Having recently watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 twice, I sat down to think about some key aspects in a movie adaptation from a book. The visuals were spectacular as expected – director David Yates has become well established in the Potter franchise for dazzling us with colorful action and beautiful landscapes – but in the end, are the cuts to J.K. Rowling’s narrative worth the lack of cohesiveness for those unfamiliar with the world of Hogwarts?
I believe a literal, page-by-page adaptation of a book (or any non-film medium for the matter) is an atrocity to film. The nature of a narrative is specific to its medium, and to transcribe it into another medium requires a understanding of the source and adaptive mediums. For books, it is all about the individual reader’s imagination, and how the words on each page convey a image just descriptive enough to visualize but just enough that as the reader, we can impress upon our own ideas about what is handsome and ugly, good or bad. For film, it’s all about composition, sound, and story: within each frame characters are placed for specific presentation purposes, music composed for different effects, and a core story that ties it all together into one cohesive movie. With film, our imaginations may not be an active player, but our emotions are in full bloom with each sensation of sound and color. An adaptation must consider medium differences if it wishes to be successful, and the filmmaker must understand that it is their job to offer something new, something intriguing about the same story that cannot be offered from reading alone – all while maintaining a level of cohesion.
That said, we can juxtapose director Christopher Columbus (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) with David Yates (all the Harry Potter films since Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) since both directors fall short of the criteria I’ve written out. In this case, Columbus and Yates demonstrate the shortcomings of lacking vision and lacking cohesiveness, respectively.
When I first saw Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone nine years ago (yikes! I’m getting old), I was severely disappointed not by the special effects (though at the time some of them were at best mediocre) nor the actors they chose, but simply because the film itself felt lifeless compared to the experience of reading the original novel. This was entirely due to Columbus’ insistence on writing and filming every detail from the book. Every. Bloody. Thing.
This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if not for the expositions that otherwise in print, were boring and on screen catered to audience members absolutely incapable of inference or simple connect-the-dots. Yes, every literal aspect of the book was included, but what was sorely missing was the creativity in driving these details to life on the big screen. When reading the books, Potter fans have the luxury of imagining what Hogwarts could not only look like, but feel and smell like – the sort of personal, mental improv literary lovers engage in. With Columbus, who wanted to remain “pure” to the books, there simply isn’t any of this whimsy or emotion incorporated into the two movies he directed (the second one less so than the first, but still sorely lacking from its true potential). For Potter fans, his films are a bore; for other moviegoers, they might be cute, but nothing spectacular.
On the polar opposite end is David Yates, who has taken enormous liberty with Rowling’s narrative to the point of making the last three (and possibly four, with Deathly Hallows Part 2) almost exclusive to Potter fans, and effectively incomprehensible to others (and even veteran book readers, myself included). No doubt his films look fantastic: Yates has never failed to deliver on fantastic visuals, and exciting feats conjured up in the realm of magic, good and evil. However, I suspect Yates decided from the beginning that he wanted his interpretation of Harry Potter to be exciting!, spectacular!, and phantasmic! – which, quite simply, can only explain why he consistently chooses to omit key detail and streamline a rather extensive plot thread into a goal-oriented fantasy run.
I have the fortune of being hazily familiar with the Harry Potter series, just enough that I can remember certain “big” events happening (horcruxes anyone?) Still, Yates’ retelling of Rowling’s tale has confused me on numerous occasions, boiling down to things simply happening because they did and they can and that’s how the story goes. I appreciate his artistic additions to the series (in The Order of the Phoenix, the battle sequence between Dumbledore and Voldemort entails a beautiful sequence of red, green and blue, all incorporated into various elements of nature and industrial constructions), but there’s also a dire need for narrative cohesiveness if you want non-Potter moviegoers to piece a and b together, and so on. Frankly, I can’t for the life of me remember anything narratively significant except for the big points (I won’t spoil them here) and that there are big shiny fights every once in awhile. In The Deathly Hallows Part 1, I simply gave up trying to recall how things happened in the first place (“why is Harry holding that piece of mirror? And why did Dobby conveniently pop up at the best time?”) and had to consult friends and Wikipedia to clarify some key terms. Call me a non-Potter fan (I prefer to label myself as ambivalent), but if a movie based off a series I’m familiar with becomes effectively incomprehensible (“why don’t they just apparate away from those snatchers?”), I think there’s definitely a basic problem with book-to-script adaptation.
The best director of the Potter series is Alfonso Cuaron, hands down. With The Prisoner of Azkaban, Cuaron not only adapted the script appropriately to the story’s increasingly dark fold (Rowling’s third book is my favorite in the series because of this), but drastically departed away from Columbus’ antiseptic vision, incorporating a grayer color palette that emphasized moments of brightness (and blood), as well as giving Harry, Ron and Hermione the dignity of not having to be in their robes 24/7. The movie is certainly far from perfect, but Cuaron’s departure from his docile directing predecessor was a breath of fresh air, the Harry Potter movie fans and moviegoers had been waiting for. The narrative is comprehensive, the artistry and creative liberty is apparent and in vein with Cuaron’s style (people have joked that Cuaron so drastically changed the landscape of Hogwarts that somehow, in the acres of Hogwarts, a massive earthquake took place to elevate the school 10 feet without anybody noticing). Cuaron set an example of his directing successors, the most obvious being Yates’ adherence to a gray palette to hyper-emphasize splashes of color during his various action scenes; unfortunately, it seems that Yates may have taken to Cuaron’s aversion from literalism too far, resulting in the invariability of making the Potter series increasingly streamlined at the cost of comprehension.
It’s inevitable that people with disagree with me on various points, but I fundamentally believe an adaptation must have an equal balance of the original narrative’s cohesion and offer something new artistically. What this balance is difficult to say until the final product comes to fruition, and solely up to what the writer and director have to say about it.
Recommended Reading/Links
• Jason Reitman in Conversation - director Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air) talks about film and his take on adapting books into film, and why The Catcher in the Rye is unfilmable.
• Albus Dumbledore versus Voldemort – the clip of interest I mentioned above.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 review – by Todd McCarthy
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 review - by A.O. Scott