/karen/

Page to screen

Thursday, 29 December, 2005

The Boxing Day movie for this year was, of course, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (my friends from school and I have started getting together at Greater Union, Macarthur Square, to see a movie on Boxing Day ever since the Lord of the Rings movies. Last year it was Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events). The following day some of our number went to Burwood to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire which I never would be seeing if they hadn't been going too.

I discovered that Burwood Greater Union brings movie-going to a whole new level; the cinema is on the lower ground floor and there were people massing about everywhere. There is practically no signage so I wasn't sure where to buy tickets so I went to the candy bar (where, I was astonished to discover, they were selling mango smoothies to go with your popcorn). My friends were parking the car so I bought them tickets and discovered that 1) it was cheap Tuesday; and 2) Greater Union Burwood allocates seats (which is why they have so many ads up encouraging people to buy their tickets online). I also discovered that that long queue which snakes past the candy bar was actually for the box office and not for a movie like I had previously thought. This proved quite handy for, when my friends eventually turned up and were ordering their own snacks from the candy bar, I got a call from Haydn who, I found out after talking to him for a while, was standing in the box office queue for tickets to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe so I was able to point out to him that he could bypass the long line by going to the candy bar—particularly the candy bar queues behind the pillar which were shorter because most people didn't realise they were there.

Anyway, we had to go because Harry Potter was starting and I have to say it is pretty much on par with the rest of the Harry Potter movies: perfectly dreadful. From now on I shall not believe anyone (and I mean anyone!) who claims that the most recent one is better than the last one and that those movies are actually “good”! But I feel that I ought to explain why because, when I express my opinions on these matters, most of the people I am talking to assume that I'm just a Harry Potter fanatic who is complaining about the movies because they aren't faithful enough to the books. That's not true: my biggest gripe with these movies is that they are terrible as movies; they are among the worst movies that I have ever seen—right up there with Inspector Gadget, Event Horizon and What Dreams May Come. I don't know whether the problem is with the directors but since they've changed directors three times, it's got to be something else. Nevertheless, every time I see one of them, I have the following complaints:

(Warning: contains some spoilers.)

• The script: It's always awful. It always contains lines of completely unnecessary dialogue. It always features completely unnecessary scenes (like Harry playing with Hedgwig against the snow) or scenes which waste valuable screen time (like Dumbledore putting out street lights or the scene in Mr. Ollivander's wand shop which is protracted and drawn out just to give John Hurt a performance worthy of his paycheck). Or scenes which are completely unprobable and unfaithful to the characters (Harry wandering around at night without his invisibility cloak, chasing Peter Pettigrew with the Marauder's Map; he may not be as smart as Hermione but he's not a half-wit!). Maybe it's all Steven Kloves' fault (oh no, he's down to do The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time!!!). But to be fair, directors and actors change scripts.
• The acting/characterisation: The only redeemable members of the cast are Shirley Henderson (who does a wonderful Moaning Myrtle), Jason Isaacs (he plays Lucius Malfoy. He was also brilliant as Mr Darling/Hook in Peter Pan), Rupert Grint (who is the most natural and selfless of the three and who deserves to get great parts beyond the Potter films) and the boys who play the Wesley twins who were, quite fittingly, absolutely hysterical. Given the wonderful casting of the kids in Peter Pan, Lemony Snicket and, of course, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, how is it that they found such poor actors for these films? Daniel Radcliffe does a passable Harry but lacks Harry's heart; he does not make me believe that he is Harry but rather that he is Daniel playing Harry. Emma Watson is the worst of the three; in Goblet of Fire she over-acts in every single scene she is in. It made me want to gag—particularly that last scene where they're about to go on summer holidays and she clutches Harry's arm and says to him imploringly, “You will write to me Harry, won't you? You will write to me?” The problem is she's not nerdy enough and she spends most of the film looking like she's actually sweet on Harry instead of Ron (whom she's supposed to be sweet on). I reckon Dakota Fanning would have done a much better job. It's a pity the three of them don't really look like they connect together like the good friends they're supposed to be. Finally, I reserve my biggest gripe for Dumbledore. Michael Gambon demonstrates none of Dumbledore's warmth and humour. We don't feel like he's in control and he certainly does some extremely odd things that make you think he's off his rocker in ways which the fictional Dumbledore was not. Not that I think Richard Harris was any better; both Dumbledores are very cold and distant. Dumbledore's a figure you are supposed to love immediately, like Aslan.
• The direction: For directors who make films, it astonishes me how, time and time again, these films do not work like films. They feel more like novels translated into films—they're prosaic, they're too obvious and they plod along like heavy stupid elephants. A director's job is to tell a story and tell it well but these directors tend to treat their audience like they're stupid; they don't allow us to put two and two together but instead they feel the need to explain everything. There was one scene in Goblet of Fire where I found this tendency really irritating but fortunately I've forgotten about it. The other thing a good director does well is elicit great performances from his cast and, as I've said above, these ones don't.

The other things—the sets, the costumes and the music—are done quite well; it's just a pity that the direction, acting and scripts don't match them.

