哈利·波特与凤凰社 Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix review by Frank Lovece

First-time feature director David Yates has won a couple of BAFTA Awards and gotten an Emmy nomination, and critical acclaim for such telefilms as Channel 4's Sex Traffic (2004). And the virtues of a top-notch TV director--briskness on budget, plot-driven storytelling, and recognizing that television is a producer's medium--aren't those of a movie auteur. For every Robert Altman or Richard Donner who fought out of the box, there are dozens of dynamic directors who better serve the small screen. Yates may have been chosen by the producers of the new Harry Potter film for his ability to tell a big story efficiently and not let a personal vision intrude on a beloved franchise, but y'know, the L. Frank Baum books were also huge in their day, and that didn't stop Victor Fleming and company from expanding greatly on the source material to make a pretty good little movie called The Wizard of Oz (1939). Fifty years from now, will any of the Harry Potter movies be thought of in the same way?

The fifth and biggest of the J.K. Rowling books about young wizard-in-training Harry Potter, spanning 896 pages and 255,000 words, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has been translated into the shortest of the films so far. Sacrificed are all but the barest broad strokes of characterization; Yates' take hammers home plot and an occasional gag, ironically rendering the protagonists flatter than ink on the pages of a book.
Unsurprisingly, it's the few relatable moments that highlight the film. The opening sequence, set in a small playground in the English exurbs and involving a confrontation first between Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his mean-spirited cousin Dudley (Harry Melling) and then between the teens and two ghastly, spirit-sucking Dementors in a graffiti-covered pedestrian tunnel, captures the enchanting balance of everyday magic in the real world that has made the Potter books irresistible--even at the mystical academy Hogwarts, the primary setting, where the prosaic demands of schoolwork and social hierarchy are as ever-present as anywhere. But aside from that scene and a few novel details, the film is nearly nothing but plot, with mostly facile performances and a pacing that could, incredibly, be called slapdash despite a reported seven to eight months of filming and all the post-production resources in the world.

That plot concerns the winds of war between the evil Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) and the rest of the wizard community, whose Ministry of Magic rejects Harry's warning that the dark lord has returned. The bureaucracy tries railroading Harry for his claim, painting him and his patron, Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), as dangerous crackpots. The paranoiac Ministry installs a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), who consolidates her power with Dick Cheney-like disregard for truth or rights. To prepare for the impending war, Harry allies himself with the underground Order of the Phoenix, consisting of his godfather, Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), and such compatriots as Remus Lupin (David Thewlis), "Mad-Eye" Moody (Brendan Gleeson), the Weasleys (Mark Williams and Julie Walters) and others, and gives secret combat training to classmates including best buds Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), Ron's sister Ginny (Bonnie Wright), awkward Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis), the quirkily Zenned-out Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch), and Harry's new flame, Cho Chang (Katie Leung). Series stalwarts Maggie Smith, Emma Thompson, Robbie Coltrane and others get what amount to cameos.

The story plods, with no particular personal voice and, despite a reported $200 million budget, much intrusively obvious CGI for things like landscapes. Staunton, at least, creates a burst-out character with Umbridge, a zealous true-believer of the most dangerously self-righteous kind, whom the actress plays perfectly larger-than-life yet all-too-real. And young Lynch, in a few minutes of screen time, makes Luna a more three-dimensional character than those of all three leads combined.

Many of the source excisions are sensible, such as a sports subplot, though one of the book's most poignant and beguiling scenes--a coda in which a heartbroken Harry very reasonably quizzes a ghost about Sirius surviving the afterlife--is a telling example of the human element Yates and company jettisoned to make what would have been a perfectly serviceable TV-movie.

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