It had been almost four years since I’d seen the first twoHarry Potter films, and I’d never watched the entire series (to date) in a row. Therefore, on the occasion of purchasing my IMAX seats for Part I of the Deathly Hallows, I decided it was finally time to re-experience this sometimes wonderful, sometimes flawed cinematic saga from start to almost-finish. My appetite was, admittedly, also piqued by the Ultimate Edition DVDs of the third and fourth films, which Warner Bros. sent me for review (those reviews should be up by the end of the week). But before revisiting those entries, it seemed only right to begin at the beginning, even though Chris Columbus’ directing does not make for the most auspicious of beginnings.
My first reaction upon starting Sorcerer’s Stone (my deepest apologies to my UK readers, but that is the edition that is most readily available here), was, as it always must be, “Oh my Dumbledore, how young the kids are!” Because they really are. The sheer impact of how tiny Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, et al. look in this film simply cannot be overstated. This is back when they were completely fresh, utterly green, and in some cases, untweezed. There is something extremely refreshing about how non-Hollywood the little kidlets look in the first two films. There they are, bushy eyebrows and all, not looking glossy or teen magazine idealized but just like the actual young children they actually are. In later films, as they grow into their teenage years, this does change, and that’s not even necessarily a bad thing. As people start to mature, they do tend to become more concerned about their looks, and about making themselves look appealing to the opposite or same sex, so it’s fitting. Still, it is nice to revisit Harry, Hermione, and Ron in this more innocent section of the saga, actually looking young and innocent.
The Harry Potter films provide a unique and most likely unprecedented opportunity to watch actors grow up on the big screen. It may be the only film series to function like a television series in that each year, for seven straight years (if not slightly longer) they have been in production. Each year, year after year, the majority of the same kids return to the same fictional world, a little older, perhaps a little wiser, and certainly ever so slightly more sophisticated as actors. Daniel Radcliffe, in particular, has matured into quite a fine actor, but for all three of the main kids, it is rather fascinating to compare their performances in the more recent films with those in the first and second. They are obviously now much better trained, from an objective standpoint, and certainly are capable of conveying greater depth of emotion than they could as children. At the same time, however, watching the first films, one still gets a sense of just why they were chosen for the roles. They may not be classically superb actors, but they each have a spark, sense of wonder, and authenticity about them that grounds the story perhaps even more than had they been more polished from the get-go. And this way, we also get to see them evolve along with their characters.
The raw energy of the kids’ early performances is also one of the major reasons the first two films work as well as they do. Now, that is not meant to denigrate or underestimate some of the genuine artistry on display in Sorcerer’s Stone andChamber of Secrets. I watched some of the DVD documentaries on the Prisoner of Azkaban Ultimate Edition before starting the films, and I’m glad I did because they made me appreciate them in a whole new light. In earlier viewings, I had always lamented Chris Columbus’ by-the-numbers, pedestrian direction. Watching glimpses of the creation of the Harry Potter film universe from behind-the-scenes, however, gave me newfound respect for the sizable accomplishments of the first two. Columbus had to take the most popular children’s book in a generation and turn it into a viable, living, breathing film property, and while I’ll be the first to admit that his direction can be hamfisted and clunky in spots (I’ll discuss this in greater detail, further down), I respect the immensity of this undertaking.
I also respect him for having been arguably the major force in defining the overall visual world of the Harry Potter film series, and that overall visual world is very difficult to fault. Not every single creature is exactly as one might have hoped or imagined (though some certainly are), but the overall look of Hogwarts and other parts of the Wizarding World, of the characters, of the costumes are about as good as one could get short of magically lifting them straight from the pages of Rowling’s novel. It is always difficult to tell in a production how much of the creativity comes from the director himself and how much from the ingenuity of the team he has assembled. Whether or not Columbus came up with the film’s strongest visual moments, he did choose to surround himself with some extremely talented people and certainly made the final decisions, and he deserves a great deal of credit for that.