So I've been thinking: why is it that films like The Lord of the Rings and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe are converted to screen so well while all the Harry Potter movies fail so miserably? This is what I've come up with:

• The movie adaptation must be faithful to the spirit of the book: This was Peter Jackson's objective in The Lord of the Rings and I reckon he achieved it. Sure, he cut out a lot of the songs, the poetry and that awful Tom Bombadil episode but he preserved what was essential and beautiful about Middle Earth and highlighted it all the more through his direction. Ditto Emma Thompson's adaptation of Sense and Sensibility which I have to say I like better than the book. I think that fidelity to the spirit of the book is the problem which Ben A's highlights in his review of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
• The plot must be faithful to the book in overall structure but not necessarily in detail: The movie has to get from A to B just as the book gets from A to B but certain things can be sacrificed if it will make the movie a better movie. Tom Bombadil is a good example. So is the romance in the Houses of Healing. And Miyazaki's interpretation of Howl's Moving Castle didn't bother me for much the same reasons (I knew he could never translate such a complicated plot into film). Big deal if the Dursleys don't figure in Goblet of Fire; we don't really need to see them for all the Dudley gags were well and truly used up by the time of Chamber of Secrets. The most important thing in a book-to-movie adaptation is that it works as a movie. If it doesn't, the whole thing will fall apart.
• Characters should not be changed unless it's important to do so: I am so glad they didn't make Arwen a warrior princess at Helm's Deep. It doesn't bug me that Faramir is a little nastier because I think Jackson and his writers make a good point about the inconsistency of his immunity to the One Ring. It's more important to make the audience understand what the ring of power does and why it is imperative that Frodo get rid of it in the fires of Mount Doom than for Faramir to retain his gentlemanliness. But it does matter to me that Violet's moment of cleverness is stolen by Count Olaf at the end of the film when she goes to sign the marriage certificate in her left hand and he berates her for it (he is not that smart in the books). It does matter that Lupin yells at Harry, that Sirius does not come across as being cool, and that Dumbledore is cold and slightly deranged because there is absolutely no reason for these changes. Worse still, the changes detract from the stories. Harry Potter is all about growing up and Lupin, Sirius and Dumbledore are, in some sense, father figures to him; they're the models that will shape the man that he will become. To have these father figures fail is a symptom of modern society but is not what Rowling intended.
• Good direction should never sacrificed for politics: (Particularly not for the sake of big-name actors who need decent screen time.) There is no need to devote 5 mins to John Hurt in Ollivander's wand shop when the scene ought to take no more than 3, and there is no need to focus for so long on John Cleese's head so he can do the Nearly Headless Nick gag when it makes absolutely no contribution to the storytelling. If the cast don't like it, they should take a page out of Gosford Park where the ensemble cast worked together. I think that's one of the major problems with the Harry Potter films—even though Harry is the main character, they are really ensemble pieces and they ought to be shot as such; Harry doesn't have to dominate the frame. In addition, there is no need for the camera to linger on a particular piece of set or costume just because the head of the departments wants it (for this reason I'm very glad that Peter Jackson doesn't make a big deal out of Eowyn's clothing during the feast scene, even though the wardrobe mistress was quite miffed that she put so much work into something that didn't even show up on screen). I do feel that, amusing though Jim Carrey was, Brad Silberling ought to have restrained him ea little more in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events simply because it wasn't a Jim Carrey film; it's about the kids and weren't they marvellous.
• Good direction is everything: The director is essentially a storyteller but the director is also like the conductor that holds the orchestra together and elicits from it the best music the ensemble can possibly produce: cast, composer, designers, wardrobe-makers, etc. I think that's what made The Lord of the Rings so marvellous—that they got the “Peter Jackson seal of approval” on everything before they went ahead with it. I reckon you can tell a good director by the scenes s/he leaves on the cutting room floor. The Princess Diaries, for example, had a couple of very cute scenes between Mia and Joe but they were best left out.
• We must be able to feel the emotional heart of the story: I think Ben A made a very good point about Aslan—we don't get to know him enough to feel the loss of his sacrifice as keenly as Susan and Lucy are supposed to. Similarly, I don't think we ever get to the heart of what Harry feels, being orphaned and sent to live among Muggles. But we do feel the wonder and the joy of the Darling children when Peter Pan covers them in fairy dust and takes them off to Neverland, and we do feel the loss of the Baudelaire children when Mr Poe comes to tell them that their parents have perished in a mysterious fire (and it's not like we ever saw the parents or the way that the parents interacted with the children; instead Brad Silberling gives us a series of images of the children in their familiar habitat—Violet with her ingenious inventions [later we see their charred remains], Klaus in his Eden full of books and Sunny, of course, biting things). Talking with a friend after seeing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe I think the scene where the White Witch kills Aslan could have been directed much better if they hadn't slowed the pace down so much, if the White Witch hadn't waffled on so much, and if they hadn't shown her doing the actual deed but instead we heard it and imagined it. Furthermore, my friend pointed out, Susan and Lucy were so distraught they couldn't actually watch, whereas in this film they were glued as if to a television screen. And then the army went into battle and it was sunny. They are supposed to feel despair—the sky should have been blank or grey and the light, cold and icy, like the witch.

My verdict: Give Harry another 10 years or so and then I think someone ought to turn all the books into a television series—one episode a week with an ensemble cast and a great director who can tell these stories the way they were meant to be told.

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