When Harry Met Puberty

Don't look back: Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe). Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth book in J.K. Rowling’s continuing series, runs more than 700 pages and marks a turning point in Harry’s life. Not only is the orphaned wizard entering mortifying adolescence, but his arch enemy, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, Lord Voldemort himself, is gaining strength. After 13 years in hiding, Voldemort’s followers, the Death Eaters, have returned with a plan to bring Harry into the Dark Lord’s serpentine clutches. To complicate matters, there’s a 150-page interlude at the World Quidditch Cup (the Superbowl of the wizard community’s favourite sport), a sub-plot involving a campaign by Harry’s friend Hermione to liberate enslaved house elves and a suspenseful, near-epic storyline about a treacherous year-long competition that pits Harry against three other students.

The unenviable job of bringing this wonderfully dark, unwieldy book to the screen falls to director Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco) and series screenwriter Steven Kloves. As if he weren’t taxed enough, Newell faces the added challenge of following Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s inspired adaptation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which breathed new life into Chris Columbus’s slavish versions of the first two books.

To cram Rowling’s immense book into a manageable film, Newell and Kloves strip it of everything but its central thrillerish plot: the Triwizard Tournament that culminates in a battle between Harry and Voldemort. Goblet of Fire opens with what becomes a recurring motif: Harry’s dream that Voldemort is sending his minions to track him down. From there, the film makes quick and stunning work of the World Quidditch Cup and the Death Eaters’ ugly assault on the wizard encampment around it. Newell dispatches Harry, Hermione and Ron (Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint) back to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where puberty is hitting the Fourth Years hard. That point is driven home when Headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) announces that the school will play host for the year to a bevy of chic and dishy girls from France’s Beauxbatons Academy (cue goofy boys ogling) and several examples of male pulchritude from Bulgaria’s Durmstrang Institute (cue girls sighing in appreciation). The occasion? The rarely held Triwizard Tournament, an exercise in “international cooperation.”

Rogues gallery: From left, Severus Snape (Alan Rickman), Minerva McGonagall (Maggie Smith), Madame Olympe Maxime (Frances de la Tour), Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody (Brendan Gleeson) and Barty Crouch (Roger Lloyd Pack). Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

As expected, the star seniors from each of the schools are selected to compete. But when Harry’s name is unexpectedly announced, it’s met with outrage. Harry is too young and inexperienced for the competition. Though Harry swears he had nothing to do with the selection, his detractors, and even his best friend Ron, think the young wizard is just showing off.

But what’s to be done? According to the Ministry of Magic’s Barty Crouch, every inch the British civil servant, the choice is a magical contract that cannot be broken. Harry reluctantly enters the fray, facing off against dragons, grindlylows (think sea monkeys gone rotten) and, most terrifying of all, a malevolent garden maze conjured up from a Freudian nightmare. Along the way, he’s helped by the newest addition to the Hogwarts staff, Alistor “Mad Eye” Moody, played with scenery-chewing, scene-stealing glee by Irish actor Brendan Gleeson, complete with a motorized, all-seeing glass eye.

Newell tears through the material, barely pausing for a breath, counting on the audience’s obsessive familiarity with the story to fill in the blanks. As a result, most of the secondary characters — including Alan Rickman’s marvellously embittered potions instructor Severus Snape — are given just a handful of lines. A cameo appearance by Miranda Richardson as reporter Rita Skeeter (Rowling’s not-so-subtle jab at the British tabloids) is reduced to a few obvious twitches.

At 157 minutes, Goblet of Fire somehow still feels rushed, never quite digging into the deeper emotional veins of the story — namely, the wizarding world’s fear-driven denial that Voldemort has returned, and Harry’s dawning awareness that, despite the guidance of his beloved father figures Dumbledore and Sirius Black, when it comes to facing off against the Dark Lord, he’s on his own.

Newell’s fizzy romantic-comedy background hasn’t prepared him for the series’ CGI dazzle, but he comports himself well. The mammoth World Quidditch Cup stadium is spectacularly menacing in scope. The buff champion players zip around on souped-up brooms the way a reader would have imagined them. The gorgeous underwater scene, in which the Triwizard competitors must free their friends, who hang suspended in the seaweed like corpses, seamlessly integrates high-tech effects with live action. Too often, though, Newell just throws a whole bunch of visual signifiers against the wall to see what sticks. There’s socialist realism (the Durmstrang boys’ leather boots and fur hats), the nouvelle vague (the Beauxbatons students’ entrance is straight out of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), Nazism (Barty Crouch’s Hitler moustache), the Red scare (a flashback to the trial of a Death Eater looks like a House Un-American Activities Committee meeting imagined by Kafka) and the Ku Klux Klan (the Death Eaters’ robes and pointed hoods.) It’s not as messy as it sounds, but it lacks the visual cohesion of the lovely brown and grey gloom of Cuarón’s Azkaban.

Putting the wizard in a tizzy: Harry's crush, Cho Chang (Katie Leung).

Goblet is much more successful at capturing teen angst. One of the film’s dead-on conceits is that Harry finds it more frightening to ask cutie Cho Chang (Katie Leung with an adorable Scottish burr) to the school dance than to square off against a fire-breathing dragon. Newell has wisely loosened the kids up from their private-school affectations. They’re sulky, self-conscious teenagers who, in their jeans and track jackets, look more likely to attend a Franz Ferdinand concert than brew up a magic potion. Radcliffe still seems a little gobsmacked as Harry, the traumatized, destiny-burdened boy upon whom so much is projected. With each film, though, he settles more into the role. As Ron, Grint is saddled with both a painful, unspoken crush on Hermione and a David Cassidy haircut. He does most of his acting with his bangs. Watson, however, positively shines as Hermione, a girl blossoming from nerdhood to hottiedom. She seems to be the only one among Harry’s friends to understand the terrible task he has before him.

Newell’s thriller instincts do pay off — richly — in the end, with Harry’s emotionally devastating showdown with the Dark Lord. Ralph Fiennes — regally handsome features barely obscured by Nosferatu-ish make-up — apparently based his portrayal of Voldemort on lizards and “a little [bit of] Hitler” for a perfect embodiment of charismatic evil. Without giving too much away, the bone-chilling scene (which helped to earn the film the series’ first PG-13 rating) establishes, more clearly, why Harry is the Chosen One. It also sets up the even darker days to come.

As Hermione asks (rhetorically) near the film’s end, “Everything’s going to change now, isn’t it?” Goblet’s shattering climax leaves viewers eager — and more than a little frightened — to see exactly how.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire opens Nov. 18 across Canada.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.