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Film
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Tackling Potter Out of Order
If there were such a thing as a Hollywood confession booth, our critic Brent Simon would have long ago intoned, 'Bless me Alan Horn, for I have sinned...'
Thursday, July 12, 2007 at 3:00 PM
By Brent Simon
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Warner Home Video
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Nope
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I have a dirty confession to make. I’m a professional film critic and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth film in a franchise whose five efforts thus far have raked in a combined $3.5 billion domestically, is the first film in the series that I’ve seen.
This is irresponsible to some and baffling to most, but I find it rather amusing.
When the first movie came out, in November of 2001, I was the Editor-in-Chief and principal film critic of a now-defunct weekly L.A. entertainment paper, so I had my pick of the litter with regards to assignments. The thing was, I wasn’t necessarily as excited about Harry Potter as the general populace. I’d heard good things about the books (even a thumbs up from my mom), but hadn’t read any of them; given that my regular job indulged such high amounts of escapist fiction, any time I had left for reading invariably was devoted to biographies or something of the sort, so I could feel like I wasn’t completely rotting my brain.
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Warner Home Video
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Nope
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The paper where I worked wasn’t invited to the film’s out-of-town junket (in London), and I believe I had another, admittedly nominal conflict the evening of the announced screening I first heard about from a Warner Bros. publicist. So I passed the movie along to one of my fine and more than grateful freelancers; I think I reviewed Steve Martin’s Novocaine, Snoop Dogg’s The Wash, and the indies Maze and The Fluffer that week, four films which collectively opened on less than a quarter of the screens that Harry Potter did.
With subsequent films, I just didn’t get into them; I’d cast my lot with the Lord of the Rings series. I read along with the critical coverage, and while for the most part the Harry Potter films were respected, apart from their special effects work they didn’t seem to figure prominently in year-end awards discussions, which aided my rationalization. In the meantime I was more than happy to provide readers of my publication a through line of sorts, and cede opinion on the movies to those well versed in matters of “Muggles” and the Hogwarts School.
What’s that? Oh, yes, I did pick up some of the lingo, you see. That’s how inescapable a force J.K. Rowling’s franchise is. I followed with interest the intriguing choices of director for the series, and some of the other gossip, but never really felt like I was missing out. If anything, I thought fondly of a day 20 years hence, just settling down one weekend with a stack of DVDs (or whatever form of newfangled home exhibition was all the rage at that time) and plowing through them all, my own little discovered pop cultural time capsule.
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Warner Home Video
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But now I’ve gone and ruined that a bit. With the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I thought, 'You know, why not just jump into the middle of the series, and see how that feels?' So I went, knowing only the loosest outlines of the plot, that 15-year-old orphan Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) is grappling a bit with maturing, as well as the return of some villainous figure known as Lord Voldemort (a de-nosed Ralph Fiennes), and that he’d probably have that red-headed kid (Rupert Grint) and chick (Emma Watson) along to help him. I also knew that David Yates — who’d made slightly different movies in the form of The Girl in the Café and Sex Traffic — was directing, and that, per contractual obligation, every other actor of British origin between the ages of 40 and 65 would also appear, in some sort of cameo form.
All in all, I have to say, I rather enjoyed it. And it’s not as bewildering of an experience as you might think, actually. Wandering into a series completely cold, you’re probably able to appreciate certain things a bit more — certainly there’s no irrational attachment to the novels’ exposition or detail in setting.
And picking up on all the nuances of relationships doesn’t take too much time; one can take cues from the audience to some degree. Harry’s human guardians were obviously exasperated with him. There were titters from the crowd when a character named Luna Lovegood, looking like the little extraterrestrial love child of Courtney Love and David Bowie, told Harry he was just as sane as she was. And there was much appreciation for the hapless Neville finally getting a spell right, as well as what I gather is Harry’s first big screen kiss.
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Warner Bros.
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Yup
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I found the performances for the most part solid. Gary Oldman brought a bit of pleasant groundedness to the movie as the formerly imprisoned Sirius Black, smeared by newspaper tycoon Cornelius Fudge, but clearly an important friend to Harry. Ditto Michael Gambon as Albus Dumbledore, Harry’s chief mentor and the headmaster of Hogwarts. The portrayal most giving The Order of the Phoenix its zing, though, was Vera Drake’s Imelda Staunton, who I found just deliciously deplorable as the conniving, dictatorial Dolores Umbridge, working in cahoots with the aforementioned Fudge to slowly strangle all practicality and intellectual and creative freedom out of Hogwarts’ classrooms. ('Progress for the sake of progress must be discouraged,' she says on her first day on the job, eventually rising up the school’s power chain to oust Dumbledore.)
There are also all the sorts of digressions one can freely entertain without more of a psychological investment. Apart from the juvenile (Harry is threatened with expulsion from Hogwarts after, ahem, pulling out his wand in public), there are sociopolitical strands aplenty in The Order of the Phoenix. As Voldemort rises and benefits from those that don’t believe in the reality of his return, several characters make mention of the fact that things 'are changing out there, just like last time.' Like all sorts of screen heroes before him, meanwhile, Harry grapples with constructing a worldview that balances his do-gooder’s instinct with the frustration, anger and isolation he increasingly feels. 'The more you care, the more you have to lose,' he says.
That doesn’t always have to be the case, though, as my little social experiment somewhat affirms. I had no strong previous connection to the material, but was carried along by the film’s rather savvy balance of wonderment with a sense of impending doom and mystery. Coming out of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I can understand and more fully appreciate the series’ appeal, even without the same commitment of shared hours in the darkness.
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