Proof’s in the Potter
Reviewing Sorcerer's Stone, the film.

Mr. Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post.
November 17-18, 2001

haven't looked forward to a movie in a long time, but I was very much looking forward to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone — largely on the strength of a trailer that may have been the most effective appetite-whetter I've ever seen. Alas, the movie proves to be dull, dull, dull. It's also wildly overlong in the fashion of the movie musicals of the 1960s that were aimed at children like Doctor Doolittle and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang but only succeeded in causing near-riots of boredom in the theaters showing them.

It's not a disaster, like those movies were, and it won't lead to kids going berserk in the aisles. It's beautifully rendered, lavish, and well-acted. It's a joy to watch great actors like Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, John Hurt, and Alan Rickman have themselves a busman's holiday dressing up in garish gear and looking as though they'd stepped out of a late Victorian illustration. The whole movie, in fact, looks like a full-page plate out of a Victorian fantasy-adventure story, like Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies. Director Chris Columbus gives full vent to the notion that the world of magic to which young Harry is happily introduced has not progressed beyond 1899 in terms of its taste in architecture, décor, or lighting. The movie is thrilling to look at.

It's slavishly faithful to J. K. Rowling's wondrous book. But in sensibility, the movie version is nothing like Rowling's imaginative and whimsical masterpiece, and that's why Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is such a disappointment. On the page, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is as fleet-footed as Mercury, funny and exciting and triumphant. But on screen, Harry Potter is dark, brooding, somber. The Victorian gothic gloom of the art direction infects the movie with a dreary virus.

Nobody's having fun at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and that's the movie's most dramatic failure. It's not clear why anybody would want to attend the school, and of course, when you read the book you want nothing so much as to be Harry Potter or his friends Ron and Hermione. While Daniel Radcliffe looks amazingly like the illustration on the cover of Rowling's book, he is rather charmless, and so is Rupert Grint's Ron Weasley. Only Emma Watson, as the know-it-all Hermione Granger, really seems like an 11-year-old kid delighted beyond words to be able to manipulate the world through magic.

Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is credited with giving millions of children a sense of the joys to be found inside the covers of books. Chris Columbus's Harry Potter isn't going to turn anybody into a moviegoer.