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Harry Potter and the order of the phoenix
Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Helena Bonham Carter
Director: David Yates
138 mins
Harry Potter kissing a girl? Harry Potter getting some osculatory action? Harry Potter ... copping off? Yes, yes and yes.
Harry’s premier snog is very much the USP of this, the fifth Harry Potter film. Hang on: the fifth? The fifth? Where has the time gone?
Eliot’s Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons; British film writers measure out theirs by Daniel Radcliffe’s growth spurts – made more heartstopping here by flashback glimpses of his teeny, tiny bespectacled self from the first movie, which came out ... oooh ... surely about 14 months ago.
Soon Harry Potter will be actually doing the noisome deed itself, going for trendier glasses, or contact lenses, or zipping over to Moscow for corrective eye surgery; he’ll be going on Facebook and going tombstoning every weekend.
But, yes, here is the film where Potter gets some serious romance, with fellow Hogwarts scholar Cho Chang, played by Katie Leung – though bafflingly, and rather ungallantly, her character is completely dumped from the action after the snog, and she doesn’t even get to be one of his gang of pals who finally confront the lord of all evil in the final reel.
Perhaps Harry is not entirely ready to leave the asexual world of childhood after all. His description of the kiss is incidentally the best dialogue exchange in the film.
“What was it like?” ask his friends Ron and Hermione. “Wet,” replies Harry unselfconsciously, and adding after a nicely judged pause: “She’d been crying.”
Award-winning British director David Yates takes over the reins here, and once again the emphasis on that most over-rated and under-understood concept: dark.
Harry Potter has once again gone dark, and what this means is an exciting and moody opening sequence in which Harry confronts some bullies and then, against all the rules, uses his secret magic powers in front of civilians, or “muggles”, to slay some fierce beasts – Dementors.
He is persecuted by the authorities for this breach of etiquette, a form of institutional hounding that has its roots in the wicked Voldemort’s influence, and Harry himself winds up forming an alternative rebel gang of students who must go it alone to take on the evil forces.
The Harry Potter series has become famous, or faintly notorious, for giving work to almost every single British character actor in the Spotlight casting directory, with the exception of Stephen Fry, and he surely is lined up for something in the future.
Almost all of them, I have to say, have good-naturedly got stuck into the Hogwarts dressing-up box and then phoned in their performance.
But HP newcomer Imelda Staunton is marvellous and genuinely unpleasant as Professor Dolores Umbrage, the creepy new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. With her glassy, fixed smile, she looks like a cross between Vera Drake and an evil version of the Queen, from her late 1960s period, when she starred in the Royal Family documentary and still did Trooping the Colour on horseback.
Professor Umbrage has been forced on the school by the malign apparatchiks of the Ministry of Magic, with a brief to sort things out.
She instigates a punitive reign of terror and there is a superb scene in which she makes Harry do lines – a magnificently retrograde imposition – with a special quill. He has to write out the unjust sentiment: “I must not tell lies”, a phrase that is magically and agonisingly scratched out in blood on the back of his hand. It’s absurd but also very, very nasty: a painfully real case of schoolteacherly bullying.
And so the Harry Potter saga continues. It’s essentially deeply conservative, with battles, and crashes, and giants and explosions and is shaping up to be an extraordinary real-time experiment for Daniel Radcliffe. Plenty of young actors complain that they did their growing up in public.
For Radcliffe that is literally true. When the saga is finally complete, its sheer bulk will be impressive, and we will gasp at Radcliffe’s remarkable stamina and maturity in the role: a testing experience for any actor, but one that he has managed without going obviously mad, and with enough wit to send himself up on Ricky Gervais’s TV comedy Extras.
Will it amount to anything more than just very good family entertainment – or will it assume a lofty Tolkienesque grandeur? I think and hope not. But there are worrying signs that there is really no development from film to film: the actors are all obviously growing up, but there is no substantial increase in maturity in the films themselves, no desire to evoke good and evil in any real way.
As I say, that’s a relief, on balance. But every time I sit down to a new Harry Potter movie, I’m struck by how very, very similar it is to the previous one – and how forgettable, even disposable, the plot twists are.
The new Potter novel comes out on July 21, which will of course sell by the tonne, and finally the movies will catch up with the books.
It’s an astonishingly successful brand on the page and on the screen. But I’ve given up wondering if it’s going to be any more than that.
By Peter Bradshaw