I was particularly impressed to learn in the documentaries, for example, that although of course computer animation is used, the creatures that we might assume to always be CGI were actually animatronic puppets in many of the shots. Examples include the crying mandrake roots, the head of the basilisk, the huge spider, Aragog, the phoenix, Fawkes, and even the unconscious body of the troll (in later films, the hippogriff, Buckbeak, the dragon, the werewolf version of Lupin, and others were also sometimes puppets). Apparently, he was initially hesitant to use puppets but was eventually swayed by his effects team’s argument that they would help provoke more genuine responses from the children, which they certainly do.
And so there is a great deal that Chris Columbus gets right. He conveys the right amount of childlike awe and nails the storybook tone of the first two books quite beautifully. He even manages some spectacularly creepy and dark scenes, such as Quirrell/Voldemort drinking the unicorn’s blood, Aragog’s appearance, and Harry speaking in Parseltongue. The major problem, however, is that while there is certainly artistry on display, the films fail to be artistically satisfying for a number of reasons. While Chris Columbus certainly seems to be an intelligent man and can be an admirably ambitious director, his personal level of talent often doesn’t seem to quite match the level that his material calls for. The prime example for me is always his unfairly denigrated film version of Rent, which is clearly a labor of love for him. It shows in how it inspired him to heights of which, frankly, I did not realize him capable. Scenes such as “Tango: Maureen” display a daring willingness to stretch the musical beyond its stagebound roots in impressively creative ways, while retaining that which made the show so loved. At the same time, the film falters nearly as much as it flies (for example, the ill-conceived on-location Santa Fe sequence), simply because, although Columbus knows how films work and clearly knows how to tell a filmic narrative, his reach often far exceeds his grasp.
His films are also practically devoid of any interesting camera moves. The camera always stays relatively static, moving up or down or to the left or to the right, perhaps tilting if it has to, but almost never making any truly kinetic motions. Most of the scenes contain the standard establishing shot, then a two or three shot (meaning two or three people in camera), then alternating one or two shots (for example, shot of Harry talking, shot of Ron reacting, shot of Harry talking, shot of Ron talking, shot of Harry reacting), with perhaps an over-the-shoulder shot (meaning, as it sounds, shot from behind and over someone’s shoulder, so you see that shoulder in frame, as if the camera is a person, peering over it from behind) thrown in for good measure. This is fairly reductive and doesn’t describe every scene in the film, of course, but it describes far too many of them. The job of bringing the story to the screen is done, but with only scattered moments of true visual flair or style. Diagon Alley seems nicely and properly Dickensian but also rather tame, whereas it should have been stuffed to the brim with magical happenings.
Compare this to Alfonso Cuaron’s direction of Prisoner of Azkaban, in which the camera circles around a scene, zooms in, weaves up and down and in and around, and in which practically every part of the frame contains some tiny wonder or delight, from a student performing a minor spell to a picture coming to life in the far right or lefthand side of the shot. This is a world completely infused with magic. Note Cuaron’s depiction of Harry flying on Buckbeak–how the camera swoops and curves, perfectly conveying the epic grandeur of flight, in the most awe-inspiring sense of the word. Columbus’ depiction of flight in Quidditch matches, on the other hand, get the job done but lack sweep. Except for the fact that the kids are on broomsticks, it could be a depiction of any sport on film. Columbus is far too literal. He has an awesome world to work in, with wonderful set, costume, and creature design, and he films it with very little panache.
