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.

Prisoner of Azkaban exemplifies, the best of all the films, the way the Harry Potter movies act as active, engaged editors to a set of books that never, except in the earliest going, had ones. Once the books were hits, it was clear Rowling didn’t have anyone meaningfully scrutinizing her work to tell her what was and wasn't working; it’s obvious not just in the rapidly ballooning lengths of the books, or in particularly bad subplots like S.P.E.W. (i.e. the “Hermione gets too haughty about ending chattel slavery” stuff), but in the way each novel buckles under its episodic, formulaic excess, with the mess of classes, interpersonal squabbles, Quidditch matches, and the need to trace an entire school year muddying the narrative throughline, and often making it impossible for a thematic center to emerge. Watching Prisoner of Azkaban in movie form, though, you can see how acutely Cuarón and screenwriter Steve Kloves cue in on a central theme and make it the spine undergirding the whole film: Harry’s ongoing grief over the loss of the parents he cannot remember, and the life with them he never got to live. It is visceral and deeply felt, right from the opening scene – where Aunt Marge antagonizes Harry about his absent parents – on to the very end, with Harry becoming his phantasmal father and Sirius telling him that “the ones we love never really leave us.”

Those themes are certainly present in Rowling’s book, and are a big reason why readers have always responded to Prisoner of Azkaban particularly strongly; of all seven novels, it is the one that comes closest to squaring the circle between the episodic, procedural adventures at Hogwarts and a moving, focused character-driven story. But it doesn’t get there entirely: those ideas must still fight for space with a lot of entirely unrelated Hogwarts subplots (like multiple full Quidditch chapters), and it’s the book where the nastiness of the Ron/Hermione dynamic really starts coming to the fore. It’s also the entry where Rowling’s penchant for extended exposition starts getting the better of her, as the climax of Azkaban saddles readers with dozens and dozens of pages of often interesting, but also completely momentum-shattering history and world-building. Cuarón’s film is sometimes criticized by fans for how many details are never conveyed – the full details of the Lupin/Sirius/Pettigrew/James friendship are elided, and we never get the animagus backstory – but as an exercise in narrative construction, I would strongly urge those viewers to take a cold, clinical look at that stretch of the book, then watch the movie version, and tell me which is better drama. Because ‘lore,’ no matter how interesting, is a different matter entirely than effective storytelling.

Look, for instance, at the sheer length and amount of exposition that exists between Peter Pettigrew's name being invoked by Sirius and Lupin, and the reveal that Ron’s rat Scabbers is, in fact, Pettigrew himself (it stretches from the end of Chapter 17 to the middle of Chapter 19). In Kloves’ script, once Peter’s name is dropped, the film focuses in on it like a laser, making it the point of tension the scene operates on until we get to the introduction of Timothy Spall. Where Chapters 17, 18, 19, and 20 of the book vacillate between major narrative incident and long stretches of backstory narration, the film keeps the intensity up the entire time: from the set piece of Harry and Hermione getting inside the Whomping Willow to the moment Harry finally succumbs to the Dementors and passes out, Kloves and Cuarón keep their feet on the accelerator, only allowing a break in the tension in that brief moment the characters think they are safe before Lupin transforms into a werewolf. That stretch in the novel is a large fraction of the total page count, and it has many peaks and valleys of rising and falling tension; and it simply isn’t possible to convey real narrative intensity if the characters sit back and listen to someone else monologue their life story for dozens of pages (Rowling runs into this problem a lot – the terror of Voldemort’s return in Goblet of Fire is more than a little undercut by how long Harry is frozen listening to the Big Bad meticulously narrate his perspective of the last fourteen years). Kloves and Cuarón are simply more skilled at cinematic storytelling than Rowling is at literary narration. The result is a version of the climax with many fewer story details, but a plot that unfolds with much more dramatic weight. Of course, the fact the story works at all, and that the central theme comes through so strongly (including why Sirius/Lupin/Pettigrew are the adult triad reflecting it to us), more or less proves that Rowling didn’t actually need most of that exposition in the first place.

