Film Review: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
This is the third of eight. The first instalment is here and the second is here; the series is taken in release order and judged against what each film was trying to be.
The previous entry closed on the observation that Christopher Columbus's decision to stand down was the most valuable thing anybody did on it. That holds. But it was not a decision taken in a vacuum, and the circumstances surrounding it — who was hired, who replaced whom, and what the new man did with the light — are the whole story of this film. Prisoner of Azkaban is the only one of the eight that is any good as cinema, and it is also the one that does the most damage to the book. Those two facts are not in competition. They are the same fact.
Rowling's third novel appeared on 8 July 1999: 317 pages, the longest of the three to that point, a third Smarties Prize and then the Whitbread. It is also the volume in which she stopped writing about a boy looking for a family and started writing about the family he had lost, and about institutions — the Ministry, the dementors, the letter of the law — as things capable of being comprehensively wrong. Everything the saga later became is in it. The film, released five years on, had a decision to make about whether to grow up alongside it, and made the braver and costlier of the two available choices.
The plot, briefly. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), now thirteen, inflates his Aunt Marge, flees the Dursleys, and learns that Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) has escaped Azkaban and is coming for him. Dementors are posted at Hogwarts; Remus Lupin (David Thewlis) is the new Defence teacher and teaches Harry the Patronus Charm; a map finds its way into Harry's hands; the story converges on the Shrieking Shack, a werewolf, a rat, and a night that has to be run twice.
What was cut, and what the cutting cost
The adaptation is loose in a way the first two were not, and the looseness is not evenly distributed. It is concentrated almost entirely in one place: the Marauders. The film keeps the map and throws away its makers. Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs go unnamed; that Harry's father and his friends were unregistered Animagi goes unexplained; the Fidelius Charm, which is the only mechanism that makes Sirius's supposed betrayal intelligible, goes unexplained too, as does how he got out of Azkaban at all. The stag appears in the climax and is never identified as Prongs. The whole inheritance — that Harry is being protected and pursued by his father's friends, and that the map is his father's handwriting — is reduced to a shouted line in a shack.
Around that hole, other excisions. The Quidditch season is cut to a single match Harry loses; the Cup is never won. The Firebolt is no longer an anonymous midwinter gift impounded by McGonagall, just a present that turns up at the end already vouched for. Cho Chang is removed entirely, Potions classes with them, and Harry's reaction to the betrayal is upgraded from paralysis to "I'm gonna kill him."
Some of this is good discipline. A 636-page Goblet was two years away, and Kloves was learning the compression that the later films would need. But the Shrieking Shack sequence is where the bill comes due. It is the emotional centre of the novel and here it plays as a rush of exposition delivered at speed by men in a hurry, and the reason is that the film has spent two hours on mood and none on the paperwork that mood is supposed to be about. Cuarón's interest is in the boys' interiority — in fear, in shame, in the specific dread of being thirteen — and he is very good at it. He is much less interested in plot furniture, and the film is consequently the best of the eight and the least useful as an adaptation.
The director
Columbus was physically spent after two films shot back to back and moved to producer, citing his children; Warners, sensibly, moved the series onto an eighteen-month cycle so that no one would have to do that again. Guillermo del Toro was approached and passed, on the grounds that the first two films were too "bright and happy and full of light." Marc Forster and M. Night Shyamalan were sounded out. The shortlist came down to Callie Khouri, Kenneth Branagh and Alfonso Cuarón, and Cuarón got it in July 2002.
He did not want it. He had not read the books or seen the films. Del Toro berated him into reading them, after which he signed. Rowling, who adored A Little Princess and Y tu mamá también, was delighted; David Heyman called him "tonally and stylistically" the perfect fit. What he brought was not decoration. He had the three leads write first-person essays as their characters — Watson produced ten pages, Radcliffe two, Grint none at all, on the grounds that Ron wouldn't have done it, which is the most complete piece of character work anyone did on the production. He dressed the students in mufti off duty and let them wear their uniforms like clothes rather than costume. He had the Hogwarts model enlarged by forty per cent and put the camera on real ground at Glen Coe, Loch Shiel and Virginia Water. Michael Seresin shot it on wide lenses with source-driven light and shadows in the corners, sparing close-ups, and the camera stopped sitting still.
The Dumbledore
Richard Harris died of Hodgkin's disease on 25 October 2002, three weeks before Chamber of Secrets opened, having told Heyman not to recast. Ian McKellen declined — Harris had been publicly dismissive of his Gandalf — and Peter O'Toole, whom the family wanted, also passed. Cuarón cast Michael Gambon four months after the death. Gambon did his scenes in three weeks, in a slight Irish accent as homage, and Jany Temime dressed him as an old hippie in floating tie-dyed silk, a deliberate break from Harris's heavy, majestic robes.
