So, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone we have quidditch, and the lightning-bolt scar, and a giant magical castle. But we lose any sense of story, of connection between characters and between one segment of the tale and the next. We are always watching a movie; we are never flies on the wall, watching a young man's life.

Case in point: in the book, when Draco makes off with Neville's remembrall, it is one of the book's most telling, involving, and important scenes. As Harry pursues, riding a broomstick for the first time, he finds it's something he does well without even trying. He discovers the thrill of mastery, all the headier for being immediate mastery. Harry has probably just taken his first major step to adulthood. He zooms over to Draco, who is not sitting quite as well on his own broom, and orders him to return the remembrall. Draco notes Harry's confidence and skill and quails a bit, flinging the remembrall at the ground rather than continuing to challenge the obviously better flier. In the movie, however, Draco makes off with the remembrall and Harry gives chase in a chain of unoriginal technical events that titillate the eye but deaden the heart. Where is Harry's discovery, his exhilaration, and where is Draco's capitulation to Harry's power? Why were the visuals so slavishly copied, but all the meaning excised?

Stifling the emotions of this movie could not be on account of its young audience. I bet more adults than kids will see this movie, but even a child of five prefers to see a movie invested with real feeling.

All the movie's pleasures are visual: the whizzing quidditch players; the young heads bowed over ancient leatherbound texts in a room with walls of stone, a shaft of morning sunlight illuminating their studies; the vision of the firelit Gryffindor common room that seemed to have been surgically removed from my imagination. All the movie's flaws are emotional or adaptational; there is a frenetic flightiness as the movie jumps from scene to scene, attempting to stuff its big hairy foot into a teeny glass slipper.

I know that no movie can fit in all the richness of a novel. But Harry Potter is the poster child for how souless and sad the mass-consumption remake of a rich work can be.

Fine actors are wasted, and worse, misused. Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid is too dry and too smart, looking the part but failing to convey the necessary essence of tenderhearted Hagrid. I disliked Emma Watson's character, as well. (Director Chris Columbus really deserves a smack here for Totally Not Getting It -- since when does Hermione genuinely believe herself to be superior?) The Hermione I knew really believed she was being helpful/observant/responsible -- the screen Hermione has a pathological desire to flash her intelligence, making her sappy friendship monologue at the end of the movie roll-your-eyes discordant.

And what pathetic, slavishly obeisant, idiotic waster of celluloid uses no less than John Cleese in a three-second, stroll-across-the-screen-as-you-say-your-line moment, revealing that Harry is the youngest seeker in a century? What an utter waste of precious screen time and of a comedy great. Cleese's character, Nearly Headless Nick, is laugh-out-loud funny in the book, but in the movie is a cheap kiddie-gore money shot, with nary a snicker from the audience.

The young actors, the oldest of whom was twelve when the movie was filmed, don't look out of place in this heartless and beautiful world that Columbus & company have lavished millions on. Not yet. Next year they won't look so bad either. But unless a director of exponentially more bravery and emotional complexity is hired, by the time Harry is old enough to get his learner's permit and shoplift rubbers from the drugstore, the later installments of the franchise are going look as ridiculous as Harvey Keitel playing Peter Pan. The fantasy worlds Rowling and Columbus have constructed are ideal for a shadow show of human struggles both utterly basic and specifically pre-teen, but the dead end looms as Harry hovers on the edge of being more man than child.

I will probably skip the next Harry movie, and America may, as we anoint the next fad. Harry fans have classics like Babe and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which pack more delight into their opening credits than Harry Potter did in its entire two and a half hours. And as for reading magic, Mr. Columbus and the Hollywood Movie Factory can never take the gentle wonder of Rowling's books away from us.

I love the Harry Potter books as much for their depiction of a young person finding emotional and social freedom, finding his skin and his place in the world, as for the sumptuous charms of the tapestry-hung Hogwarts. The childish thrill of magic is a shortcut to, and evidence of, personal power and... coolth. This movie gives us little more than the sugar rush of the latter; the former is still safely tucked within the novel, untouched by Chris Columbus's grubby little hack paws.

Jennifer Saylor, November 30, 2001