There are other small changes throughout that show just how sharper a writer Steve Kloves is than J.K. Rowling. The film gives Sirius and Harry two major bonding moments, for instance – looking up at the Hogwarts Castle together, before Lupin transforms, and their heartfelt goodbye in the courtyard before Sirius flies away – where the book never actually invests much in the positive emotions of this relationship. There is a scene where Sirius talks to Harry about coming to live with him in the novel, but it is more dry, lacking that personal connection around the symbol of Hogwarts itself; and the goodbye is very hurried in the book, with Harry rushing Sirius off without a conversation instead of slowing down for a thematic denouement. The wisest change, though, comes earlier, in the memory Harry chooses for his Patronus in his lessons with Lupin. In the book, the memory Harry lands on is the moment he learned he was a Wizard and would be leaving the Dursleys for Hogwarts – a memory about getting to leave something bad behind. That’s all well and good, but it’s not really what this specific story is about, is it? Prisoner of Azkaban is fundamentally focused on the life Harry never got to live with his loving parents, and learning to live amidst that regret while still carrying their love inside him. So Kloves, wisely, instead gives Harry a half-remembered, hazy vision of his parents talking to him as a baby. He literally has Harry turn his grief into his shield, literalizing the idea that “the ones we love never really leave us,” and making Harry’s belief in that idea the measuring stick by which his character progression is charted (Harry only has the power to save himself and Sirius from the horde of dementors once he has learned and internalized this idea). This is what it means to be a good, active adaptation: to intensely hone in on what works best in the source material, and concentrate upon (or even rearrange it) until those ideas sing as best they can.

Of course, Cuarón’s film does all this with an absolutely intoxicating sense of style and texture, of character and playfulness. Few movies feel so ludicrously alive as this one does; it is some of the best, most imaginative presentation of fantasy I have ever seen on film, from start to finish. I love the colors of this movie, all of its surfaces, all of its mysteries: the way the images feel so immediate and tactile. Cuarón portrays the whole world, magical and natural, as one big living organism, both wondrous and violent. We see this most obviously in the moments conveying the passing of the seasons – those wonderful little ellipsis with the Whomping Willow, as it drops its Fall leaves or shakes off the last bits of snow – but that attitude is everywhere. The whole world lives and breathes, some of it animated by magic, some of it by the seasons and weather; some of it is warm and beautiful, some of it cold and scary, and sometimes it is all these things at the same time. The world is animated and animistic, to the point that even seemingly stationary objects seem to have an attitude, perhaps even a soul. Look at how the film depicts the Shrieking Shack, this big physical set that is literally swaying throughout the whole scene, breathing back and forth in slow, juddering movements alongside the ebbs and flow of the drama. It is an absolute marvel of mise-en-scene, and at many points, Prisoner of Azkaban has more in common with classic animation – like the Fleischer Brothers’ Out of the Inkwell shorts, or Disney’s Silly Symphonies – than it does any live-action blockbuster of its era.

Harry’s first flight on Buckbeak is another sequence I love, and one of the best examples of something all the Harry Potter movies regularly do that the books mostly don’t: build in moments to really revel in the wonder and magic of this world, to instill in the viewer an embodied, visceral sense of what it would be like to engage with a landscape of actual magic. In her books, Rowling renders magic something fairly mundane, a pseudo-scientific force that is described, catalogued, and exposited, not necessarily wondered at and made awe-inspiring. The movies – all of them, to their credit, albeit Prisoner of Azkaban most of all – endeavor to make the magic something wondrous, something we feel, and look upon with real astonishment.

