ANYTHING BUT GARFIELD:

Third Time's The Charm: A new director--Alfonso Cuarón--reinvigorates the 'Harry Potter' series (Terri Sutton, 6/02/04, www.citypages.com)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban hasn't been released yet and I'm already missing it. One-off director Alfonso Cuarón probably signed onto the franchise to bridge Chris Columbus and Mike Newell administrations. What he has fashioned represents the best of the series thus far--and, I predict, further. No offense to Mr. Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral), whose "family film" Into the West capably balanced grit and sentimentality. But if the powers that be at Warners don't bring Cuarón back for an encore (say, when Harry is 16), they'll deserve a "kiss of death" by soul-sucking dementors (who'll leave humming "Unsatisfied," no doubt).

Columbus, infamous for turning Macaulay Culkin into a cartoon version of Edvard Munch's "The Scream," tried to make the story of young Harry Potter going to Hogwarts wizard school a wondrous thing. Predictably, he chose shock and awe through super-sizing: big snake, big doggie, big chessboard pieces, big school, big soundtrack, big effects. Sure, the size of many of those things was conceived first by series author J.K. Rowling, and has much to do with a child's eye view of the adult world. But books are not like movies, and the relentless stand back! scale of Columbus's Hogwarts (Chamber of Secrets ran two hours and 40 minutes!) effectively numbed this viewer to the wonders therein.

From his first scene, Cuarón pulls the camera in far closer: Harry's mean room, at his horrible, nonmagical relatives' house, finally feels suffocatingly small. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) is under the covers, reading by wand-light. Ugly Uncle Vernon (Richard Griffiths) keeps busting through the door, trying to catch him at it; the boy is always peacefully sleeping when he looks in. The sight of the light under the bedspread will delight any kid who has snuck a flashlight to peruse a new Harry Potter; the idea of a pubescent boy under the blankets holding a "magic wand" will crack up any adult who has seen Cuarón's frankly sexual teen tale Y Tu Mamá También. What Cuarón finds with a tight lens is texture: dimensional, tangible, sensuous.

The director even detects a nub on the heretofore flat Radcliffe. Just his arm outside the bedclothes has a round weight to it that no part of him had previously expressed. (I'd never thought of Harry as a body before.) In the next scene, Harry clatters down stairs, reluctantly requests a signature, and makes a threat, all with mulish attitude and clumsy physicality--in other words, more like your average pissed-off 13-year-old than I'd thought possible. Cuarón has somehow bewitched Radcliffe into acting like a real boy and not like some heroic icon or vehicle of audience emotion or pitiable child who can't act caught in a $100 million spotlight.

It's not like parents have any choice about seeing it or not.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 1, 2004 8:02 PM