A Fine Commercial and Social Product

Rating: 8/10 (18 May 2011)

Gone With the Wind was another literary phenomenon that produced a film rendering that had to meet equally exacting fan qualifications. It's comparable in the sense that everyone had an attitude about the casting, which in due course resulted wonderfully. The novelists required a loyalty to the manuscript, which was respected. Directors were enlisted who could be relied upon to deferentially work for the material. Immeasurable arithmetic was done while constructing the corporal worlds of the novels. Producers challenged standard constraints about running time to incorporate all the indispensable narrative episodes.
On a hushed suburban London street, owls emerge, a cat transforms into Maggie Smith and Robbie Coltraine relinquishes a bundled infant to a doorstep. Harry Potter, an urchin who keeps extraordinarily buoyant despite the never-ending bitterness and cruelty allotted by the intolerant aunt and uncle with whom he's been left, is kept in a cubbyhole, tormented by his browbeating cousin, forbidden from opening the officially addressed envelopes that inexplicably begin arriving for him. The relatives are stunned when the same leviathan, Hagrid, arrives on Harry's 11th birthday to notify him that he's indeed the son of two slain wizards and is now welcome to grace Hogwarts. Very smartly, this is all done with tongue lodged in cheek and rewarded by temporary comeuppance.
The reason this near-ideal product holds up so well from age ten to twenty owes to its humor, its light-hearted youthful nature, though it's clear that Chris Columbus cuts and arranges his camera very capriciously and isn't the ideal filmmaker for staging action dramatically or developing with deliberate accent, depending instead on FX and John Williams' tiringly hectic score to punch up crucial moments. Nevertheless, it's all on the right tonal level, as we're absconded into a world immortalized to an unusually engaging extent by production design, locations, effects and actors. The key, naturally, is Radcliffe. Young Daniel's standard facial appearance, unkempt dark hair, sheer eyes, round spectacles make an instantaneously adorable Harry. He's an average underdog whose continuing comprehension of his uncommon power I believe.
When, at 40 minutes in, the school is finally seen, kids paddling across a lake at night toward its soaring spires on a bastion-style outcrop, the film establishes a sought-after atmosphere of marvel and mystery about what lies ahead. Maggie Smith recurs as Professor McGonagall, who heads the much-repeated "sorting" of students arbitrated in the immense Great Hall by a pleasant talking hat. Harry, Weasley and Hermione wind up together in Gryffindor, while their little arch-rival Malfoy is allocated to Slytherin, where Alan Rickman's ham-handedly fearsome Professor Snape rules. Mysteriously, a feast materializes on the endless tables, ghosts gracefully flutter around, paintings are flesh, stairways reposition unexpectedly.
Throughout a decidedly action-packed school year, it appears someone wicked is scheming to purloin the eponymous Stone for Voldemort, a matchless wizard who's been without power since he slaughtered Harry's parents but couldn't quite dispose of the child. The stone lies beyond a trap door fortified by a massive three-headed dog absurdly named Fluffy. In a jam-packed chain of events from such highlights as Harry's night-time rovings in his invisibility cloak and seeing his late parents in a conjuring mirror to eluding Fluffy into a full-scale chessboard, the young threesome has its nerve and cleverness weathered to the utmost in a clash of obvious good versus evil, though the chess match alas underscores violence over suspense.
Harry's found to be so skillful at piloting a broomstick that he's made star player on Gryffindor's team in Quidditch, a staggeringly unsafe sport that has its pre-pubescent players hundreds of feet above an arena on brooms in frantic pursuit of very hard high-speed balls. The airborne element is excellently achieved visually, but the Quidditch match itself is one sequence that indulges speed with suspense and loudness with excitement without the support of narrative motion.
Regardless, the cast recompenses flat out, especially the sweetly extroverted Emma Watson as the prying, sharp-witted Hermione, and Rupert Grint, whose Weasley grows charmingly from a perfectly nebbishy second-banana comic foil into indispensable sidekick. On the grown-up front, Coltrane is foremost among contemporaries, yet it's no revelation how superlatively such authorities as Smith, Rickman, John Hurt, Richard Harris as the white-maned Dumbledore, Ian Hart as the enigmatic Quirrell and Richard Griffiths and Fiona Shaw as the nervously conventional Dursleys are brilliant.
By and large, the vast effects are exceptional and pleasing. Some of the creature work, like the centaur, even calls to mind Harryhausen's pioneering stop-motion. The costumes are another spring for repeated amusement, while John Seale's widescreen lensing substantially proliferates everything across the screen. If all movies acquisitively allocated as cinematic franchises could be as spotlessly considered as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, there'd be no incentive to lament cinema's asinine commodification.