Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
No, Harry Potter hasn't been ruined in the move from the printed page to the big screen. There's more right than wrong with it, at least visually. It looks great. Still, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," while having blockbuster written all over it, remains a thing of calculation rather than inspiration. The inspiration took place in the coffee shops where J.K. Rowling wrote the book. The film not only will take its place alongside the other Harry Potter spinoffs, but will lead the parade of them. What we see onscreen is alive with skilled craftsmanship, not alive with magic.
I may be too harsh on a film that doubtless will satisfy tens of millions of Harry Potter fans, but "Sorcerer's Stone" often has the feel of a manufactured object, a replica, not a living, breathing thing. In fact, its almost reverent attention to detail might be exactly what keeps it from soaring. The film seems to spend a lot of time looking nervously over its shoulder at the book and at the watchful figure of Rowling herself. The result seems a careful construct aimed at not derailing a multibillion-dollar franchise.The pleasurable elements, and they're there, too, begin with the casting of English children to play the young English wizard and his two friends, who become the nucleus of the spiritual family he finds at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry arrives there once he's sprung from the mean-spirited earthly relatives with whom he has spent the first 11 years of his life. His real parents were killed by the evil wizard who left little Harry with a lightning-bolt scar (moved in the film from the center of his forehead to the side, where it's mostly hidden by his hair).
Rowling approved of this change, and, presumably, the many others filling countless fans' Web chats. The changes began a while ago when the US publisher dumbed down the English version's title, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone," putting quite a different cast on things. Are American children - and their parents - really too dumb to handle the word "philosopher?" Would the use of it, in book or movie, really have shrouded everything in such impenetrable mystery?
As Harry, Daniel Radcliffe looks as if he might have stepped from the cover of the novel, right down to his round National Health Service spectacles. But as the film unfolds, he seems a somewhat muted hero. As his unprepossessing sidekick Ron, Rupert Grint steals nearly all their scenes together, despite being made virtually the same height as Harry, presumably not to upstage him (in the book, Ron is taller). But then Ron's role is meatier, since he gets to react a lot more while Harry keeps things inside. Emma Watson is fine as Hermione, their more scholastically advantaged friend and ally.
Robbie Coltrane is the best of the adults as the well-meaning giant, Hagrid, whose eyes supply an ever-present intensity of feeling the film struggles to maintain. Richard Harris, surprisingly, seems a bit recessive as wise old Dumbledore, who runs Hogwarts. Maggie Smith unfurls Professor McGonagall's shtick adroitly, and although Alan Rickman has little screen time as the forbidding Snape, it's a pleasure to listen to him speak his lines as if they were draped in black crepe. On the whole, though, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" scores more on looks than it does on mood and atmosphere and suspense. Director Chris Columbus simply puts too small a flame under it all.
The special effects seem neither all that special nor effective, although the Quidditch game is a high. You can feel it lift the film when the teams square off to play the game that seems a sort of high-speed, three-dimensional version of polo, played on broomsticks. And Hogwarts is every bit the great gothic pile you want it to be. Still, for every flight, the film serves up equal amounts of flattened-out shortfall. Director Columbus seems too busy acting as custodian to do enough actual dramatizing. So the verdict? A firm, ringing yes and no on "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." The best thing about it may be that it will lead many back to read - or re-read - the book.
Jay Carr can be reached by e-mail at jcarr@globe.com
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