11: HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE
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(Year refers to British release)
Running Time: 152 minutes
Colour: Technicolor
Estimated Attendance: 17.56 million
What they said at the time...
Synopsis
Somewhere in Britain, the infant Harry Potter survives an attack by the evil wizard Voldemort, though his parents are killed. He is left with his vindictive 'muggle' (non-wizard) relatives, Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon. On his eleventh birthday, Harry is removed by the giant Hagrid, caretaker of Hogwarts School for wizards. Hagrid retrieves a mysterious package from Gringotts Bank.
On board the Hogwarts Express, Harry encounters Hermione and Ron; later all three are enrolled in Gryffindor House. By accident they stumble upon a room in which a huge three-headed hound guards a trapdoor. When a troll finds its way into the school, the three suspect Professor Snape of seeking whatever it is the hound is guarding, especially as Snape appears to be muttering incantations at Harry during his first, victorious game of the school sport, Quidditch.
The three children are given a detention for visiting Hagrid at night. They realise that the giant hound is guarding Hagrid's mysterious package, the Philosopher's Stone, which could restore Voldemort's power. Searching the woods for a wounded unicorn, Harry is attacked by Voldemort but saved by a centaur.
Finding the hound lulled to sleep, the children pass tests required to reach an inner sanctum. Harry enters alone and manages to repel Voldemort - who has been inhabiting the form of Professor Quirrell, not Snape - before they get the stone. The children's bravery is rewarded with extra points which ensure that Gryffindor win the school cup.
Review
Those who applaud J.K. Rowling's success in selling Harry Potter books to children may miss the point that it has as much to do with multimedia merchandising, brand-name exploitation and the saleability of nostalgia as with any deep-rooted return to literature. It may be that the books' reader base is exceptionally wide, but it is also shallow, made up of children and adults who read sparingly but enjoy Rowling's boarding-school fantasy world as a gratifying version of burgeoning adolescence. Anyone who knows the darker hue of comparable children's fiction - Susan Cooper, Roald Dahl, Philip Pullman, Tolkien - may be less impressed with Hogwarts and a central character who, though orphaned, is a major celebrity among wizards, heir to a vaultful of gold, the best natural Quidditch player ever known, possessed of a cloak of invisibility and a phoenix-feather wand, protégé of the headmaster and centre of a close-knit circle of friends. The proportion of whimsy to brutality in the Harry Potter books is high.
This first film adaptation is clearly conscious of a vast international market. Eccentric cameos from British comics seem curtailed (or, in the case of Rik Mayall's, apparently cut). John Cleese has only a few lines as a semi-decapitated ghost; Zoe Wanamaker is notable mainly for her yellow contact-lenses. The motto seems to have been: keep it bland. Only Alan Rickman bucks the general trend by camping it up to the rafters as Professor Snape, Master of Potions. As for the young leads, Daniel Radcliffe is genial and inoffensive as Harry, yet he manages to hold the film together. Rupert Grint is very good as Ron, a set-jawed Artful Dodger to Harry's Oliver Twist; but Emma Watson as Hermione is shrill and prim, reminiscent of the disagreeable little girls who come to nasty ends in Dahl stories.
Escape is a central theme: the film is full of doorways and portals, each leading to a more magical place. Harry's initial view of the world is through an air vent in the door of the cupboard where his aunt and uncle keep him locked up. A wall unbricks itself to reveal the entrance to Diagon Alley, where Harry's protector Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) shows him round shops selling potions, broomsticks and wands. Another magic wall in King's Cross Station conceals the entrance to platform nine-and-three-quarters, where Harry boards the Hogwarts Express. While exploring Hogwarts under cover of his invisibility cloak, Harry sneaks through a door to find a magic mirror that shows whoever looks into it what their heart most desires.
The journey towards magic is also a journey into the past. When Harry looks through the cupboard vent, he sees a 1950s suburban interior. The inn, shops and bank in Diagon Alley are Victorian, populated by wizened shopkeepers and goblin-bankers wearing capes or half-moon spectacles. The Hogwarts Express steam-train bisects a landscape where no sign of modem technology can be seen. And Hogwarts itself is a dreamworld, a mixed-sex multiracial Eton for magicians. Each setting adds something to a kaleidoscope of imagined Englands: a heritage theme park kept scrubbed and shiny. Harry Potter is like that magic mirror: it shows a wished-for world - a world without machines, a public school without bullying or sexual tension, a childhood where abusive adults can be outwitted.
There are still moments of terror and grief. Harry is frozen by the sight of Voldemort drinking a dead unicorn's blood. Earlier, Harry sits cross-legged and very quiet, staring into the mirror that shows his parents flanking him. His vigil is interrupted by the headmaster, Professor Dumbledore: "It does not do to dwell on dreams, Harry, and forget to live." And so the film moves to the next minor escapade, the feeling spent.
The best thing about the book may be the jokes and the film retains many, such as the wizards' confectionery, Bertie Bolts' Every Flavour Beans, which occasionally come in vomit or ear-wax flavour. Rowling's more visual gags - newspapers with moving pictures, 'wizard chess' with violently active pieces - also transfer well to the screen.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone will captivate younger children, but overall it's oddly anticlimactic. It has cuteness in plenty but neither epic sweep nor any edge of emotional conflict. No matter how homely Peter Jackson makes the first instalment of the forthcoming The Lord of the Rings, it must have great vistas of tragedy and violence. The fifth Star Wars film is going to have to show the beginning of the blue-eyed Anakin Skywalker's transformation into Darth Vader. Harry Potter may battle all manner of monsters but - barring some extraordinary volte-face on Rowling's part - he will continue his well-adjusted adolescence inside a closed and essentially unthreatening world. At the end of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, John Williams' music soars, recalling his score for Star Wars; but an evil empire hasn't been hobbled - instead, Harry's house, Gryffindor, has won the school cup.
Synopsis and Review from Sight and Sound Vol.12 No.1 January 2002 p.43-44
The Monthly Film Bulletin was published by the BFI between 1934 and 1991. Initially aimed at distributors and exhibitors as well as filmgoers, it carried reviews and details of all UK film releases. In 1991, the Bulletin was incoporated into Sight and Sound magazine.
