Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

After arranging for the Boo to hang out with her cousin Mandy, Mrs. TMcD and I stole away to see the new Harry Potter movie last night. It's gotten some mixed reviews (e.g., NYT liked it, but Roger Ebert whined that it wasn't the joyous kid's movie he was awaiting) so my expectations were modest. Man, did Ebert miss the boat.

I confess to being a Harry Potter fan. My sister got me into the books several years ago, and they started me reading fiction again after, literally, decades of abandonment. They may not be high art, as the snobby Harold Blooms complain, but they are great entertainment. They're also several cuts above fluff, especially once you get past the first couple of books. Since Rowling ages Harry a year in each book, she also ages the themes. Reviewers often comment on how the books get "darker," but as Rowling points out, you had to be pretty thick not to see it coming in a series that begins with the double murder of the hero's parents. Book Two, which I generally consider to be both the weakest book and the weakest film, nonetheless raises central issues of racism and class exploitation. Book Three, the best of the early Potters, offers a brilliant recasting of Dickens's Great Expectations. And Book Four combines teen sports heroism with a complex narrative of identity crisis and political corruption.

Book Five, Order of the Phoenix, is the most difficult book in the series so far. At 870 labyrinthine pages, it surely challenges many of its young readers' endurance. Even more challenging to the reader is Harry himself, who is no longer very likable. He's 15, angry, self-absorbed, and convinced the world is out to get him. It is. Rowling dives headlong into politics here. After the gruesome murder of one of Harry's schoolmates that ended Book Four, Harry knows he's entered a new and violent world. But the politicians are in denial and the press merely mouths the official state narrative. The Ministry of Magic takes over Hogwarts via the primly authoritarian Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton portrays her Queen Mum meets Laura Bush), who values loyalty above all else and slowly turns the school into a fascist police state. She may not be in league with the terrorists, but her commitment to ideology over empiricism makes her seem even worse. A portrait of the banality of evil, she's a vastly more compelling and infuriating villain than the radically evil (but somewhat cartoonish) Lord Voldemort. It's especially remarkable that Rowling offered this prescient analysis in a book published in 2003 and surely started much earlier.

Filming Book Five must have been the toughest task of any of the novels to date: its length, its tangle of subplots, and its grim tone all worked against it. But the film, directed by David Yates, does the book more than justice. Stripping away the gloss, Yates evokes WWII films by injecting more grit into the genre's magical surrealism. It doesn't hurt that the young actors are finally starting to look comfortable as actors at just the moment that their characters are least comfortable as teenagers. I won't give any more away. I'll just say that I thought the film soared, as action flick, as teen melodrama, as gothic horror, and as pre-war epic. Not bad.