Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Nothing I say in a review will make a difference as to whether Potter fans see this latest film adaptation of the 5th book in the Harry Potter series. This is fortunate for Warner Brothers, as this film grossly misfired where its predecessors had so (seemingly) effortlessly gone before. I confess, I was taking the high quality of the Potter movies for granted, like a Pixar or an Aardman movie. I went in nervous; an obscure television director paired with a new screenwriter (Steve Kloves adapted the previous four books in close collaboration with author J.K. Rowling)? Also, Order of the Phoenix is my favorite of the 6 books so far released. However, my nerves were assuaged by “they haven’t done anything wrong yet” hubris, and we moviegoers are paying the price. This will put your minds at ease that I don’t just give gold stars out to sentimental favorites, I hope.
My first impression of the film was that it just felt weird. It felt wrong, in many ways. The tone, the pacing, the dialogue, all belonged to some other franchise. Even the costumes were out of character (check out Mrs. Dursley’s cougar getup)! People didn’t talk like themselves; the Kloves scripts captured the Britishness and charm of the books, and conveyed tons of character. This script by Michael Goldenberg not only betrays the characters’ past development, but also makes assumptions about its audience which are unfair to the moviegoers. If you have not read the source novel, you may be very perplexed as to why people are emoting the way that they are, or why certain key scenes in certain headmaster’s offices are confusing and thence leave you out. Even Cho’s accent was diminished! If you had read the books, you will be disappointed in certain scenes involving the older Weasley boys, and possibly also even (gasp) Ms. Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) herself. Staunton is a brilliant choice to play Umbridge: she is a sweet-faced, short, hard as nails, and hilarious actress. She is given the wrong dialogue to speak, however, as Goldenberg appears to have not read the book prior to writing this screenplay, and misses her particular venomous treacle. The film relies heavily on the novel to tell what the movie refuses to show.
Is it all the script’s fault? No, indeed. It is very much, definitely, the editor’s fault as well. And/or possibly director David Yates as well. Whether or not Yates shot enough scene coverage cannot be known by me, but it is evident that the editor Mark Day (of various lurid B films and TV) actually took scenes that were edited effectively for the preview and then re-edited them to not work. (”Then prove it!”) Time moved at jerky pace – either skipping ahead incomprehensibly, compressing time without using time-honored methods of implying the passage of time, in jerks, or dragging time out until you think, “surely they’re not spending all this time on that section, this is still chapter 1!” Some very key scenes feel as awkward as those embarrassing deleted scenes in DVD extras. In these, I imagine the actors glowering at the director when they tried to salvage their well-developed character work from the previous films. For book fans, the arrival at the Hog’s Head felt like they just randomly spliced out 3 feet of film. Some pacing was definitely due to script, like compressing three major events into one chunk the length of two real-time minutes. I am often defending major changes that serve the story in a book adaptation (see my review of Goblet of Fire; some brilliant streamlining there) but when coupled with the other sloppiness, it’s intolerable. There is never enough Snape or McGonagall, and Hagrid seems to be there under duress. Filch gets some laughs, deservedly so. Despite the title of the film, there is far too little taking place at 12 Grimmauld Place, though a notable tapestry is re-imagined as a gorgeous room decoration of another sort.
Back to the costumes for a minute. Some purists lost their minds when Prisoner of Azkaban had our heroes wearing regular teen clothes instead of school robes full time; the following installment honored that sartorial choice and kept it consistent. This time, horizontal stripes are the rage when they aren’t wearing their awkward robes, pinned in the center of their solar plexus for maximum binding and bunching. Staunton’s Umbridge is stuffed into pink twill suits that make her certainly dumpy and presenting a confident pink-and-precious aura, but they are too close to The Queen’s sedate dumpiness and not quite the delicious irony exemplified by Umbridge’s office. The props and set dressing in this installment are fabulous, by the way – the Daily Prophet, while totally redesigned, is really cool and used to terrific effect (also, by the way, helping with some of those story problems). The decrees, the Defense Against the Dark Arts textbooks, the Cheery-Owls cereal boxes, all great! (Though it is unlikely that Hogwarts house elves would allow commercial products onto their banquet tables.) A certain special room in Hogwarts that we have not seen before was designed very differently than I imagined, but very cleverly.
The big climax we’ve all been waiting to see on the big screen is exciting and gorgeous, thankfully, though again, dribs and drabs at a weird pace toward the end and is not clear to non-readers of the novel what is going on. The director of photography Slawomir Idziak has got some beautiful films under his belt (Black Hawk Down, Gattaca) but his aesthetic doesn’t help recapture that British je ne sais quois that has been lost by the script. The acting is all as good or better than before (though Emma Watson and Rupert Grint’s relationship suffers from the editor’s negligence), and Daniel Radcliffe gets to act with parts of his body he didn’t even get to use onstage in Equus. His good work is occluded by the herky jerky story momentum. Matthew Lewis’ Neville Longbottom gets a lot more to do, which is welcome, but isn’t Ron Harry’s best friend?
Another thing that made the movie feel weird was Nicholas Hooper’s score. While there were (probably contractual) token nods to John Williams’ defining themes, there is some music in this movie where, if you closed your eyes, you would not know this was anything close to being a Harry Potter movie. (The dialogue over the music is no help either.) Stay through the credits until the cast listing and close your eyes and listen – it sounds more like a terrible B movie with an US Magazine cover girl in rags being dragged somewhere. Williams handled the first three films, then passed off to Patrick Doyle, who honored the tone and style of Williams’ work while still giving it his own delicate touch. Hooper also does not seem to have followed the previous books or films’ tone. Watching this film is like coming back to your home town and finding they tore down your childhood home and your school and the bank you had your first savings account. The whole film gels into something wrong and off-putting when this book is a major turning point in the whole book series. Some could argue that the books evolve and so should the films; they have been successfully doing so along the same evolutionary path until now. This movie almost seems to hate its own subject matter and want to turn it into something it’s not. The Potter books, even at their darkest, even at their most dire or emotional, still maintain a firm grip on the sense of that world. Until this, the movies had as well.
For kids under say, 8, this one is pretty scary; though some of the scenes that should be the most menacing gloss over the good stuff so vaguely that maybe they aren’t even scary any more. The infant in our screening (which let us out just shy of 1 a.m.) seemed pretty scared to me. After detention with Umbridge has lost its sting, after Occlumency lessons have failed to register as anything serious, and after the Ministry’s amazing sets have failed to host an equivalent climactic set piece, the only thing left to be scared of is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (I noticed some of the names I cite above being slated for pre-production already). I am so very very sad to report this to you! Crucio!
MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 7/12/07
Time in minutes 138
Director David Yates
Studio Warner Brothers
