"Wizardry Without Magic"
Time.com
By Richard Corliss
Source
Fearful wizards refer to their nemesis, the wicked Voldemort, as You-Know-Who. But for literate kids and plenty of adults, the book world's You-Know-Who for the past few years has been Harry Potter, unassuming boy hero of J.K. Rowling's fantasy series. Now that the first book--Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Philosopher's Stone in the original British version)--is a movie, true Hogwartsians will return to the source and compare written and visual texts with the care of a New Critical scholar. They will find that the book was better--richer in mood, in thrilling melodrama, in joy--than director Chris Columbus' meticulous, stolid film.
Rowling's first inspiration was to plop modern, realistically drawn kids into a magical, medieval setting. Her next was to make Harry a naive hero, plucked from ignominious obscurity--the spidery cupboard under his awful relatives' stairs--and challenged to greatness. The result, a witches' brew of Tolkien and Tom Brown's School Days, was so vividly written that it was, in effect, already its own movie. It gave readers the narrative equivalent of the best seat in the house and free popcorn to boot.
How to make a film out of such a cinematic experience that 100 million
readers have seen in their minds' eyes? Either by transferring it,
like a lavishly illustrated volume of Dickens, or transforming it with
a new vision. Columbus, along with screenwriter Steve Kloves and the
Potter production team, chose Column A and made a handsomely faithful
version, with actors smartly cast to type. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe)
and his pals Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) look
word-picture perfect. Members of the Hogwarts staff--Dumbledore
(Richard Harris), McGonagall (Maggie Smith), Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane)
and Snape (who else? Alan Rickman, in Hamlet's drab garb)--have the
requisite majesty or malevolence. The special effects are spiffy too.
The Golden Snitch has a mischievous mind of its own, and that
three-headed boar could guard bin Laden's cave.
We will let other Potterphiles debate the movie's excision of the book's spooky Halloween party, or its use of a Sorting Hat that speaks its musings aloud instead of whispering them conspiratorially into the wearer's ear, or its slight cuting up of the officious Hermione. All that is just grading papers. The big question is whether Columbus has found a potent kinetic equivalent to the book. We sigh and say no.
In choosing to be true to the words, he's made a movie by the numbers. Stopping to admire his film's production design (good work by Stuart Craig), he slows the action down; it's often stodgy, humorless. His reaction shots are clumsy; each gives you just one piece of narrative or emotional information at a time. That doesn't help the three young stars, on whose slim shoulders the whole project rests; they are competent but charisma-free. The film lacks moviemaking buoyancy--the feeling of soaring in space that Rowling's magic-carpet prose gives the reader. The picture isn't inept, just inert.
An adapter of a famous work need not choose between fidelity and poetry; the King James version of the Bible had both. But Columbus is content to make a student's copy of the original master portrait. This movie about You-Know-Who is missing a sprinkle of you-know-what: what one dared to expect in a wizard's tale. This is a magic act performed by a Muggle.
By. Bob Graham
San Francisco Chronicle
Source
HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE: Mystery-adventure. Starring Daniel Radcliffe. Directed by Chris Columbus. (PG. 152 minutes.)
If Harry Potter himself could see the movie that bears his famous name, the coolly observant young wizard-in-training would be so bug-eyed his spectacles would pop off. He'd also have to have an iron butt.
J.K. Rowling's mystery-adventure may have acquainted countless kids with the joys of reading, but now the marathon movie version is going to have to teach them to sit still for 2 1/2 hours straight. It's likely they will, maybe for the first time in their lives.
This movie is bound to delight millions of kids and start passionate arguments about details, and it's not going to embarrass their parents, either.
Just about every time the magic seems to be wearing thin, something astonishing is sure to occur:
Bricks in a wall rearrange themselves
as Harry and his giant guide,
Hagrid - - along with the audience -- enter another reality.
Pinched-faced, bat-eared bank clerks hunker over their ledgers.
Hanging portraits take on a life of their own.
Fantastic creatures materialize, a centaur and three-headed mastiff among them.
Perhaps disconcertingly, so does a troll that's almost too much like Shrek for comfort, including getting the movie's best gross-out joke. It is a reminder that the animated fairy-tale parody has some of the very qualities "Harry Potter" sure could use -- economy, a distinctive style and sharper wit, to be specific.
Blame it on the English and their damned green grass. Even if they may be more in awe than others of the boarding-school traditions from which "Harry Potter" takes off, the magic works where it counts: the creation of a whole 'nother world.
There are spectacular segments -- a hands-off game of chess, mail- delivering owls and, best of all, the wizardly, airborne game of Quidditch. Think of it as some incomprehensible English game -- cricket comes to mind -- with zooming broomsticks, impenetrable but sacrosanct rules and nasty rivalries.
If such special effects and others, including transfiguration and telekinesis, have not yet become completely taken for granted and lost their power to amaze, that day is getting closer. Fortunately, "Harry Potter" has something else to fall back on.
Rowling's neo-classic is essentially a detective story. As the 11-year-old title character, Daniel Radcliffe is the embodiment of every reader's imagination. It is wonderful to see a young hero who is so scholarly looking and filled with curiosity and who connects with very real emotions, from solemn intelligence and the delight of discovery to deep family longing.
Radcliffe is in good company among illustrious veteran players as well as totally winning newcomers. Sure to be a favorite, hands down, is Emma Watson as Harry's peer and smarty-pants would-be witch, Hermione. Rupert Grint -- how English can you get? -- is a red-haired go-getter and the third corner of this triangle of schoolmates.
CHARACTER ACTING
Nobody seeing Maggie Smith, as no-nonsense Professor McGonagall, should have to be forgiven for being reminded of Anne Robinson. Alan Rickman as Professor Snape leaves little doubt of his villainy ("You don't want me as an enemy," he confides, believably). Big, bushy-bearded Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid) keeps blurting out things he shouldn't, a little bit of lovableness that the big guy probably stretches too far.
A nagging question, too, lingers: Can Chris Columbus, the San Francisco director, accomplish with literal images what Rowlings did with words?
Short answer: probably not. "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" is a completely admirable, journeyman production. We may keep waiting for this movie to jack it up to another, more scintillating level, but mostly it keeps chugging along.
Could Columbus be too inhibited, with Rowlings hovering over his shoulder, about being faithful to the source? Two hours or so into "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," and the book that young people could not put down begins to seem like the movie they may never see end. Like the feasts in the Great Hall of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, is it possible to have too much of a good thing?
BUILT-IN AUDIENCE
John Williams has provided a lighter-textured score than usual, but that doesn't keep him from seeming afraid that the audience might miss something if he didn't blast out every dramatic moment.
This movie may have the greatest built-in audience since "Gone With the Wind" in 1939. My advice, hardly needed for this inevitable blockbuster, is twofold: Stick with it for the long haul. Go to the bathroom first.
Absolutely the best single moment, beautifully presented, comes when the orphaned Harry looks in a mirror and sees his parents there. It is brilliant in its simplicity and very moving. That is what each of us sees, after all, when we look in the mirror, our parents.