A SPOOKY SMALL GIRL WITH WIDE, UNBLINKING, ALMOST PROTUBERANT EYES POINTS A WAND IN SPACE AND CONJURES A SPECTRAL HARE, wild and bounding, that energetically clatters and crashes across a hallowed space: more of this, please. In Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, functional as narrative passageway from the things of youth to the damaging disappointments of adulthood and responsibility for its young charges, there is much motoring of plot for the readers and viewers who find J. K. Rowling’s multi-billion-dollar enterprise worthy of deeper, greater and longer concentration. (An uncommonly obsessed Potterphile accompanied me to the screening, and the blanks she filled in later only reinforced the idea that this movie is not at all intended as a coherent, standalone picture for those who do not read children’s lit.)
The small girl is Evanna Lynch, an Irish nonprofessional, who, as the lore insists, badgered Rowling herself as to how ideal she would be as young “Loony” Luna Lovegood. Here is a performer who has only to lift her chin slightly to suggest not just an old soul, but an old soul that’s been stoned for eons on the finest of fumes and dandelion wine. Bonnie Wright, who has almost nothing to do as Ginny Weasley, is also a striking casting choice, but reportedly has much on her hands in the book-movie-heated conversations to come. And of course, there is the matter of Daniel Radcliiffe’s cheekbones, a weapon in their own right. Lynch’s delivery of the line “You’re just as sane as I am” approaches profundity, while “I hope there’s pudding” gathers both a child’s hope of satiety and a genial otherworldliness. Blissed out, seemingly stoned to highest heaven, her smile is bliss. (Every shot she’s in beats any frame of Helena Bonham’s ineffectual and Carter’s dispatched madwoman murderer, done in wild-maned polecat getup that resembles her husband, Tim Burton, on a day without caffeine.)

There’s a grill-bar on my block that’s more restaurant or local than sports bar, but the TVs are on, and one recent night, the backroom held Brazilian soccer fans; in front someone’s talking “our lineup” and “our pitching depth” while taking in baseball; and a Porky Pig voice is talking about clay courts for tennis. I felt the same way a few nights later watching this Harry Potter entry. There are codes and context and facts and ventures grooved along the runnels of the brains of the sports adepts or the Harry fans, but to an outsider, there is the occasional pretty picture or arresting image. The Order of the Phoenix opens nicely in a grassy patch of suburb and the grainy azure sky goes to gray, black, bleak and beyond like an apocryphal Gregory Crewdson tableau. Later on, nestled in the corner of a frame is the loveliness of a Christmas fir that bears its own personal snowfall. (Harry’s flash-frame visions of terrible things seems drawn largely from Ken Russell’s eye-blink edits in Altered States.)
Well enough in the margins: first-time director David Yates is a practiced BBC hand, whose output includes dramas Sex Traffic and the Richard Curtis agit-rom-weepie The Girl In the Café. There are a few glimpses of the characters in London, such as at Kings Cross and along the waves of the Thames, that open up the cloistered scenes of feigned magic and perfumed sentiment, more the making of pictures than of drama. Plot turns and character traits seem arbitrary and casual rather than rooted in comprehensible mythology or resonance with larger cultural artifacts and tradition.
Still, political metaphor rears its head as the characters await the apparition of the apocalyptic Lord Voldemort. Bureaucratic threats pile on like duck pecks, with standardized tests and talk of how of “disloyalty” will be punished and “security” is preferable to freedom. The boss of it all is relentlessly despicable and terribly unpleasant Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), dressed in dowdy garb of fathomless puce and pink and mauve and rhubarb marmalade. (Radcliffe has referred to Umbridge as “a cross between Margaret Thatcher and Freddy Krueger.”) Umbridge invokes the name of the Ministry of Magic to issue picayune edicts the equivalent of students being told that “Bong Hits for Dumbledore” is forbidden speech. (Illegal forms of torture in order to retrieve information from children are also indicated as pro forma in the new world disorder.) The familiar faces from English acting that have littered the early films make modest cameos, with Alan Richman getting the most time to purr, as well as eye-blink glimpses of Ralph Fiennes, Robbie Coltrane, Maggie Smith, Julie Walters, Warwick Davis, David Thewlis, Fiona Shaw, Gary Oldman, Emma Thompson, Jason Isaacs, Richard Griffiths (very ill-treated), Brendan Gleeson, and the mutteringly magisterial Michael Gambon.
J. K. Rowling’s own story, it’s worth repeating, from single mother escaping the Glasgow chill to scribble her first book in warm cafes to keeper of her own queendom, generally holds more fascination than this glum thunderation. (The flurry of interviews and thumbsuckers keyed to the final book and to this film that you can find on the web is daunting.) Yates is set to direct the next film, before the violent climax of part seven, the beneficiary of the standing, practiced production, along the lines of the infrastructure the Broccoli family keeps together between the eons of Bond entries. It was a keen surprise to see that Yates chose as his cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, whose work includes Three Colors: Blue, The Decalogue, The Double Life of Veronique, Gattaca and Black Hawk Down. The darker palette (except for a late conversation where an elder explains a raft of backstory to Harry after several violent battles) does have a pictorial consistency.
Better than perfunctory, but hardly necessary, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix gets Warner Bros.’ bottom line from one fiscal year to the other with practical grace.

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