Film

*** Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Directed by Chris Columbus. Written by Steve Kloves. Based on the novel by J.K. Rowling. With Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, John Cleese, Robbie Coltrane, Warwick Davis, Richard Grif ths, Richard Harris, Ian Hart, John Hurt, Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw, Maggie Smith, and Julie Walters. A Warner Bros. release.

The Harry Potter novels, a projected series of seven following Harry through his wizard training (four have been published so far), are the sort of phenomenon that makes everyone sit up and resalute Gutenberg. Of course, some folks never stop saluting Mammon, so it would be fruitless to argue that Harry and his world might have been better suited to the connecting of individual imaginations with Rowling’s, like wands made from the same phoenix’s feathers. Books that capture the collective fancy the way the Harry Potter set have, selling some 110 million copies, do not escape becoming movies. At least Warner Bros. had to toe the line with Rowling, lest Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (already in production, with the same creative team) get made by some other studio. It was the Scottish writer who nixed Haley Joel Osment in the title role and insisted on a British cast anchored by adolescent unknowns.

The Harry Potter saga, for those who have spent the last ve years in Middle Earth (your time will come), is a blend of Arthurian legend and very particular fantasy that mixes English prep-school experience with a matter-of-fact culture of wands and witchcraft, cauldrons and charms. Harry, famous since birth though he doesn’t know it until destiny arrives by owl post, survived a backfired curse that sapped the dark lord who’s terrifying the wizard world of his power. Raised by non-magical relatives in a manner that would make Cinderella weep, Harry is rescued by the call to Hogwarts castle. There he will nd family and undertake a magical education fraught by peril as Voldemort hovers in the hope of a comeback and Harry can’t keep his nose out of intrigue. Intended for young readers, the books, with their quirkish world governed by a Ministry of Magic and enthralled by an airborne form of soccer called Quidditch, have made fanatics of readers of all ages, who await the next installment the way, well, the way they’ve awaited this movie.

The film begins promisingly, retaining the mysterious and eccentric prologue in which the infant Harry, his parents murdered, is delivered by wizard protectors to live out the sentence of his childhood on Privet Drive with — in the shuddering words of Maggie Smith’s Professor Minerva McGonagall — “the worst sort of Muggles imaginable.” “Muggles” is wizard-speak for non-magical people like us, and Professor McGonagall is right in that Harry’s Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia, and cousin Dudley — spiteful, spoiled slaves of normality whose portrayal and comeuppance are among the film’s satisfying aspects — are about as bad as we come, short of criminality.

As the film begins, to the spooky tinkle of composer John Williams in a subtle mood (enjoy it, it won’t last), an owl soars over the shadowy suburb and Richard Harris’s richly robed and bearded Albus Dumbledore appears, summoning the flames from the street lights. A glowing ball flashes in the night sky, like something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Robbie Coltraine’s massive and tender Hagrid the gamekeeper lands with a screeching skid on a flying motorcycle, bearing Harry in patterned swaddling. It’s then that Williams hits the storm pedal as the film’s title hurtles into view and later that things go a bit awry, Harry’s wizarding adventure coming to seem more like Star Wars, with whooshing broomsticks replacing intergalactic gadgetry, or the Indiana Jones series with a pint-sized hero. It seems that director Chris Columbus, who’s best known for the Home Alone films, once aspired to draw cartoons for Marvel Comics. And for all the effective marshaling of venerable settings and fanciful effects, too much of a Marvel sensibility infects the film.

On the one hand, Columbus would seem to comprehend that Harry’s journey toward belonging is the heart of the story. No little trouble was taken to enlist the now-12-year-old Radcliffe, who matches a laid-back awe, as Harry encounters the marvelous rudiments of his destiny, with an intense yet subtle longing for the roots he never had. But filmmaker Columbus distrusts the power of words at crucial junctures. Never is the film tackier than when it interrupts Hagrid hesitantly telling Harry his own story with a very non-magical horror-movie flashback to his parents’ murder by Voldemort.

Despite an unflagging attention to suspense and effects, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is faithful, in a necessarily shorthand way, to Rowling’s story. It’s better, though, before it gives itself over to the pursuit, by Harry and pals Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, of the mystery involving the sorcerer’s stone, a shimmering garnet slug with both alchemical and immortality-supplying powers sequestered beneath a maze of spells at Hogwarts. Take, for example, the lm’s rendition of that magical marketplace Diagon Alley. We see Harry and Hagrid bustling through modern London (Hagrid looking drolly unlikely in his trademark beard and moleskin coat), then ducking through the divy wizard bar, the Leaky Cauldron, into a bustling Victorian bazaar. It’s as if they’d stepped onto a Dickensian street — augmented, of course, by the paraphernalia, from stately owls to magic wands, for sale in its dusty shops. Similarly, Gringotts, the fortress-like wizard bank managed by sternly bureaucratic goblins, is scrupulously, whimsically rendered. As for Quidditch, when the players finally mount their brooms and zoom above a cheering stadium, the game looks harrowingly fast and very nearly homicidal.

Even at two and a half hours, the film can’t include everything. There’s plenty of middle-school gross-out, but such Hogwarts staples as pumpkin juice and Peeves the poltergeist hit the cutting-room floor. And the movie gets rushed once Harry, Ron, and Hermione stumble upon the ferociously slobbering three-headed dog (not Cerberus but “Fluffy”) guarding the stone and set out, Nancy Drew–like, to figure out what the treasure is and who’s after it. Some elements of plot may elude viewers unfamiliar with the book. But Columbus is less interested in the kids’ sleuthing than in its action-packed consequences, as the gutsy trio face knife-sharp flying keys and chessmen set on reducing one another to rubble before Harry meets his unexpected nemesis (in an encounter that’s cheesier and less chilling than it should be). For my money, the entire climactic sequence would be more effective if we hadn’t already watched so many things get bashed to bits.

The wizarding populace, however, looks wonderful, whether John Cleese, in little more than a cameo as Gryffindor House ghost Nearly Headless Nick, is wafting up through a platter of chicken legs or Warwick Davis’s diminutive Professor Flitwick is teaching from atop a tower of ancient-appearing tomes.

Most surprising is Alan Rickman’s take on greasy, Harry-hating potions professor Snape. Not only did the actor’s slack hairdo and dark-eyed intensity connect me with the physical shape Snape had taken in my mind (Laurence Olivier in Richard III), but Rickman takes one of Rowling’s most odious, if non-lethal, baddies and imbues him with a quizzical mien that’s infinitely more interesting. Fortunately, this is no Robin Hood, in which Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham stole the movie from the prince of thieves. Harry Potter, his mantle of nobility resting comfortably on Radcliffe’s skinny shoulders, is an unconquerable adversary.

Hogwarts and all

Harry Potter hits the screen