Supporting Victims:
Alex Carver, Joel Fuernsinn, Sean Marston, Heather Richter, Vincent Scarlata
It's tough to translate literature to screen. You
have to overcome all sorts of problems such as length of narrative vs. screen
time, finding the right cast to fill the shoes of the characters, and conveying
the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters without resorting too heavily
on narrative techniques like voiceovers and indirect expositions. The hardest
part of translating stories to screen is pleasing those readers who have read
the book and who have developed a sense and feeling about the world that can
differ from reader to reader.
There have been two general approaches to taking a book to screen. One is to
convey the essence of the book while altering and abridging the story to
preserve the coherence of the movie. We see this in movies like The
Wizard of Oz which presented a wonderful child's eye picture of Oz but left
out many of the vignettes in the original (like Dorothy freeing the Winged
Monkeys). This method tends to work the best out of the three because the movie
story, when executed well, can take on a life of its own and hold its own with
the original book. The second is a literal approach that attempts to present
every aspect of the story as written. This has given many directors and editors
grand conniptions as most books would take 4-5 hours to show on screen in their
complete form. We're also past the generation that survived movies like Gone
With The Wind where it was acceptable and profitable to stick a 3+ hour
movie on the screen so directors are usually forced to make cuts and they cut
episodes out of the movie, hoping that the rest of the scenes will still tell
the story. Unfortunately, what you cut can make or break the movie if you
use a literal approach. Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone took the second
approach and successfully left the major storyline and episodes in the movie but
somehow lost the delightful essence of the book.
First the good stuff. The movie has a faithful eye for detail. It did a great
job of casting everyone. Hogwarts, magic spells, the banquets, and the scenes
were impeccable and stunning to watch. It'll probably be difficult for me to
read the books again without seeing those actors and images in my head. That's
the product of great art direction and casting. There was also some good
acting in the movie. I especially enjoyed watching the young actress playing
Hermione (Emma Watson) and Alan Rickman's portrayal of Snape. I loved the
ceiling of the Hogwarts banquet hall and have been trying to work out how to do
the same thing to my bedroom in my future house. Most of the major
episodes and incidents in the book have been brought to screen with some
abridgement or compaction, for example, no song from the Sorting Hat and
Dumbledore doesn't say his "few words" before the banquet begins.
Unfortunately, visuals and visually-correct actors can't sustain a movie.
Ultimately, it's the synthesis of all the elements that make it work. With a
well-known book like Harry Potter, how you tell the story will make or break
you.
Here's what was missing out of the movie from the book. In the book, there was a
constant reminder of the House points. Points were gained and deducted
everywhere. Two minutes of dialogue and a scene showing the clocks that recorded
the progress of the Houses would have been sufficient to justify the celebration
at the end. Some of the minor characters, like Fred and George Weasley, fell by
the wayside, which was probably inevitable given the length of the movie. I
liked Harry's interactions with Hedwig but these were missing as well. But these
are minor quibbles and almost unfair because you have to make allowances for the
movie length. The more serious ones are missing character development, missing
villain presence, and poor pacing.
One of the key elements of the book told in little paragraphs and sentences is
how Harry comes to feel affection for his friends, his House, the school, and
his new life. This never comes across terribly clearly in the actor playing
Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) or in the movie. The director (Chris Columbus) does
devote a scene to this transition by spending a precious minute on a close-up
showing Harry smiling out at the moonlit grounds of Hogwarts from his bedroom
window but it's not really enough. One of the moments in the book that I
appreciated was when the Weasley family and Harry were all wearing Weasley
sweaters and headed together to dinner. This is simply given another minute in
the movie as Ron tells Harry that he has presents and they wish each other a
Happy Christmas (Is this the British greeting? If so, where did
"Merry Christmas" come from? Did I hear that wrong?).
