Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is an anomaly in the famed children’s book series: It marks the only time author J.K. Rowling seems to have lost sight of her core audience. Much of the novel, which revolves around the takeover of the wizarding academy Hogwarts by government officials at the Ministry of Magic, is a deft satire of clueless bureaucracy run amok. Rowling also crafts a hard-to-miss allegory with distinctly contemporary parallels, about wartime leaders who insist on positively spinning the news and ignoring the realities at hand.
Critics generally praised Rowling’s bid for adult respectability. But for those readers not yet old enough to vote — or those of us who vastly prefer magical yarns to political tracts — the book is an oddly alienating experience. Skipping from one disjointed anecdote to the next, Rowling never develops an overarching plot device (like, say, the “Triwizard Tournament” that unfolded in the fourth book of the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) to hold the book together. It’s a little bit of a shock, too, when we come to the end and discover that the Potter saga has barely been advanced: Harry and his pals are in the same spot they were at the end of The Goblet of Fire, trying to defeat an increasingly corporeal Lord Voldemort before he rises to power.
Adapting this behemoth for the movies was certainly no easy task — and it can’t have been made any easier by the fact that The Order of the Phoenix follows Mike Newell’s extraordinary adaptation of The Goblet of Fire , the first film of the Potter series to capture the mixture of grimness and majesty that propels Rowling’s novels. But even grading on a curve, this new movie turns out to be a near disaster. Director David Yates ( The Girl in the Cafe ) and screenwriter Michael Goldenberg ( Contact ) — both newcomers to the franchise — have no handle on Rowling’s shapeless narrative. They merely give in to the sprawl. The result is talky, tedious and — if you haven’t recently read Phoenix — nearly impossible to follow.
At the start of the film, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) is once again spending a long, lonely summer in the suburbs with his Uncle Vernon (Richard Griffiths) and Aunt Petunia (Fiona Shaw) and his increasingly immense cousin Dudley (Harry Melling). Once again, Dudley picks a fight with Harry, but this time — before Harry can fight back — a pair of evil Dementors descend upon them and Harry must use magic to save them both. It’s the strongest proof yet that the evil Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) is back.
But the Ministry of Magic would prefer to keep its bureaucratic head buried in the sand. Not only does the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy), refuse to believe Harry’s story about the Dementors; he threatens to expel him from Hogwarts for illegally using magic in the human world. As in Rowling’s novel, these early sections are the strongest, especially when Harry attends a disciplinary hearing at the Ministry, which is rendered like a vast big-city corporation, with harried office workers streaming past and magical elevators rising into the sky.
But there’s not much tension here — of course Harry’s not going to be expelled — and once he gets to Hogwarts, there’s not much of a story, either. The ministry appoints a new Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher, a Fudge toadie named Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton). Ostensibly, the movie is about Harry trying to prove to Umbridge and Fudge that Voldemort’s threat is real and imminent. But, honestly, who cares? The audience already knows that Voldemort has returned — and it’s not much fun waiting for a bunch of blowhards on the screen to figure it out.
The previous “Harry Potter” movies often suffered from a certain dutifulness; the filmmakers seemed so determined to faithfully transcribe all of Rowling’s twists and turns that they allowed the joy to drain out of the proceedings. This time, the problem is a different one: Goldenberg’s screenplay transcribes all the wrong things. The most interesting part of the novel — namely, Harry’s increasingly hostile teen angst — is subsumed far into the background. Two lively new good guys — the grrl-power witch Nymphadora Tonks (Natalia Tena) and the wizard Kingsley Shacklebolt (George Harris), one of the few faces of color in the series — are introduced in a rush and then even more quickly rushed off the screen. Instead, we get scene after scene of Harry, Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) talking each other’s ears off, punctuated by bursts of special effects (such as the appearance of a giant named Grawp) that seem to have nothing to do with anything.
(And for all the pruning that Yates and Goldenberg have done — including the elimination of a subplot involving Ron joining the Quidditch team — they weren’t smart enough to either remove or properly explain the presence of a surly “House Elf” named Kreacher, voiced by Timothy Bateson; even if you’re familiar with the book, you might not know what this odd creature is doing trolling around here.)
Without any emotional or physical conflicts to resolve, Radcliffe, Watson and Grint all look bored or confused (or, most often, both). One of the chief pleasures of this franchise has been watching these kids grow up — a point brought home here by occasional flashbacks to the previous films. But in The Order of the Phoenix they all seem to be stuck in a state of arrested development. Even Harry’s much-anticipated first kiss, with classmate Cho Chang (Katie Leung), feels awkward and curiously uneventful. (Or maybe Radcliffe is just a really lousy kisser.)
The movie has only two saving graces, both of them new additions to the cast. Staunton, better known as the meek abortionist in Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake , has a grand time as the pink-and-fuchsia-bedecked Umbridge, who finishes her most ruthless declarations with a chirpy giggle. She might be the scariest villain in all of the “Harry Potter” movies because she looks so unnervingly familiar — an amalgamation of every two-faced schoolteacher you ever had, who would smile graciously on parents night but then reveal her truly wicked colors the next day in the classroom.
And then there’s Helena Bonham Carter, playing the Azkaban prison escapee Bellatrix Lestrange. With her hair teased into a rat’s nest and mascara smeared across her eyes, she looks like Bonham Carter’s Marla Singer character from Fight Club gone to seed — and every time the actress opens her mouth, she sends off a shock wave of Grand Guignol -style humor that cuts straight through the static. Alas, she arrives late and hangs around for only about 10 minutes. Like everything else about Order of the Phoenix , she ultimately seems to be marking time before she can get to part six.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
**
Director: David Yates
Stars: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint
Length: 138 min.
Rated: PG-13 (violence)
Christopher Kelly is the Star-Telegram film critic, 817-390-7032
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