Thoughts on the first four Harry Potter movies

Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone (2001)

You’ll make allowances for the fact that it’s hard to start a franchise, and that the kids were really little.  After making allowances, though, you’re still left with the fact that this is a really lousy movie.  Children are sweet and direct, and we should be clear and affectionate when we communicate with them.  One suspects that these were not Mr. Columbus’s methods.  So heavyhanded, so telegraphed!  

This is what I'm talking about

Frank Capra’s reaction shots gave us hints about what we were supposed to think and how we were supposed to feel.  But more than that, they contained joy and generosity, an immigrant’s democratic suggestion that even the movie extra or featured bit player contained multitudes.  Conversely, Columbus’s reaction shots contain all the infinite dumb and manipulative of his cinema, and of so much popular culture.  And way to leave all these great actors standing around with nothing to do.  Mind you, Richard Griffiths is some kind of comic genius. 

"Justice!"

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

Not great, or even particularly good.  Better, though.  “You’ve just ruined the punch line of my Japanese golfer joke!”  They are starting to accumulate the interactions and affections that give the central conflicts reason and resonance.  There’s not enough Ginny to really justify our concern at the climax.  Come to think of it, that is also true in the book.  But there are a few felicities, such that we are willing to make up for the shortfall ourselves.  That’s as it should be.  And there are hints of deeper things.  Lucius.  Rickman!  The kid who plays Riddle ups the ante, and those diary parts are effectively rendered.  And let’s admit it—the climax is exciting.  Myth and digital technology meet pretty felicitously in the confrontation between basilisk and phoenix.  The near loss and the miraculous restorations portrayed here are more than just sentimentally satisfying.   

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

Cuaron

Bang!  It’s the change in director, isn’t it?  And the fact that these kids are wearing their own clothes, and that they’re shooting on location.  Instead of constant cutaways, instead of constructing performances and manipulating the audience, we have scenes that go on a bit, a relaxed pace that parallels the characters’ mounting mutual affection, and our own increasing interest and investment.  The night bus is not attempting to be funny.  It just is, light and confident and satisfying.  The Sirius poster!  The Dementors on the train.  Here’s where darkness really starts to register, which causes the light to mean so much more.

For example: there’s a scene early on up in the Griffindor tower when the boys are trying those dangerously flavoured jellybeans.  The scene is pure exposition, but it’s not really planting for any subsequent harvest, or moving us down the road at all.  It’s just nice, fun, loving.  In relationships you don’t always want plot.  You just want to be in the same room with a person.  They’ve got it.

Doré, David and Jonathan

We continue to have our doubts about D. Radcliffe, but watch Mr. Grint and Ms. Watson as they start to emerge (ie. that Draco beating).  The film does a terrific job handling all of the book’s important expansions and extensions.  Kudos also for managing to clearly communicate Rowling’s mind-melting conclusion.  The time turner is fun at first, and quantum physics at last.  Very contrapuntal, challenging, beautiful.  Oldman!  Gambon!   

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

The special effects are really good in these movies.  They’re either pleasingly spectacular or truly menacing.  In this way they meet two objectives, delighting the kids and filling their eyes with wonder, or scaring them silly.  That’s actually a perfectly acceptable, even morally viable combination for a melodrama such as this.  There’s nothing wrong with shining good guys and vivid bad guys, especially given how things will develop as the series continues.  Mind you, the compression of the (really!) long novel into this sort of long film really hurts.  The result is that like in the chamberofsecrets, we get to the high plot points too quickly, without the percolation and lead-up that makes the high points resonate. (By this time Rowling was no longer having trouble with this in the books.)  

Still, there are lots of good things here.  Like the boys' long hair, the Quidditch World Cup and its really chilling interruption, Moaning Myrtle—“I was distraught!”—the continuing flowering of the estimable Miss Watson.  These relationships are starting to mean something.  The climactic confrontation is, once again, powerful, and Cedric’s death—"that’s my son!"—truly pitiable.  (Yes, I know who played Cedric.)  Plus which, it's not just the film, but the circumstances in which you encounter and absorb it.  Or, consider your kids as you share this kind of thing together.  It can, it should get to the point where not completely great is still way good enough.