Four Wizards and a Funeral : Harry Potter goes through growing pains

by SCOTT FOUNDAS

In the fourth Harry Potter film, the adventures are more
perilous, the spells more powerful and the young
wizards’ own bodies roiling with tempests of pubescent
emotion. In the end, someone even dies. Yes, true to the
prerelease hype, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is
most definitely not kids’ stuff - the film, and the
lives of its characters, have graduated to a PG-13
rating - and as one who has never read so much as one
page of one Potter novel, I can only imagine where it
all goes from here. (Specifically, I imagine a Part 5 in
which an antiestablishment Harry blasts gangsta rap out
of his iPod and starts referring to Dobby the house elf
as ’Shorty.’)

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire traces the events
leading up to and constituting the storied ’Triwizard
Tournament,’ a sort of triathlon for magic people,
pitting Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
against two rival academies - one consisting entirely of
sashaying French schoolgirls, the stuff of many a
schoolboy fantasy; the other an army of burly, grunting
Eastern European bodybuilder types (also the stuff of
schoolboy fantasies). As for the titular burning
chalice, it will magically select the names of the three
wizards - one from each school - worthiest of the
Triwizard competition. There’s just one catch:
Competitors must be at least 17 years of age, which
makes 14-year-old Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) ineligible.
The End.

Well, not exactly. Believe it or not, by the time Goblet
of Fire reaches the terminus of its two-and-a-half-hour
running time, Harry hasn’t just turned the Triwizard
Tournament into a four-way affair, he’s performed beyond
all reasonable expectation. Someone, you see, has a
vested interest (and hardly a benevolent one) in making
sure young Harry survives this arsenal of fearsome
challenges.

The Tournament itself makes for an engaging spectacle,
sure to rekindle fond audience memories of childhood
intramural athletics: Harry does battle with a fire-
breathing dragon, at one point nimbly chasing it around
a steep shingle roof, then later navigates his way
through a shape-shifting hedge maze that can turn
entrants nearly psychotic with championship lust. The
versatile director Mike Newell (Dance With a Stranger,
Pushing Tin), who’s actually the first native Brit to
take a crack at a Potter picture, pulls off these
effects-intensive sequences with aplomb, if admittedly
none of the transcendent imagination that Alfonso Cuarón
brought to last summer’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner
of Azkaban - still the series’ best effort. But before
the games begin, we’re subjected to a litany of tedious
pre-show entertainments, including the Quidditch World
Cup (which I’m told takes up more than 100 pages of
Rowling’s book), the Yule Ball (Hogwarts’ version of a
homecoming dance), and a tentative romance between the
giant Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) and the equally
formidable Madame Olympe Maxime (West End grande dame
Frances de la Tour), headmistress of Beauxbatons
Academy. All of which, while reasonably amusing, feels
like something that the Potter films have thus far been
free of - a marking of time.

And Goblet of Fire is disappointing on other counts,
too. For the second in their series of obstacles, the
Triwizard contestants must rescue, from the icy Black
Lake, a close friend (in Harry’s case, Hermione) who has
been abducted, rendered unconscious and deposited in the
boggy depths by the tournament coordinators. It’s a
scenario whose unfathomable cruelty neither Newell nor
veteran series screenwriter Steve Kloves seems fully
prepared to confront. Nor do they seem any surer what to
make of the weirdly jealous behavior shown toward Harry
by his best mate Ron (Rupert Grint) in the wake of
Harry’s ascendant celebrity. (By the time Ron stops
speaking to Harry out of wounded pride, adolescents in
the audience may wonder if they’re watching an
adaptation of not J.K. Rowling but rather that staple of
every middlebrow middle school education: John Knowles.)

I suppose what I’m getting at is that adolescence is no
less sticky a situation for multibillion-dollar movie
franchises than it is for young witches and wizards, and
what is a Part 4 if not the cinematic equivalent of
those awkward tween years? More often than not at this
point in a series, novelty wears thin and reinvention
abounds - Jason Voorhes bites the dust, Jar Jar Binks
takes center stage, and the crew of the Starship
Enterprise plops down in San Francisco Bay - to varying
degrees of success. So why not a little teen angst for
Harry and company, especially when the actors’ own
gangly growth spurts (particularly Grint’s) have caused
them to resemble oversize Alices traipsing through toy-
box wonderlands? Purists, of course, will point out that
this is all derived verbatim from Rowling’s 700-page
tome - and far be it from me to suggest that a movie
should succeed on its own terms.

For this viewer, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
came alive only in the presence of a supposed dead man -
specifically, the nefarious Lord Voldemort, who brought
the lives of Harry’s parents to their untimely ends some
13 years ago, left Harry’s forehead emblazoned with its
distinctive lightning-bolt scar and now guides his young
archnemesis toward a fateful showdown. Resurrected here
in the form of a nearly unrecognizable Ralph Fiennes,
ashen of complexion and devoid of hair and nose,
Voldemort is like a primeval poltergeist loosed from the
deepest recesses of childhood paranoia. From the moment
he appears onscreen three-quarters of the way into the
picture, I was as if a child again, shivering under my
bed covers from some gruesome night terror; then the
lights came up, and like the teenage Harry, I found
myself all too abruptly returned to a world where there
are things far graver than nocturnal phantoms.

HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE
Directed by MIKE NEWELL
Written by STEVE KLOVES, based on the novel by J.K. Rowling
Produced by DAVID HEYMAN
Released by Warner Bros.
Citywide

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