Review: Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix

Don't worry...no spoilers.

I went to see the latest installment of Harry Potter film series with my friends Bob and the Old Professor. Bob seemed to like it, I enjoyed most of it, and the Old Professor thought it was a crashing bore.

As is the case of all films in a series, there has to be an assumption of knowledge on the part of the audience of what's gone on before so that you don't have to spend an hour or so recapping what went on in the first four films. The problem with that, however, is that it may have been a while since you've either read the book (I read Phoenix during Hurricane Katrina in 2005) or seen the last film in spite of HBO re-running Goblet of Fire over and over again. So I spent a bit of time rebooting the database to catch up with the story. But once I did, it moved along, and I remembered most of the story as it was told. The screenwriter, Michael Goldenberg, did a good job of paring the book, which is 734 pages, down to a manageable running time on the screen and tightening up the narrative. One of my chief complaints about Ms. Rowling as a writer is that her narrative gets a bit long-winded and her dialogue is clunky. However, she's richer than the Queen of England, so what do I know? So all in all, I think the translation from book to screenplay went well.

I continue to be impressed with the ability of both the story and the actors to maintain a strong sense of continuity from installment to installment. Harry Potter has grown, in more ways than one, into the role life has handed him yet he still has that sense of innocence, wonder, and self-doubt that infused him in the first film. He has been tested and beaten down, but he still strives on when others, especially teens, would have said something along the lines of "I'm outta here!" to the place the world has put him. Obviously he can't give up -- there are still two more books to go at this stage -- but his sense of perseverance and strength is very powerful and I think that's what makes him worth watching. (Daniel Radcliffe, the actor portraying him, has also grown; he's getting buff in his late teens, which may make the rest of the films hard to pull off. Harry Potter in his twenties with a six-pack and stubble might be hard to sell.)

The rest of the company is also aging well. Rupert Grint as Ron and Emma Watson as Hermione aren't nearly half as annoying as they were in the first two, and Maggie Smith and Alan Rickman are worth the price of admission alone.

I have no idea why the fundamentalists are up in arms about the Harry Potter books. These are stories about good versus evil and honor and right versus treachery and darkness. The fact that Harry is a wizard and that he is learning witchcraft is almost beside the point; those are devices and gimmicks to infuse the stories with a different interesting angle, but the real story has nothing to do with magic any more than Star Trek is about space flight. It's about our basic human nature and how we face the tests of being human. In other words, it's all allegory and parable, which, in case the fundamentalists haven't noticed, is what most of the bible is. What I think irritates them isn't that there's magic in these stories -- as opposed to changing sticks into snakes, parting the Red Sea, and making Merlot out of tap water. It's that the stories have captured the imagination of billions of children and adults and it makes them jealous; they don't see kids standing in line and waiting up all hours for the latest Left Behind book. (With good reason. I read one. It makes a Harlequin Romance sound like Faulkner.)

By the way, there was one unintentional laugh. There's a scene where the dreaded Dolores Uxbridge, played with delicious sugar-coated evil by Imelda Staunton, is proctoring the OWL exams in the Great Hall, sitting like a pink-coated queen on a dais. Someone in the theatre said loudly, "George Bush in drag!" Even the actors on the screen grinned at that.

Okay, I'm going back to reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.