It is the largest single rupture in the series and the most consequential. Harris played a poet; Gambon plays a man who might lose. The gain is immediate — this Dumbledore can be physical, eccentric, funny, and can carry the third act's panic — and so is the loss, because the twinkle becomes a glint and the serenity becomes something closer to calculation. Gambon had not read the books and played the script, which is fine here and progressively less fine later; the "DID YOU PUT YOUR NAME IN THE GOBLET" reading, two years off, has its seed in this performance. The recasting was unavoidable. The reinterpretation was a choice, and it is the one place where the film's freedom costs the saga continuity rather than enriching it.
The tone, against the first two
This is where the film is unmistakably a different object from its predecessors. The chocolate-box England is gone. John Seale's permanent late-afternoon glow, the Christmas-card Hogwarts, the Oxbridge lawns — all of it is replaced by a cold, grey, wet, autumnal Britain in which the grounds are mud and the sky is a threat. Cuarón marks the school year with a time-lapse of the Whomping Willow shedding and regrowing its leaves, and it is a lovelier piece of storytelling than anything in either previous film. The dementors are genuinely dreadful, designed around the idea of a wound rather than a monster. John Williams, asked for something new, sets the witches' lines from Macbeth as a choral waltz — "Double Trouble" — and it is the best thing he wrote for the series after Hedwig's Theme.
And it does all this inside a PG. That is worth stating plainly, because the received wisdom is that the series darkened at Goblet and the certificates followed. Not so: the darkness arrives here, in a film the BBFC passed at PG, and it is achieved by atmosphere rather than by body count. Cuarón's comic register is intact and often better than Columbus's, because it is faster and stranger — the Knight Bus and its shrunken head, Emma Thompson's Trelawney, the choir, the triple-decker swerve through London traffic. He is a better director of children than Columbus is, and a less sentimental one, which is not the same thing as a colder one.
The industry around it
The summer of 2004 was Shrek 2, Spider-Man 2, Troy, Van Helsing, The Day After Tomorrow, I, Robot. Against a $130 million budget the film took $810.6 million — second in the world that year behind Shrek 2 and, by some distance, the lowest-grossing Potter of the eight. Its opening weekend of $93.7 million was the third-biggest ever at the time and set a June record that stood for five years. It earned two Oscar nominations, for Score and Visual Effects, four BAFTA nominations, the publicly voted Orange Film of the Year, and in 2011 a First Light award as Film of the Decade.
The commercial lesson was misread in the only way studios misread lessons. The best-reviewed entry in the franchise made the least money, so Warners concluded that a director's picture was a liability and never hired another one: Mike Newell, a solid journeyman, for Goblet; David Yates, a television man, for the remaining four. Yates would go on to be very good at some of it. But the series never again looked like this, and the eight films are weaker for it. Cuarón, for his part, went and made Children of Men.
Rowling called it "Alfonso's version of my world," which is both a compliment and an accurate description of a film that is a version rather than a transcription.
Verdict
Prisoner of Azkaban is arguably the best film of the eight by a margin, and the least faithful, and it is not obvious that the second fact is a fault. It looks extraordinary, it moves, it is the first Potter with any interest in what adolescence actually feels like, and the trio give performances here that nothing before or after them earns. Oldman, Thewlis, Spall and Thompson are the best single infusion of cast the series got, and the sequence in which Harry waits for his own Patronus across the lake is the only scene in eight films that approaches poetry.
It is also, in the end, a brilliant film of the wrong book. By discarding the Marauders it discards the thing the novel is about — inherited debt, the friends of your father, the map as a will and testament — and leaves a beautiful shell where a spine should be. The two facts sit together, unresolved, exactly as they should. It took a director with no reverence for the material to make the material sing, and then the studio took the director away.
RATING: 7/10
Blog in Croatian https://draxblog.com
Blog in English https://draxreview.wordpress.com/
InLeo blog https://inleo.io/@drax.leo
Substack https://draxster.substack.com/
BTC donations: 1EWxiMiP6iiG9rger3NuUSd6HByaxQWafG
ETH donations: 0xB305F144323b99e6f8b1d66f5D7DE78B498C32A7
BCH donations: qpvxw0jax79lhmvlgcldkzpqanf03r9cjv8y6gtmk9