"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007, PG-13)



This is an odd one for me.  There are big parts of this movie that I really love, but others are major disappointments.  The book was hit-or-miss for me, too, though for mostly different reasons.  While the film nicely truncates what didn’t work for me in the book – much of the interminable teen romance drama has been cut – it runs into other issues that, despite liking the movie a lot, keeps it from being one of my favorites.

Although Voldemort’s return at the end of The Goblet of Fire is a huge factor here, much of Harry’s time isn’t spent fighting You-Know-Who.  Instead, his largest foe in this movie is the Ministry of Magic, the wizard government currently beset with fear-mongering and propaganda as the Ministry sticks its head in the sand re:  Voldemort.  The Minister of Magic and his emissary to Hogwarts, the saccharine and malevolent Dolores Umbridge, try to discredit Harry’s claims and prevent their real fear:  that Dumbledore wants to usurp the Minister and is training his students to fight in his name.  With Umbridge making sure everyone toes the Ministry line and keeping them from learning any practical defensive magic, the trio steps up to help their friends prepare themselves for Voldemort’s coming war, appointing Harry as their secret teacher.

As in the book, I adore Umbridge, her efforts to turn Hogwarts into a police state, and Harry and co.’s rebellion through the underground defense classes.  To me, Umbridge is one of the most interesting characters in the series, and the movie captures her brilliantly.  From her deceptively soft, pink-swathed-fluff-ball appearance and cloyingly sweet voice to her shocking undertones of menace, the execution is tremendous.  Imelda Staunton hits every note just right in the role – amazing work all around.  The DA classes are also well done, finding a balance between the thrill of rule-breaking, the triumph of learning something important, and the seriousness of the stakes involved (the scene between Neville and Harry about Neville’s parents is wonderful.)

My biggest complaint, then, is that there’s not enough of either plot.  The Order of the Phoenix is the longest book in the series, and even after trimming a lot of romance, there’s oodles of story leftover.  Bizarrely, though, this is the second-shortest movie in the franchise; only The Deathly Hallows:  Part 2 is shorter, and that’s on half of a book.  As such, plenty of good stuff doesn’t get its due.  Much of it is touched on, but the movie employs multiple drive-by montages to pack huge plot progression into fragments of screentime.  Umbridge’s first in-roads at Hogwarts get this treatment, as does a large chunk of the DA story.  Other developments are recapped through quicker news-headline sequences, and the popular Snape’s Worst Memory scene is similarly piecemeal.  Besides not doing these threads justice, it also makes the movie feel a out of place, because it’s the only film in the series that uses montages so extensively (it’s worth noting that it’s also the only film with a screenplay by Michael Goldenberg instead of Steve Kloves; Kloves has his own issues, but he does tend to approach cuts with a scalpel instead of a hatchet.)  While it’s all undeniably well-made – I can see why the franchise kept David Yates as director for the rest of the series – I’d have killed for another 10-15 minutes of runtime.  With such a long book, it’d have been justifiable, and it would’ve allowed these plots to build more organically. 

Warnings

Magical violence (including torture,) scary stuff, and some disturbing elements.

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