When I first heard that Alfonso Cuarón was hired to direct Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, I’m sure my eyebrows must have twitched. Recruiting the auteur of the masterpiece of adolescent sexual fantasy, Y Tu Mamá También, to direct one of the two most bankable franchises of preteen cinema may not be as risky as naming your childcare coop after Michael Jackson, but it absolutely suggests that J.K. Rowling’s trio of main characters, who in the first two films existed in a timeless – and largely genderless – Dickensian childhood will now become something quite other. And Other the new HP film certainly is. Daniel Radcliffe (Harry), Emma Watson (Hermione) & Rupert Grint (Ron) are now young teens – they dress like teenagers, stand like teenagers & have gone lanky, as indeed have virtually all of the returning student characters. And through a series of looks, touches & blushes, Cuarón suggests a realm of surging hormones that give these characters an edge their counterparts in other preteen fare – think Spy Kids – will never have. It’s not coincidental that several of the films first reviews have pointed to Emma Watson for her fine acting – Cuarón in many ways has made her the star of HP3, or at the very least Harry’s equal. She not only proves capable of undoing the fatal results of the tale’s frame narrative, she’s the center of an unspoken Jules et Jim ménage binding Ron & Harry to each other.
But that’s not what’s really most interesting about HP3 (which I admit to calling HP3: This Time it’s Sirius) – this after all is a dimension that could dissolve entirely in the hands of Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral), currently directing HP4. That the screenplay for at least the first 5 HPs will all be done by Steven Kloves (Racing to the Moon, Wonderboys) will simply, I suspect, deepen the ongoing demonstration that the director’s vision – let alone product – is something very different from a screenplay.
For what really matters about HP3 is something that is mimicked structurally in the film when Hermione & Harry turn back time in order to redo the narrative, rescuing two critical characters, one of whom is unambiguously “good” only in the second version of the tale. HP3 appears to occur in a completely different universe than the first two installments directed by Chris Columbus. In the first two Harry Potter flicks, the only moments in which the viewer senses that we’re not on some sound stage are the train (or train & flying car) sequences. In HP3, however, Hogwarts seems to exist in a gothic physical universe. One sees Hogwarts, looking more angular & goth, set into a landscape. Rain pelts the characters & blurs the camera’s lens. The Whomping Willow is both smaller & in a different location.
These are not insignificant changes. Indeed, whether or not Newell turns out to be half the director Cuarón – and half the director would be pretty good – it’s almost inevitable that the universe of HP4 cannot be the same as either Columbus’ or Cuarón’s. What we have here is Rashoman for kids, a demonstration of deconstruction as an inevitable critical practice. The idea that the remaining films in this series of seven might continue this cinematic cubism is, to my mind, one of the most compelling promises these films can make.
How is this different from other kids’ serials that have had different directors – Star Wars, say, or even Godzilla? The intense identification many juvenile readers have with the fictive universe created by Jo Rowling’s books is approached by only the Tolkien trilogy and Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials series. I don’t think it could have worked if the books had not existed prior to the films as a social phenomenon – and I don’t think it could have worked without the success – and imaginative continuity – of the Chris Columbus films of the first two Potter volumes. That acceptance – that these films present that world – is the key. This means that, later on, the films probably can’t serve that function for a future generation of youngsters coming into a world in which both the books & films always already exist.
But this of course means that I’m presuming that it does. And that is a presumption I am making – at least for some kids some of the time. My own sons and their best friend, all avid 12-year-old fans of the books, saw the distinctions as being related to the development of the story itself. Characters changed because the books forced them to evolve. Indeed, the lone major complaint my focus group had about the film was its failure to fully identify the origins of the magical map of Hogwarts as being the four old friends Lupin, Sirius Black, Peter Periwinkle & Harry’s father. Will they, I wonder, feel the same way if HP4 isn’t consistent in its stylistic extensions of what has already come before? Or is this kind of reading even developmental? After all, I know middle-aged Tolkien fiends every bit as literal as this? Or is this, as Paul Verhoeven is said to have characterized the layers of political commentary in his Total Recall, something that was put in because the director thought it was “fun,” and because it could broaden the appeal of the movie?
At least for once, I find myself interested in how Harry Potter the Movies will evolve.
