Review: "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" is a model of great adaptation

Movie of the Week #20 for the film's 20th anniversary

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Around this time last year, I was in the midst of a project I never wound up completing: A soul-searching journey back through the Harry Potter books and movies, an exorcism I felt I had to complete to try understanding, if not reconciling, these books that had meant so much to me in my youth with the disgusting, dangerous bigot their author had become. I wanted to go back through the novels to see what the warning signs were, and try to understand how I actually felt about those books now, as an adult who inevitably sees texts from childhood through a radically different valence. I wanted to look at the films again, too, and see not only if they ‘held up,’ but if and how they ameliorated Rowling’s worst authorial tendencies, and whether they successfully stood apart from their source material. Because while the novels will always and indelibly be tied to their author and the dark, depressing legacy she has created for herself, the films are of course the collective artistry of thousands of people, many of whom – including their lead star, Daniel Radcliffe – have been clear and outspoken in their opposition to Rowling’s hateful anti-trans rhetoric.

I read through all seven books again,¹ revisited the films, took a lot of notes, and did a lot of preliminary writing on my broad observations. Hopefully I will finish that project one day in the form of an essay or a series of articles, because I collected an awful lot of material; in doing so, though, I also discovered that it’s all still pretty raw, and difficult to write about. Rowling’s books are so much more spiteful and caustic than I remembered, unpleasant in a way I think many of us who grew up on Harry Potter have ignored or forgotten. It isn’t just the rampant fat-phobia, or the highly misogynistic way Rowling describes and writes about women, or how she always connects physical appearance with individual morality (good-looking people are virtuous, ugly people are evil), or the subplot about how Hermione cares too much about ending chattel slavery – though certainly, that’s all part of it. There is simply this pervasive sense throughout the prose that no one in these novels actually likes each other; friends spat and argue exponentially more than they express affection, Harry is always angry and bitter towards his mentors until it’s too late, and romantic love is almost exclusively a product of jealousy and competition (Ron and Hermione’s relationship is just breathtakingly toxic and emotionally abusive on the page). It can be disturbing and disheartening to spend too much time embroiled in the atmosphere of these novels, in the cognitive dissonance of stories that are nominally about defeating a violent, divisive bigot, but are for the most part written from such a dark and divisive worldview. And this would all be true whether or not J.K. Rowling devoted the years since to harassing trans people and fueling a climate of anti-trans political hysteria in the UK; that bigotry simply makes the ugliness of her novels all the more apparent.

The Harry Potter films are, I can confidently say now, definitively and holistically better than Rowling’s books, not just because they cut out so much of the author’s narrative and expository excess, but because they love the characters and this world more than Rowling ever did; they are in wonder of this world and its many magical possibilities in a way the books rarely are, and they want the characters at the heart of that world to get along and show affection and share meaningful chemistry more than Rowling was ever capable of writing. Re-reading the books today, it is clear J.K. Rowling was always the kind of small, unempathetic, small-c conservative person who could become an outspoken bigot with capital-C Conservative politics. The films, for all the myriad commercial demands they bear, feel like actual labors of love from very talented people who were not just content to translate those stories, but to actively adapt and improve upon them. There is more love for the world, characters, and ‘idea’ of Harry Potter in the Harry Potter films than you will find anywhere in the Harry Potter books, because in retrospect, ‘love’ was never something J.K. Rowling was an artist capable of authentically expressing.

Case in point: I was happy to revisit Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third and greatest film in the series, and realize that it is still, simply put, one of my favorite movies, a film I love above and apart from the strange mix of nostalgia, frustration, and betrayal I feel over Harry Potter as a franchise. It is, purely on its own terms, a magnificent film, one of the most remarkable blockbuster texts of my lifetime, an increasingly rare instance of a true artistic visionary given the keys to the kingdom and going hog wild with relentless creativity and passion. It is of a piece with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy or Sam Raimi’s first two Spider-Man films, big franchise tentpoles made by actual artisans with real voices and personalities, before Hollywood reclaimed that power and vested it in the hands of anonymous hacks towing the company line (e.g. the vast majority of the Marvel movies). The Harry Potter movies are, like Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man, substantially responsible for popularizing the serial I.P. franchise model that defines Hollywood today, of course, but the idea of craft, creativity, and passion still mattered back then; Prisoner of Azkaban in particular has more in common with George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road than it does most of the franchise fare populating theaters today.