Film - General Release
A Review by By Mary Hoffman
[Armadillo 6.2 Summer 2004]
This third cinematic outing for the boy wizard has had much better reviews than the first two. It has benefited from being moved on six months to separate it from Peter Jackson's Return of the King, which was always going to eclipse it, after two Christmasses of rivalry. And it has a new director, with Chris Columbus having moved to the producer role. Bizarrely the new director is Alfonso Cuar„n, whose last film was Y Tu Mama Tambien ® hardly a family evening out.
But that has given the new Potter film a darker edge ® at least that is what everyone is saying. If they mean that there is less mugging from Ron Weasley, that can only be good. But I think reviewers have not sufficiently allowed for the fact that HP3 is far and away the best book of the sequence so far.
It begins drearily enough, as all save the fourth do, with the Dursleys in Privet Drive, but Cuaron sensibly cuts that section as short as possible and gets us off to Hogwarts quickly, which is where we want to be. We are now so used to the technical wizardry, which eclipses Dumbledore's own powers, that we should take a step back to admire just how wonderfully the magical castle is realised. The living sky that is the ceiling of the great hall, the moving pictures, including the splendid Dawn French as the Fat Lady, the erratically re-locating staircases ® this Hogwarts is the perfect match for J.K.Rowling's invention.
And the casting is superb. Michael Gambon's Dumbledore runs seamlessly on from Richard Harris, the Weasleys are a ginger assortment worthy of Honeydukes, Gary Oldman is a suitably maniacal Sirius Black and David Thewlis an appropriately ambiguous Professor Lupin. Emma Thompson's OTT performance as Sybill [sic] Trelawney, the Divination Professor, somewhat blurs the book's distinction between her usual fakery and her one unexpected moment of clairvoyance, but is too enjoyable to cavil at.
The three teenage actors ® Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint ® have done what teenagers do and put on a growth spurt, elongating their bodies into gangling adolescents from the children they were at the beginning of the first film.
Whether it is the fact that they are fourteen instead of the book's thirteen, or something in Cuar„n's direction, they have become disturbingly sexual presences. I don't mean the hand-holding in moments of stress that Ron and Hermione go in for. It is more that as good-looking youngsters, who have grown up under public gaze, they all, even Draco, have suddenly developed into almost-adult bodies, with the physical self-awareness to go with it.
This is something that the books always planned to show, with Harry and Co. getting one year older with each, as the story unfolds in real time. But it gives a more uneasy sensation when you can actually see it.
The high spot of the new film, for me, was the Hippogriff, sensibly reduced by Cuar„n to one from the book's gaggle of them, and beautifully CGI-ed to be a convincing beast, whose execution we could care about. The Dementors were pretty good too, though not as scary as Peter Jackson's Nazgul. Cuaron also reduced the Quidditch matches to one short one carried out in a thunderstorm, which was a relief. The reassuring familiarity of some of the required sequences in the books can just seem repetitious when see on screen.
So, yes, overall a good new direction for the Potter films. But four more? We'll have to wait and see. The young actors signed up only for three and they might just be tired of living their teenage years in public. Emma Watson, who is an Oxford girl, was said in our local paper to be a bit weary of being greeted as Hermione by strangers in the High Street. She doesn't mind the approaches but would like them to know her real name.