Boy, interrupted

Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) feels increasingly alienated in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

With just two more films left to go in the gazillion-dollar, decade-spanning Harry Potter franchise, series star Daniel Radcliffe is doing his furious best to avoid being typecast forever as the boy wizard. His recent portrayal of a sexually confused stable boy in the West End play Equus had all of London abuzz over his nude scene (“Hairy Botter!” sniggered one tabloid headline). This month, the 18-year-old appears in the lad-rag Details styled like a bit of rough trade in a leather-and-scruff photo spread.

While Radcliffe is busy distancing himself from the role that made him rich and famous, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix his alter ego is also putting childish things behind him. Building on the dark turn of the last film, the fifth instalment is the grimmest and most adult movie yet. Save for one spectacular and satisfyingly rebellious prank by a pair of juvenile delinquent wizards at the film’s halfway point, there’s little humour and few cool magic tricks to leaven the dystopian gloom. This is a kid’s movie for grown-ups.

Gone are the diverting scenes of Quidditch (picture rugby played on flying broomsticks) and the cutesy details of wizard life. Instead, new director David Yates (replacing Mike Newell) and screenwriter Michael Goldenberg (stepping in for longtime series writer Steve Kloves) have gracefully trimmed the 800-plus-page book into a stylish political thriller with horror-movie undertones.

In the aftermath of the death of a schoolmate and the return of evil Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), Harry is feeling more alienated and put upon than ever: he’s smeared by the press, snubbed by his mentor Professor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), muttered about at school and plagued by nightmares that make him question the strange nature of his connection to Voldemort. Could those dark impulses lurk in him, too?

Compounding Harry’s angst is the official party line from the Ministry of Magic: the blinkered mandarins who run the wizard world refuse to acknowledge even the possibility that Voldemort and his Deatheater minions are on the rise, insisting that Harry and Dumbledore are simply scaremongering. Though the threat of Voldemort simmers beneath the surface — Fiennes’s brief appearances as the serpentine baddie are suitably bone-chilling — the real malevolence in The Order of the Phoenix is that of institutional denial and complicity. With no real plan in place to defend against the evildoers, government apparatchiks use the public’s growing paranoia and confusion to erode civil liberties and concentrate their power.

The poisonous Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton, centre front) makes big changes to Hogwarts School. (Warner Bros Pictures)

It would be easy to read this as a critique of the Bush administration, but J.K. Rowling’s allusions go further back. With their “pure blood” obsessions and grand, but ice-cold aesthetic, the Deatheaters are Brown Shirts in wizard robes.

Yet the chief fascist in this film is not a Voldemort sympathizer at all, but a pink-clad Ministry of Magic bureaucrat aptly named Dolores Umbridge — played by Imelda Staunton with a kittenish coyness that doesn’t quite mask her poisonous fangs. One of Rowling’s most pointed creations, Umbridge is a law-and-order sadist sent to oversee Hogwarts School. She emphasizes test scores over real learning and she’s not above using torture to keep students in line.

Staunton joins the regular top-drawer adult cast (Gambon, Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, Gary Oldman, David Thewlis, Brendan Gleeson and Richard Griffiths) who gather for every Potter movie as if it were high-budget summer stock. Like her fellow pros, she relishes her role, delivering a fully fleshed character in just a handful of scenes.

Time constraints sacrifice much examination of the ever-more complicated relationships between Harry and his friends Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint). Even Harry’s much-anticipated liplock with love interest Cho Chang (Katie Leung) is understated — though Harry’s half-shy, half-proud, post-kiss debriefing with Hermione and Ron rings giddily true. His growing isolation is cleverly conveyed in Yates’s framing — he is often shot alone, or at the edge of the picture, even when he trains a loyal group of schoolmates, a kind of underground resistance movement, to fight dark magic. The film’s trim running time, however, is no excuse for the gooey and too-pat ending.

There’s less emphasis on CGI tricks this time out, but a flying broomstick tour of the London skyline is magnificent, as is a climactic wand fight in the Matrix-like bowels of the Ministry of Magic. Yates’s real visual genius, though, lies in his treatment of the wizard world as being as banal as a tray of tea and biscuits (wizard homes appear as musty, dank and drafty as pre-war boarding houses), while rendering the land of the Muggles (that would be us humans) as something extraordinarily exotic. Never has a bowl of fruit in a suburban kitchen glowed so menacingly, or an escalator packed with London commuters been so fancifully choreographed.

With Voldemort gaining strength and the wizard world on the brink of chaos, this off-kilter vision makes perfect sense. Though not yet an adult, Harry no longer sees the universe through the black-and-white filter of a child. As his godfather Sirius (Oldman) explains, no one is simply right or wrong, good or bad. Evil lies not only in those who commit terrible acts, but in those who choose to look the other way.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix opens on July 11.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBCnews.ca/arts.

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