A story worth retelling

Movie adaptations of novels are generally win-some-lose-some situation. The difficulty in the case of the Harry Potter series is that, (1) the last novels were still being written when the movies were made and (2) except for the first two films, it gets a different director each time. Though all reputable, each director has had his own way of interpreting the material (so Harry gets a conspicuously different hairstyle each time), and, more serious, as only J. K. Rowling knows the full story, narrative gaps in the adaptations occur. The movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, more than its predecessors, suffers from these limitations.

In this installment, Dumbledore has re-organized the Order of the Phoenix to prevent the revivified Voldemort from regrouping his followers (the “Death Eaters”) and resuming his full powers. Voldemort plots to obtain a “secret weapon,” a prophecy locked in the vaults of the Ministry of Magic. Meanwhile, discredited by the Minister of Magic, who refuses to believe that Voldemort has returned, Harry finds himself a Cassandra-figure at Hogwarts. When the Ministry takes control of Hogwarts itself, Harry and his friends form a secret society to defend themselves against dark magic.

Ralph Fiennes, Michael Gambon, Gary Oldman, Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, and Emma Thompson—an assembly of fine British actors given, alas, only about five minutes of screen time each—resume their roles, alongside the “children”: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson. New to the cast are Imelda Staunton as Dolores Jane Umbridge, Ministry-appointed High Inquisitor of Hogwarts, and Helena Bonham-Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange, Voldemort’s loyal follower, escapee of Azkaban prison, and maniacal cousin of Sirius Black.

A cast that good, however, does not close up the gaps in the storytelling. If one had not read the book, one might be puzzled by a number of things in the movie. How, for instance, was Dumbledore alerted to Harry’s whereabouts in the movie’s climax? Why are the centaurs hostile to humans? Why were the dementors in Little Whinging? How do Harry and his friends break into a professor’s room without anybody noticing?

It is just director David Yates’s not-so-good luck that he gets the most complex of the books (so far) to adapt. The material is more complicated than that in the previous books, and weaving the various narrative threads of an eight hundred-page book into a two-hour movie is surely not an easy task. The result of the cutting, grafting, and pruning is, unhappily, a lopsided tree. Some of the incidents that make it to the final cut seem unmotivated or not motivated enough. Characters are inexplicably discarded or conveniently introduced—Mrs. Figgs, for instance. Yates calls our attention to the house-elf Kreacher, as rightly he should, since he plays a pivotal role in the novel, only to make him disappear midway in the movie. The threstals, winged creatures visible only to those who have seen death, here become, like Dumbledore coming to Harry’s rescue, so much deus ex machina. Most inconsistent is that Yates has the prophecy uttered. How, then, could the Death-Eaters tempt him, as they do here, with its secrets? Some of the lapses are the novel’s, but others are borne out of Yates’s directorial discretion.

The biggest disappointment for fans may be that the double love triangle—involving Harry, Cho, and Cedric on the one hand and Cho, Harry, and Hermione on the other—is ruthlessly truncated. Only the kiss stays, the less convincing here because the conflicts leading to and out of it are all but shorn away. Perhaps the novel is simply too bulky a package for anyone to tie up without some of the ribbons snapping.

There are, however, felicitous departures from the book, and Yates deserves credit for these. Umbridge’s interrogation of the Hogwart’s faculty is economically—and humorously—treated, as are the scenes leading to the exposure of the secret society. Yates also manages to allude to the earlier Harry Potter movies. Shots of Harry going down the hallway of the Ministry of Magic recall the Basilisk slithering in the passages of the Chamber of Secrets; the interior of the Department of Mysteries where prophecies are stored recalls the maze in Goblet of Fire. At least some level of visual coherence and foreshadowing is thus achieved.

One of the hurdles Yates has to leap over is how to make a wizard fight look convincing. The printed page is more forgiving than the screen. It would be unintentionally comic, like a literalist staging of Gloucester’s suicide in Lear, if Yates had actors waving wands and yelling pig Latin at each other. But overcame that difficulty Yates does, or rather he avoids it, by doing away with the book’s excesses.

The confrontation between Dumbledore and Voldemort, a showcase of special effects, is far more exciting than the Yoda-Dooku swordfight in Attack of the Clones and nowhere as ridiculous. Fans may debate the merits of the liberties Yates took, but one of them is, in my view, a major improvement over the book. Without giving too much away, Yates restages the end of the fight so that the crucial choice, the deciding vote, as it were, belongs to Harry. He thus ceases to be an accidental hero, as he appears to be in the book.

A flawed adaptation, then, with more losses than gains perhaps, is Yates’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; but the point of the tale, whether book or film—that the “Greater Good” exacts sacrifices, that love exerts contradictory pressures and engenders contradictory effects, and so on—is, if not so well told, certainly worth the telling.