Directly related to this is the fact that Columbus’ films don’t really say much. They devotedly bring the books to life but this is also at the expense of making them intrinsically interesting on their own. They each do their very best to fit in as many of the books’ scenes as possible and yet there seems to be little rhyme or reason as to why Columbus chose to leave some parts in or take others out, besides time constraints. The mysteries seem underdeveloped. The big Ginny reveal at the end of the second film, for example, seems to come completely out of the blue, having only been established by one line in the Weasley home regarding Ginny’s schoolgirl crush on Harry, and one later reaction shot in which she looks incredibly guilty. How she found the diary, the fact that she had been writing in it about her love for Harry–this is all chopped out, and without it, her motivation truly suffers. The film also inexplicably glosses over the sense of alienation Harry is supposed to feel when the school starts to believe he might be the heir of Slytherin. Capturing this sense of paranoia and the crushing weight of the entire school turning on Harry–the former boy hero being ostracized–surely should have been more important to Columbus than, for example, recreating the mostly unnecessary mandrake scene.
Returning again to Prisoner of Azkaban, this film actually includes many more cuts to the source material than either of the first two films, and yet they are done with far more intelligence and grace. The key to making a good dramatic adaptation of preexisting material that is too lengthy to be captured in full is for the creative team to decide on what themes most interest them and to focus the work around them. A great example is the Broadway musical of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, which is a quite sprawling novel. The writers of the musical decided to make their musical about one particular relationship in the book, that of the “Wicked Witch of the West,” Elphaba, and Glinda, and only included those parts of the novel that were central to that arc. Similarly, Cuaron decides to make Harry’s impending adulthood the primary theme of his film, and he shoots everything through this lens, so to speak. The Dementors are used to reflect a world growing ever darker and more adult, as Harry ages. The Hogwarts clock is used as a repeated visual motif to reflect the passage of time, along with the Whomping Willow–each season is marked by the cycle of this sentient tree. And Cuaron also brilliantly ties this into the time travel sequence in the latter portion of the film, taking what could have been a simple plot twist and weaving it into the core theme of his film–that the kids are growing up (Cuaron even gets away with an ingenious masturbation metaphor at the start of Azkaban, Harry playing with his wand underneath the covers) and no matter how one may try to freeze time or turn it back, literally or metaphorically, it moves ever onward. The darker visual palette with which he shoots takes the entire series to a new level of maturity and depth.
Now, maybe it isn’t fair to focus on Azkaban so much in a review that is ostensibly meant to be about the first two Harry Potter films, but I think it’s important to illustrate the contrast between the first two films and the third and beyond. It makes the difference between a film that stands on its own as a work of art, while forwarding the central themes and plots of the entire saga, and a film which, like the first two, is merely a faithful adaptation of a book–Cliffs Notes brought to life, if you will, but lacking the full passion of the source material from which they came. The first two films are entertaining, sure, but they are also narratively redundant. They bring very little to the table that one wouldn’t have gotten from simply reading the books, whereasAzkaban and the later films are personal interpretations and riffs on the books–as the greatest film adaptations are–in which one can see the director interacting with the text, putting his or her own spin on it, and telling it from a perspective that says just as much about him or her as it does about the author. Watching Azkaban, I can tell that Cuaron is fascinated by that liminal period between childhood and adulthood, where one still revels in the joys of youth but starts to feel tugged in the direction of the beckoning adult world. Watching Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets, I can tell nothing about Chris Columbus other than that he most likely really enjoyed readingHarry Potter and thinks J. K. Rowling is totally awesome.
With that said, the less sophisticated work of Columbus nicely mirrors the less sophisticated world of the first two Harry Potter books, in which Harry and his friends are still very much children. The looming threats of Voldemort await them, but it all seems so far in the future, just as high school graduation looks to a middle schooler. As the children gradually grow up, so do the actors who portray them, and so do the books and films in which they exist. From that perspective, Chris Columbus’ entries to the series are better than I remembered them. Knowing the greatness that comes later, it is easier to forgive the earlier shortcomings, for they are merely setting the stage for some truly fantastic later films, just as the first two Harry Potters set the stage for surprisingly dark and mature later books. Think of the first two as elementary school yearbooks. Parts of them might make us cringe at how awkward and immature we once were, but they are also filled with warm nostalgia for a time when we were more innocent and carefree. Every now and then, it’s nice to look back to a time when we were still on the way to being who we are now.