Another missing element is the constant torment inflicted by Malfoy, Crabbe, and
Goyle on Harry. Malfoy is definitely established as an evil character in certain
scenes but it's a clumsy and adolescent kind of evil, rather than the persistent
one that the book conveys. Malfoy is a constant foil for Harry in the books but
exists as a minor annoyance in the movie. The character Malfoy works in the
books because he's the prototypical bully and he enjoys it. Whenever Harry beats
Malfoy at something, you know that kids all over are rejoicing while they're
reading it. The movie never spends enough time developing him as a villain. In
fact, none of the villains, real or imagined, were ever given enough *presence*
in the movie to really merit the intensity of reaction or victory on the part of
the heroes. From the time that you read the name Voldemort in the book, he takes
on a sinister kind of presence that insinuates itself through dialogue and
description. This feeling is missing through most of the movie and Voldemort has
more of an "obligatory villain" persona. The missing feeling of a
strong antagonist means that when Harry, Ron (Rupert Grint), and Hermione take
up the quest of saving Hogwarts, it felt to me like the kind of perfunctory and
simple decision making that one only found in pulp novels and TV serials
from the 1950's - "It's evil therefore we must stomp it."
The worst part of the movie was the way the story was paced. It felt rushed all
over. Time was never really allowed to pass. You never got the sense that the
year was moving forward by except through certain cues in scenes, like the
holiday banquets and one CGI season change. And that might be my fundamental
complaint of the movie. It tried too hard to leave everything in and fails at
giving the audience enough time to immerse themselves in the daily rhythm of the
Harry Potter world. It would have been nice to have seen Harry, Ron, and
Hermione doing the little things that one does at boarding school like studying
for final exams or expressing exasperation at homework occasionally. I wonder if
it might have been a better movie if it had devoted less time to purely visual
scenes like the staircases, the chess game, and the Quidditch game (don't get me
started on this one) and more time towards character development and
storytelling. I wonder if it would work as a television series.
At this point, let me say a little something about the soundtrack by John
Williams. He needs to retire. I don't know how movie theaters work so it's
entirely possible that the soundtrack was simply turned up too loud in our
theater because the technicians were anticipating a full theater. But I
don't think that volume was the problem. The music simply didn't help the movie
at all. It's rather sad because John Williams has made soundtracks what they are
today with musical techniques developed for great movies like Raiders
of the Lost Ark, Schindler's List,
and Star Wars. The first problem
is that the Harry Potter soundtrack lacked the thematic solidity accompanying
the characters that Williams achieved with Star Wars or Raiders. If you don't
believe me and you've seen the movie, hum Harry's theme a bit, or even the
movie's main theme. I can't seem to do it and I was trying to remember the music
to play it back in my head later. The other problem with the soundtrack is that
it failed to help the movie tell its story. Even making allowances for the
volume in our theater, the music overpowered the dialogue often, failed to
transition properly between scenes, and had a terrible sense of "fit"
to the atmosphere that was being conveyed. The music didn't do anything to give
scenes a sense of tension or presence. There were really only three flavors of
mood - "action-happening", "dark", and
"celebratory". The music was bad enough that I felt grateful when a
scene came around unaccompanied by music. I think the movie might have even
worked better if it had been cut out entirely. I'd like to think that it's not
Williams' fault. Maybe the music suffered during the editing process or
that the director never considered the soundtrack in direction and that its
addition was a marketing decision. But on the other hand, I can't hum anything
from "A.I." either.
I give this movie a 6 out of 10 purely on visuals. I give it a 5 out of 10 on
the Bad Movie Scale for some really twitchy acting moments and some gratuitous
scenes. I give the soundtrack a solid 2 out of 10 for lazy composition and bad
thematic pacing. Go see this if you're dying to see what the Harry Potter world
looks like. Don't see this if you've already got it in your head and are happy
with the image. To be fair, this is probably a fun movie for kids and anyone who
doesn't spend time overanalyzing life and writing movie reviews. This movie will
make a lot of money because of great marketing and because of the tremendous
success of the books. But so did Rush Hour 2. Money is not a good metric for
movie quality. My overall humble opinion is that Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's
Stone, as a children's book translation or a standalone movie, falls far short
of the magic in a Wizard of Oz, Mary
Poppins, or Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory. It spent far too much effort portraying the narrative
details of the book and not enough in preserving the book's character.
