By Michael Gray
HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE, by J.K. Rowling. Directed by Chris Columbus. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Richard Harris, Fiona Shaw, Robbie Coltraine, Rupert Gint, Emma Watson. Warner Brothers Pictures.
The Nov. 16 launch of the movie “Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone” was destined to be a national event, not just for the millions of children across the country who had made a household name of reclusive English author J.K. Rowling, Harry’s creator, but for their parents as well. American adults were more than ready for a dose of fantasy after two months of grim bulletins from the real world, and aspiring wizard Harry was expected to provide it.
Masterpiece or mess, the film would be enormously successful, and its sequels would create a franchise to equal “Star Wars.” The second film in the series is already in the making, with three more to follow from the Potter books already published. As Rowling turns out more books, she can name her price in Hollywood for the screen rights, and gross profits for author and filmmakers will inevitably break the billion-dollar barrier.
But is this screen version of Harry any good? The film’s harshest critics will not be jaded adults who shuddered at children’s favorites Barney and The Teletubbies when their pre-Potter offspring were much younger and more easily impressed, but those same preteens for whom the Harry books are the defining texts of their generation.
They won’t be disappointed. Rowling may have turned over the screenwriting chores to “Wonder Boys” writer Stephen Kloves, but she keeps an iron grip on her material, from casting to merchandise, like fearsome Fluffy The Three-Headed Dog guarding the eponymous Stone. Kloves and director Chris Columbus work like diligent schoolboys through a checklist of orphan Harry’s trials at the hands of his unpleasant aunt, uncle and cousin, to his adventures at Hogwarts, the exclusive boarding school for young wizards. They seem so anxious to avoid the wrath of the mighty Rowling and her army of 90 million fanatic schoolchildren that their fidelity to the text comes across like slavish subservience to the original. Nothing much is added, nothing much is taken away.
Never miss an issue of The Irish Echo
Subscribe to one of our great value packages.
But a stellar cast of veteran character actors gives substance to a film giddy with gravity-defying effects and magical transformations. To keep Hollywood at bay, Rowling insisted on authentic British accents to maintain the English boarding-school atmosphere. Instead she got Richard Harris, as kindly headmaster Dumbledore, Fiona Shaw as Aunt Petunia, and Scot Robbie Coltrane as lovable dimwit Hagrid. Harris impresses in a role that an actor of his ability can do in his sleep; at times he defers to the wizard costume, and lets the Billy Gibbons beard and Willie Nelson wig do most of the work. Fiona Shaw revisits her Mrs. Nugent persona from Neil Jordan’s “The Butcher Boy” to make Harry’s life miserable, and Coltrane’s Hagrid charms Harry and his schoolmates with the rustic burr of Rowling’s native Bristol.
In the title role, owlish moptop Daniel Radcliffe looks a lot like the Harry on the book cover but passes through the film as an impartial observer. For two and half unblinking hours, he remains as unfazed by his ordeals at his cruel uncle’s house as he is on discovering at Hogwarts that he is the chosen one, and the inheritor of a fortune. The young magician is constantly upstaged by his friends — sorry, chums — the hapless Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and the know-all Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and doesn’t seem to mind one bit.
The real magic of Harry Potter belongs to Rowling. She made reading cool again, just when everyone thought the kids were too busy grooving to Britney and taking their opposable thumbs to new levels of Gameboy to read a book. Rowling tricked out Harry’s old-fashioned boarding-school tale with spells and sorcery to fire the imagination of children more used to narcotic entertainment than mental stimulation. The film version uses the book not as a springboard to greater leaps of fancy but as a rigid doctrine that fetters its creators. The kids will love it anyway, but the best magic it can work is to send them home to reread the book.