Dear Jane-Anne Hobbs,
Round this time last year you wrote to the paper to complain about my review of the first Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. My review was “sneering” and “shallow”, you said; I have a “terminal dose” of “disenchantment”. If the kids watching it were silent during the screening, you posited, they were “struck dumb because they were enchanted”. I sympathise: there are a few children I wish were “struck dumb”.
It pains me, therefore, to report that I didn’t like the second outing of the franchise, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, much more than the first. To put this in perspective, let me note that the leading American film critic Roger Ebert thought it was “glorious” and “brimming with invention”, while the excellent website Salon.com, on the other hand, found it “stultifyingly dull”. My view falls somewhere in between. As with the first movie, it’s not wonderful, but it’s okay. If your primary goal is to keep the kids quiet for two and a half hours, then Harry Potter II may well suffice. I don’t know about your children’s stamina. I suspect kids under, say, 10, will find it rather a long haul.
The movie gives us Harry’s second year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and the formula is much as before. First he has to be rescued from his horrible foster family, then he gets to school to discover it threatened by a dark force, one linked to his own history as the near-victim of the evil Voldemort. With his friends Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), he must save the school and, by implication, the world. Throw in a game of quidditch, and there you have it.
Daniel Radcliffe as Harry seems more than the year older he’s supposed to be since the first movie. The filmmakers’ fear that he’s growing (up) too fast seems justified; his voice seems to be breaking, for one thing. That air of wide-eyed naivety will soon be gone. But his performance is likeable. Watson is good, as before; Grint does much too much mugging. He’s the Sancho Panza figure, and he won’t let us forget it. The supporting cast of character actors (Richard Harris, Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, Jason Isaacs et al), do their bit with exemplary skill. They, along with Kenneth Branagh’s hilarious egomaniac of a self-promoting wizard, are probably the best things in the movie, and one almost wishes there were more of them and less of the kids. But then this is, indubitably, a kids’ movie. Grown-ups must wait for part two of The Lord of the Rings to be enchanted.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (directed, like the first one, by Chris Columbus) replicates the first movie’s rather mechanical development and pace, but has its share of well-coordinated and impressive effects. It looks pretty good. The filmmakers said this episode would be darker and more sinister than the first one, but that seems to apply mostly to the art direction. Apart from that, the movie’s mood is as cheery as that of its predecessor. If the young protagonists are in any danger from monsters or the like, you can be sure the scariness will not be pushed too far. And if they are in trouble because they’ve broken school rules, it is certain that Professor Dumbledore or Professor McGonagall will turn up like a deus ex machina to absolve them.
And here is, perhaps, the most interesting thing about the Harry Potter stories. It’s hard to resist a Freudian reading when there are repeated descents into dark, subterranean places — in this case, one containing a humungously penile serpent. What fascinates the most, though, is the way the ongoing storyline plays with the idea of parenthood. This is an old story: go back to Oedipus to find the tale of a prince who’s brought up by peasants, then discovers his real identity (in his case, tragically). The Star Wars series uses the same motif, or, rather, beats it to death. The bad daddy turns out to be the real daddy. Harry Potter, by contrast, has good, idealised parents who are conveniently dead and gone; his foster home saddles him with a set of bad parents, while Hogwarts gives him a set of new, good (substitute) parents — the aforementioned professors.
You may well disagree, Jo-Anne, but I suspect that here lies one of the deeper psychological reasons for the pull of the Harry Potter stories. Like Star Wars, they draw on and recast a host of older, culturally implanted narratives — not just the misplaced prince or the Jesus figure saving the world from evil (and you will remember the issues around his parenthood), but also the hoary old family romance. Many children fantasise about their mom and dad not being their real parents; many kids dream that they are really from somewhere else, and have a more important destiny than that suggested by life at school and in the suburbs. We all want to escape, to be secret wizards.
Narrative, like dreams, can split opposing ideas, like good versus bad parents, into separate images, thus turning the scenario into a manageable and entertaining play of symbols. In real life, however, the really scary monster in the chamber of secrets is that good parents and bad parents are usually the same people.
Yours,
“Cranky old” Shaun de Waal.
Jane-Anne Hobbs’ letter
I’m sure there were many parents like me who turned eagerly to your arts pages last Friday to find out what to expect from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I hooted with appreciation when I read Julie Myerson’s sparkling analysis of the Potter phenomenon.
But what were you thinking when you sent grouchy old Shaun de Waal to review the hottest kids’ movie of the century? His sneering, shallow review is one of the laziest pieces of writing I’ve ever seen in the M&G.
De Waal surmises that the audience of children was silent because they were “a very well-behaved lot” or because the movie was “less exciting than it could have been”. Duh – the children were struck dumb because they were enchanted. This is the opposite of disenchantment, of which De Waal has a terminal dose.
When the next Harry Potter film comes out, please commission someone who is a parent or who understands children.
Jane-Anne Hobbs
Published online December 12, 2001