Literal, long, slow, ponderous, inexplicable

Rating: Null/10 (10 December 2001)

First of all, I've read the first two Potter books and found them pleasant and clever, but hardly brilliant. They certainly don't measure up to classics like the Narnia cycle, Tolkien's books, or Madeleine L'Engle's either (A Wrinkle in Time, for instance.) Though undoubtedly clever, much of the author's cleverness is of a literary nature, which made me skeptical about how it would fare as a film. My skepticism turns out to have been well-founded. The movie is certainly faithful to the book, perhaps too much so. It could have been pared by a half hour or so and been the better for it. Chris Columbus's overuse of close-up reaction shots--Harry grinning, Harry and his friends looking at something in pop-eyed awe, Harry grinning yet again--to drive home how a scene was supposed to make the viewer feel--drove me a little mad toward the end. Subtle, this director ain't. There is, to be sure, excellent work by some fine veteran actors, such as Richard Harris, John Hurt, Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, and Robbie Coltrane. But, at the risk of being labeled a curmudgeon, I found the kids, though cute as buttons, were simply not up to their roles. Again, Columbus's constant closeups didn't serve the young actors well, and it may be regarded as unfair of me to expect kids to have the kind of inner resources to develop fully-fleshed performances. But they are expected to carry this film to a very large extent, and--well--they couldn't quite do so. There's also something a little repellent about the book and the film with respect to the portrayal of Muggles--non-initiates to the world of witchcraft--as being (at least implicitly) invariably stupid, crass, and cruel. I also question the propriety of equating obesity with meanness and greed---even worse in the book than the movie. Kids with a weight problem must have some difficulty dealing with this aspect of the world of Harry Potter. Well, my money has already gone into the record-breaking box office gross that this juggernaut is piling up. And that, after all, is the point. Maybe the next film in the series will be better; the young actors will be a year older and the second book is a little more substantial than the first. But I do wish they'd bring in a different director. Under the circumstances, there's not a hope of that. Bah, humbug.