'Harry' Falls Short of Expectation

Author: Padma Govindan Staff Writer

"Fantastic! I absolutely loved it. Definitely going for a second time."

"I never wanted the movie to end. I was actually depressed at the end when the lights came up."

"It was so good. I really liked it."

No, these are not the "just came out of the theater" audience testimonials you see in movie commercials. And they are not the blurbs you see in newspaper advertisements for movies. Actual people made those statements when I asked them their opinion of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." The reaction really was that positive. This should give you an idea of the mindset I had when I walked into the theater on Saturday to watch the film adaptation of one of my favorite books; I expected nothing less than the miraculous. I was fully expecting to walk out of the film thinking, "This has now become my new favorite movie." Given how taken all my friends were with the film, I went in wanting to see real movie-making magic.

Right.

I have already resigned myself to the fact that my review isn't going to affect ticket sales, or change anyone's mind about "Harry Potter" — those who want to the see movie are going to see it no matter what I (or anyone else) say. Honestly, I was disappointed with this film, more so than I have been with any other movie that I have seen recently. Granted, my expectations were probably too high, given the glowing reviews I heard and my admiration for the book. Still, I felt that the film showed a strange sort of carelessness, a lack of attention to the details of character development that was belied by the screenplay's slavish devotion to the original plot of the book.

What bothered me more than anything was the assumption that Director Chris Columbus and Screen writer Steve Kloves made that everyone at the film would have read the book. Thus, the development of the characters is left as merely a sketch.

The audience is expected to fill in the blanks with all the subtext and subtlety in which they remember them from the book.

The film contains none of the richness of the book — it is merely a record of the story. For example, the slightly uncomfortable dynamic between Ron, Harry's best friend, and Harry is never made quite clear. Ron is shown marveling at Harry's pile of Gringotts gold, and there is one dig that Draco Malfoy, Harry's arch-nemesis makes about Ron's hand-me-down robes.

However, the audience is essentially left to assume that Ron is not well-off and that this might serve to create some resentment for Harry later on, even if not in this first episode. Similarly, Voldemort's (the murderer of Harry's parents) seduction of wizards into a life of evil is only mentioned once — there is no reference to the insidious courting of wizards into wickedness or the widespread corruption while he was in power.

To be fair, there were some moments when "Harry Potter" met, or even exceeded, my expectations. One particularly striking scene, if only for its visual pizzazz, was the scene in which Ron plays across the giant chessboard to help Harry get to the stone. The sight of the huge queen smashing her sword down on the knight's horse was chillingly dramatic. Also, the casting of the film was excellent, particularly Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter.

Given the weight of his role, the burden he bore of carrying the film and the enormous shadow the book cast upon the movie, he turned a remarkably masterful performance, fine-tuning Harry's bemused Everyman quality to perfect pitch. Alan Rickman was appropriately slimy as the serpentine Master Snape, a professor of potions at Hogwart's, and even John Hurt made a wonderful cameo appearance as a mysterious dealer of wands.

Despite all that, the performances didn't have the imaginative spark that would excuse the mediocrity of the film or make the movie more watchable. "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" remains, at best, a competent cover of the book; at worst, an attempt to cash in on an international phenomenon.