"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" Review

First, I'll just go on record that Prisoner of Azkaban was by far the best of the books and the best of the movies to-date. Great story, great characters, and excellent plot twists. It's also the only one that I thought really made good use of the Hogwarts milieu as a world unto itself. It was also the last book that wasn't so long you couldn't make a decent movie out of it.

At this stage of the game, the Harry Potter phenomenon is beyond criticism, so reviewing the books or the movies is sort of pointless. As with Star Wars, you're either a rabid fan or an innocent by-stander and with the book version of the Order of the Phoenix I moved from the first camp to the second. After barely slogging through the Goblet of Fire, I lost all interest in book five before Harry ever even made it back to Hogwarts. My memory of the opening chapters of the book was one stagy dialog scene after the next, full of fake legal debates and annoyingly secretive sentences that always went unfinished. It was too much like the Senate scenes in the Star Wars prequels.

So this was the first of the movies that I saw without the benefit of having read the book, and it was the first time I was really aware of how poorly these stories hang together for the innocent bystanders in the audience. Characters appear and disappear from the central plot without much explanation. The rules of how magic works in the Harry Potter universe are increasingly confusing and rarely explained. Most of the magic exists solely as a convenient plot device (e.g. the magical training room that appears for Harry's Dumbledore's Army, the late arrival of Hagrid and his giant half-brother).

Now you could easily say that the book fills in all of the gaps or explains things in better detail, but that doesn't really excuse the poor execution of even the quieter scenes. Here for example is a very nice moment from the mid-point of the story and quoted at length in Michael Berube's essay (PDF) on reading the books with his son. Harry is confused by Cho's reaction to their first kiss:

“Don’t you understand how Cho’s
feeling at the moment?” she asked.

“No,” said Harry and Ron together.
Hermione sighed and laid
down her quill.

“Well, obviously, she’s feeling
very sad, because of Cedric dying.
Then I expect she’s feeling
confused because she liked Cedric
and now she likes Harry, and
she can’t work out who she likes
best. Then she’ll be feeling guilty,
thinking it’s an insult to Cedric’s
memory to be kissing Harry at all,
and she’ll be worrying about what
everyone else might say about
her if she starts going out with
Harry. And she probably can’t
work out what her feelings toward
Harry are anyway, because he
was the one who was with Cedric
when Cedric died, so that’s all
very mixed up and painful. Oh,
and she’s afraid she’s going to be
thrown off the Ravenclaw Quidditch
team because she’s flying so
badly.”

A slightly stunned silence greeted
the end of this speech, then
Ron said, “One person can’t feel
all that at once, they’d explode.”

“Just because you’ve got the
emotional range of a teaspoon
doesn’t mean we all have,” said
Hermione nastily, picking up her
quill again.

This is a wonderful little bit of dialog that expresses the various emotional cross-currents of the story and really captures both the heightened sensitivity and baffled ignorance of teenagers. It's also an excellent example of the holistic mind (in Dramatica terms) at work: searching for balance across the spectrum of experience rather than progressing linearly from one thing to the next.

But the director and the actors completely blow the scene. Hermione speaks it with no conviction, and Ron makes faces for Harry's benefit. There's no "stunned silence", just dismissiveness. Hermione does not deliver her last line nastily, but as a joke and they all share a laugh at all her silly girlish talk. I don't know if they didn't understand the scene, or if the kids just haven't the skill to play the scene correctly, but it was all a great disappointment. Worse yet, the scene has no impact on the rest of the film. Cho all but disappears from the story (as though she's been puritanically punished for the kiss).

So the whole thing falls flat. The fans don't care because they'll just go back and read the book again, and the bystanders don't care because it was better than nothing. But after the success of Azkaban, I can't help wishing that both the books and the movies were leaner, more focused, and more satisfying.