'Potter' works magic ahead of U.S. It's not as if "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" is the spinach on our plates and the only thing standing between us and dessert, aka, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
" However, it does feel rather like the rice: obligatory, filling at two plus hours and not all that exciting. The movie itself is less to blame than the timing. If this were the sixth movie, coming out just ten days before the seventh book arrived in bookstores, it would serve as a perfect catching up tool, priming us for the finale of J.
K. Rowling's wizards and witches saga. But as the fifth it has the inevitable air of a distraction, of something sent either too early or too late to a party.
Our hero, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) is well into adolescence, and even gets kissed for the first time in this film. As he describes the event, it's a bit "wet," which fits with the rest of "Phoenix's" unrelentingly gloomy plot. We have life sucking Dementors and the wizarding world's refusal to accept Harry's and Dumbledore's (Michael Gambon) word for it that Lord Voldermort (Ralph Fiennes) is back.
Then Hogwart's, which was always Harry's refuge, is invaded by the Ministry of Magic's most meddlesome minion, Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), who immediately puts an end to all fun, including Quidditch. Umbridge may be only a fill-in villain, a one-off, but as Staunton, an Oscar nominee in 2005 for "Vera Drake," plays her, she's the most memorable character in the movie (Evanna Lynch, who plays spacey Luna Lovegood, is a close second). Umbridge wears pink every day and maintains the scarily steadfastly sweet exterior of a Stepford wife (with those blue eyes, rosy cheeks and dimply smiles you wonder if Staunton found inspiration in Laura Bush).
Under that pretty surface, Umbridge is so deeply malicious that even the imposing Professor McGonagall (Maggie Smith) looks nervous when she's around. The big question for any filmmaker coming into the series this late in the game, as director David Yates has, is how can the film make its mark in the franchise? The obvious choice would be to go dark, as Alfonso Cuaron did so successfully in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," still the best in the film series.
Yates and his cinematographer, Slawomir Idziak, do exactly that, although they take that darkness to a whole new level. As the cosmic connection between Harry and Voldermort deepens, we see a lot of sweaty Harry tossing and turning in his bed, veins throbbing in his neck while he channels the evil lord. You start to think, is this a junkie movie?
Is Harry going to tie off a vein and do terrible drugs in front of us? Yates is not exactly a kiddie director. Before becoming a Potter man - he's already signed up to do the next film as well - he was best known for "State of Play," an addictive British television miniseries set in the overlapping and equally dirty worlds of journalism and politics.
"State of Play" is very adult and very smart. Meanwhile Idziak shot "Black Hawk Down" and there's a real similarity between his style there and here, a sort of garish wartime urgency. When the Weasleys, Harry and his godfather, Sirius Black (Gary Oldman, who can't play a nice guy to save his life) sit down to dinner in the super secret headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix, you sort of expect someone to show up at the door selling crack while a helicopter drops snipers on the opposite roof.
We know Harry is growing up - ack, that photo of Radcliffe in a black leather vest from a recent "Details" shoot is ample proof of that - but somehow the atmosphere of this film feels almost too adult. Of course it's tricky, handing off the baton between directors and directors of photography in what will eventually be a seven-movie long series. We certainly want fresh energy brought to each film, but at the same time, there needs to be a continuity beyond just the actors and the setting.
Reading Rowling's books, we're not thinking, oh, now this one should feel like a David Lynch film while that earlier one was really a family picture. On the page, they are all part of the universe of Harry Potter, a universe we've all been rather pleased with, apparently. But on the screen, the stories, now in their fourth set of hands, feel uncomfortably fractured.
Thank heavens for books. 'Potter' works magic ahead of U.S.
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