Not so Wild About Harry

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

by D. K. Holm, www.cinemonkey.com

ermit me to be a Scrooge. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is a bore. We have been so inundated with advanced media designed to hypnotize us into believing that both Harry Potter the character and Harry Potter the film are a delight that the movie itself comes as something of a surprise: nothing happens in it. And at two and a half hours it is more than an hour longer than most kids under six can sustain an interest in, something that the effluvia from Time and Vanity Fair and Katie Couric didn't tell us.

Of course, things do happen. But they are not enchanting. They are not even particularly unpredictable. And the film concludes with a final face off that is about as suspense free, about as unhazardous and tame, as you could dread to see in a multi-million dollar movie. For their long-awaited climax the filmmakers have done as little as they can get away with.

leansed of all the hyperbole, the books themselves are moderately charming exercises in whimsy and verbal wit. They blend kid appeal with adult-friendly satire. The books are cunningly written in that, while a six year old can enjoy them, what they don't understand now they will probably laugh at 10 years later during a re-read.

Possibly the cleverest idea author J. K. Rowling came up with was making her central character a Superman. As Jules Feiffer pointed out in his brilliant study of comic books, The Great Comic Book Heroes, and Tcheky Karyo reiterated in Addicted to Love, the key difference between Superman and other contemporaneous heroes was that he wasn't a human dressing up to be super powerful creature, he was a uber-powerful creature passing as a normal human being (Clark Kent). This fantasy, as Gore Vidal might note, appeals to the unempowered in everyone. In the Potter books, Harry is not a typical kid who acquires magic skills, he is already a magical person who has been deluded into thinking that he is normal. The nightmare family he is forced to live with for the first 11 years of his life is vile enough to excite sympathy in every child, children being justice seekers (before they become, as adults, injustice collectors).

With 100 million sales worldwide, there was little doubt that the Potter books would in some fashion come to the screen. At one point, Spielberg flirted with the project, and wanted it animated, Pixar-style. In fact the studio, Warners, has perhaps made a mistake in not offering us an animated version of the book, although in a way, HP&tSS is an animated movie. Live action, however, draws a wider audience; and there is of course the built in excitement of the casting search for a Harry Potter, a prize that eventually befell Daniel Radcliffe, whose poise on screen and remarkable likeness to the illustrations in the American versions of the books is soon outweighed by his annoying habit of awestruck smiling with his teeth apart, perhaps the last vestige of Spielberg's influence.

Stripped of its wands and "Codswallop"s and its consonant-heavy vocabulary in general, Harry Potter is just another schoolboy bildungsroman, borrowing heavily from Tom Browns's Schooldays, even down to a smug and cowardly Flashman character. Rowling's prose is smooth and polished, but seems to exist in a vacuum It is well-known that children's books are heavily edited, and it would be interesting to see what Rowling's early drafts looked like before a team of Bloomsbury editors got a hold of them. In any case, assessing any "influence" on Rowling's books is difficult (unless it's the author who has brought a lawsuit alleging to have first introduced the term "muggles" for human beings and other devices also found in the Potter series).

he biggest stumbling block to enjoying the movie is to thinking about it. There are staggeringly numerous inner inconsistencies. If the premise that magic and spells exist is to remain solid, then much of what happens in the film is nonsense, since many long incidents, such as the tedious chess game near the climax, could be rendered null and void with the pass of a want. Also, how can a villain who is stuck to the back of another guy's head go out and kill unicorns at night. Just asking. Which is what we are not suppose to do.

The climax also offers up a rather dubious moral message: Love gives you a reverse Midas touch, turning enemies (that is, Hate) into charcoal. In the end, the first Harry Potter is a Scooby Doo movie, with ghosts and surprise identity revelations and a whole feel of "Why, it's Mr Jones in a ghost costume!" and with a mega happy ending tacked on. And don't even get me started on the incomprehensible Quidditch game, one of the biggest bores in all filmdom (and children's' literature) with its numbing rules and its harsh playing space like something out of a floating Rollerball. In this, as in all aspects of the movie, victory is handed to Potter too easily.

Like the first Batman movie from Warners and the first Superman movie, Harry… is an "origin" tale, with all the attendant stumbling blocks that throws in the way of efficient story telling. Presumably the next Potter movie, out perhaps in the winter of 2002, will tell a much more efficient story, dispensing with the laborious introducing of Potter to the Hogwarts school.

11/01

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