit in and immediately falls foul of American Magical law (no importing of beasts, no wand permit, consorting with nomag (muggles)). It is this law which sets the tone of the film and gives it its own slant. The Salem witch trials of the past have given rise to a situation where magicians are hidden from the non- magical world, which sees magic as sinful, evil and dangerous (they have good reason on this last). Mary Lou Barebone (Morton) is the main witch hating focus for this stance and is suitably chilling in this role. The underground nature of magic in America riffs on a host of witchcraft films and TV programmes of the past. While not making any actual references there are elements of "Bewitched" and the problems of relationships between magical and non-magical folk. Which brings us to Kowalski (Fogler) as the comic light relief and our nomag view of the world. I like Kowalski, I like his aspirations to be a baker and his wide eyed wonder at the magic he encounters. I do however feel that he is put into the clichéd fat funny guy role. My main criticisms are that while the "keep it under wraps" view of magic is different it also gives rise to the problem of how they manage to do this when New York seems to be getting torn up by magical events on a fairly regular basis. Surely they can't obliviate everyone and keep on repairing the damage or passing it off as a gas explosion? And there is the oh so tedious your superiors won't listen to you when you have something important to say (even if you do keep gatecrashing meetings) don't people ever follow correct procedure? Still these are minor quibbles and Newt's TARDIS like suitcase is a fantastic nod to Hogwartian eccentricity