Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates, 2007)
As a fan of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, the biggest struggle in trying to evaluate the movie series has been in trying to evaluate them as stand-alone films. This is always a problem when looking at adaptations of familiar books, but I think it’s particularly so for the Harry Potter series. Rowling’s plotting is complex, and she fleshes out her world by indulging in numerous subplots and diversions. Her novels have therefore proven difficult to adapt: they don’t easily smooth out into the neat through lines of a typical Hollywood narrative. And while I recognised the virtues of the third and forth Potter adaptations – I didn’t think much at all of the first two, directed by Christopher Columbus – there was something inherently unsatisfying about them. I think the biggest problem is that the fun of the novels is in mulling over Rowling’s puzzles over the time it takes to read a book; Rowling can drop the clues in casually over several hundred pages, so there’s a pleasure in finally getting to a resolution. The films, constrained to two and a bit hours, have to hit every vital plot point with so little room to breathe that there’s no time to think over the main plot, let alone take pleasure in the asides or humorous details Rowling could enjoy. So even more than for most adaptations, I felt the films were simply highlights packages, like watching a trailer. I know there are many who have only seen the films and who have enjoyed them a great deal, so it must be possible to get something from these films in their own right. Yet I always find it a little bewildering, as I felt I had to put the story together in my mind by reading back in elements from the books.
The latest film, the fifth, has something of a head start in this respect. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was the longest of Rowling’s books, but its plotline is relatively simple. Evil wizard Voldemort has returned (at the end of the preceding Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), but the Ministry for Magic remains in denial and smears those who try to tell the truth. The Ministry’s control of the Hogwarts school becomes increasingly authoritarian, with the sadistic Ministry lackey Dolores Umbridge placed on the staff to meddle in its affairs. Harry and his friends, meanwhile, try to resist the takeover and ready for battle with Voldemort by starting a secret club, dubbed “Dumbledore’s Army,” for those wishing to receive instruction in Defence Against the Dark Arts from Harry.
This is a fundamentally sound plot, but is not nearly involved as the books that came before, and by stretching it over far too many pages Rowling created the first disappointing book in the series. However, that simplicity is a virtue for the film. Director David Yates and screenwriter Michael Goldenberg (both of them new to the series) handle the basics of this plot with confidence. The pink and frilly fascist Umbridge, easily the most memorable character in the book, is played with relish by Imelda Staunton and is satisfyingly despicable. This is the Harry Potter series’ Revenge of the Sith, the episode where the forces of darkness manage to cause society to rot from the inside through misdirection and fear. The tone of the film closely matches that established by Alfonso Cuaron in his Prisoner of Azkaban, in that it is literally and figuratively a darker work, and at its best, it’s probably the most confident of the Potter films. Certainly Yates and Goldenberg have some confidence in communicating ideas visually, rather than through plodding exposition. There’s a really snappy montage showing the students’ progression in their covert Dark Arts lessons, for example, and there’s a good running sight gag involving a series of ever-lengthening ladders used by caretaker Augustus Filch as he displays Umbridge’s escalating series of decrees. There are also ideas from the previous films that are used more effectively here, like the magical newspapers.
This level of visual literacy was also there in Prisoner of Azkaban (still the most handsomely mounted of the series), but the relatively thin plot means that the grand arc of the narrative is smoother than in Cuaron’s film. Yet there’s still a choppiness within individual scenes that speaks of a film cut slightly too close too the bone. Yates has made the shortest of the films, and with perhaps five or ten more minutes of running time there would have been more room for sequences to breathe. It isn’t just that the incidental character details are light on the ground (characters we were asked to care about a lot in previous films, like Professor Lupin, sulk around with barely a word of dialogue), but that individual scenes also feel rushed. For example, one of the most enjoyable scenes in the book has Ministry Officials come to confront Dumbledore, only to have him respond in a dramatic and unexpected fashion. Yet Yates’ staging of the scene takes all the fun out of it: the move against Dumbledore happens so quickly, and with so little build up, that when Dumbledore just as abruptly turns the tables there’s not really any sense of triumph. Similarly, Dumbledore’s big speech to Harry at the end needed to be about twice as long so it could get some emotional momentum to it. It feels like Goldenberg has done his most ruthless draft of the script to see how much of the detail and character he can take away before it stops working, but then not done another pass to add back in some of the little details that make Rowling’s world worth visiting.
Yates does, however, manage a key success by building the film to a satisfying climax, something that had stumped all his predecessors. Rowling’s supernatural conclusions have been tricky to film, because once magic is involved the action can seem arbitrary and made-up. Order of the Phoenix gets around this by not making the outcome dependent on a particular piece of wizardry. There’s a spectacular magical duel at the end, but it ends essentially in stalemate, and the focus becomes more Harry’s internal struggle between good and bad. The idea that a good character may turn bad can be a hard sell (and again, Revenge of the Sith is a key reference in this regard), but Yates plausibly builds the link between Harry and Voldemort through subtle touches earlier in the film such as having Daniel Radcliffe, as Harry, repeat gestures from his visions of Ralph Fiennes’ Voldemort. The emotional stakes are further raised by the traumatic events late in the film, so when Voldemort turns up at the end and gets delightfully Palpatine-esque in his taunting of Harry, there’s a real sense of jeopardy. That the final moment of the climax is about Harry’s moral fortitude rather than the kind of flukish magical intervention that has saved Harry all too often in the past makes the whole final battle much more effective.
At the end of the day, Order of the Phoenix is as much of a mixed bag as its predecessors. Yet it gets enough right that it will please most Potter fans, and as jaded as I am about the cinematic Potter, it’s still exciting to think of the adventures still to come as the film series turns into the home straight.