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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Headmaster Dumbledore declares Hogwarts open
Tue, 20 Dec 2005
In his latest film, director Mike Newell takes our young hero on journey of possession, repression and demonic reincarnation. Screenwriter Graham Stokhuyzen takes a closer look at the growing pains of Harry Potter, aged 14…
Seeing Harry Potter’s alter ego - Daniel Radcliffe - sparring with Jonathan Ross on his Friday night chat show was a curious experience. Barely had the Muggle presenter recovered from Radcliffe’s opening salvo of youthful exuberance – “I didn’t have to do anything there … they just applaud …” – when the sixteen-year-old launched into a rendition of the Match of the Day theme tune by slapping himself around the face and opening and closing his mouth like a demented goldfish. The energy of the young wizard was extraordinary.
The irony is that while Harry’s off-screen persona seems to have evolved into something irrepressibly naïve, his on-screen incarnation has been doing a bit of growing up.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire tells the story of the Triwizard Tournament: an annual competition between European wizarding schools each of which puts forth a single champion – aged over seventeen – to compete in three potentially lethal challenges. The competition takes place at Hogwarts this year and the Goblet of Fire – a kind of Grail-come-tombola device – has nominated Harry as a controversial fourth contestant. Thrust reluctantly into the limelight, the fourteen-year-old must compete with dragons, sinister mermaids and enchanted hedgerow, casting aside his adolescent inadequacies to take his place in the world of grown-ups.
In condensing Rowling’s 734 page tome into 157 minutes of screen time, screenwriter Stephen Kloves (Wonderboys, The Fabulous Baker Boys) creates a structure that works on paper – one would imagine – far more neatly than it does on film. The opening and closing sequences – graveyard scenes that echo Lean’s Great Expectations – mirror each other nicely: Harry’s nightmare becomes reality and he must face his demons before returning to Hogwarts with the inert body of his childhood (symbolised by a fellow contestant’s corpse). The heart of the film is punctuated by the three challenges of the Tournament, with the Yuletide Ball acting as a fulcrum upon which to balance the themes of sex and attraction flowing between Ron and Hermione, Harry and Cho Chang.
And yet the film comes across as anything but balanced with the sheer volume of material crammed on screen creating a staccato, scatter-gun feel as we cut wildly from the small to the expansive; the intimate to the public. At one point, such was the abruptness of a cut from Harry receiving a quiet word of encouragement from “Mad-Eye” Moody, to a riotous stadium rammed with screaming spectators, that half the cinema audience turned to the projectionist to check he hadn’t skipped a bit.
Despite the choppiness though, the film does what it sets out to do; relocating Potter and friends out of childhood fantasy and into adult fantasy. Harry grows up and we are introduced to a world of Muggles and Wizards that feels just a few degrees chillier and just a shade darker. Questions about Harry’s first encounter with Voldemort are answered, but new ones are raised with the Harry / Ron / Hermione triangle increasingly resembling that of Luke / Han / Leia.
This is a loss-of-innocence film of surprising menace in which Harry’s experiences strip away the last vestiges of childhood fractured by the Dementors of The Prisoner of Azkaban. Even Dumbledore has lost his avuncular charm, showing himself fallible and indecisive in the political cut and thrust with the Ministry of Magic. “Dark and difficult times lie ahead” he mumbles to Harry, but this time there is no glint of mischief, no protective pat on the young boy’s shoulders. The competition is probably too dangerous for a fourteen year-old to enter unsupervised, but the Goblet of Fire is a powerful device and – foolishly as it turns out – not even Dumbledore will defy it. This is an altogether more dangerous, more uncertain world in which power does good only when wielded with responsibility and humility. This is, Harry discovers, life.
This review is by Graham Stokhuyzen.
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