Speaking of making the world feel ‘alive,’ look at what Cuarón does with the costumes in this film (alongside the great Jany Temime, who took over costume design here and continued for the rest of the series). Prisoner of Azkaban completely upends what the characters’ garb looked like in the previous films, and even how they're described in the book, in favor of designs that work so much better for cinema, as tools for performance and characterization in this intimate visual medium. The school uniforms feel like actual everyday outfits, with everyone wearing them a little differently, and when the characters are in their casual attire, everybody's in different colors and fits that express them specifically as characters and make them all easily distinguishable; in lieu of the sea of identical black robes that dominate the first two films, Cuarón and Temime quite literally color code Harry, Ron, and Hermione for the last hour here, in stark blue, maroon, and pink, respectively.

That kind of creativity is visible everywhere, as Prisoner of Azkaban also inaugurates something I truly love about the Harry Potter movies, which is that every film reinvents the mise-en-scene, adding on to and changing what came before. Azkaban doesn’t just give us new locations like Hogsmeade, but rethinks the entire layout of the Hogwarts grounds (that long covered bridge is probably its best addition, though placing a big Scottish hill between the castle and Hagrid’s hut is also essential), and adopts a radically different style of lighting and color in its cinematography. Subsequent directors Mike Newell and David Yates kept this tradition alive by swapping cinematographers (all of them world class, and resolutely unique in their presentation of this world), and rethinking various sets and costumes (Newell gave the boys long, unkempt hair for Goblet of Fire, while Yates favored short crew cuts in his films, for instance). Every Potter film past the original two Christopher Columbus entries presents a slightly (or not-so-slightly) different vision of the world, none of them fully in line with each other, but that inconsistency is productive and interesting. We live now in a continuity-obsessed culture, where franchise images are so set in stone that even the recasting of dead actors is verboten, and their corpses must be puppeteered through CGI forever (I shudder to think how Richard Harris’ passing would have been handled today – would we have gotten Michael Gambon’s wonderful re-interpretation, or would we have had a CGI deepfake Dumbledore for six more films?). I wish more film series were willing to swing big like this, to be expressive and experimental and additive in how they imagine their worlds between entries.

Even the music goes in a wildly different direction than what we had heard before. After largely sitting on the sidelines for Chamber of Secrets, John Williams returned for Prisoner of Azkaban and essentially threw out everything he had done before, returning to the drawing board and completely reinventing the sound of the series. The resulting soundtrack is big and sweeping and emotional in the way Williams’ best blockbuster scores always are, but it’s also immensely playful and inventive with its instrumentation and texture, more akin to some of the work he was doing with Spielberg in this period on films like Catch Me If You Can. The soundtrack so perfectly matches the lively, unpredictable look Cuarón built here, like the music is extending out of the scenery, a part of the magic and the nature of this universe. Even for the truly great composers, that total synthesis between mise-en-scene and mise-en-bande is often elusive, a magic trick that is intoxicating when achieved; Williams did it here, and it honestly might be my favorite score of his career.

The main trio of Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson all take a major leap forward as actors here, and a huge part of that is down to how Cuarón directs and stages things. Christopher Columbus largely filmed in tight shot-reverse-shot coverage so he could assemble the performances in the editing booth, as a means of getting around the challenge of working with child actors. Cuarón just treats them as professionals. There is a lot less editing in this film compared to the first two, many more long takes where multiple characters are in frame bouncing off one another’s energy, which is absolutely essential in establishing the reality of these characters and their personalities and relationships. Those main three really come into their own as performers when they’re all sharing the frame, acting opposite each other in real time, without the edit bouncing constantly from one to the other. On one level, this is basic stuff – though there are a few very impressive 'oners' that portend some of what Cuarón would do after this film, in Children of Men, Gravity, and Roma – but it speaks to how much trust Cuarón placed in his young cast, and what wonders he worked giving them the tools to perform.

For the adults, it's amazing just how many great actors this one adds to the already stacked ensemble: David Thewlis, Gary Oldman, Timothy Spall, Emma Thompson, and Michael Gambon would be an astonishingly great group purely on their own, and make for a wildly effective expansion of an already extraordinary cast. Thewlis in particular gives one of the best performances in the series, and Gambon is just a joy to behold. While his performance vacillated in different directions in later entries, his work in this film specifically might be my favorite depiction of Dumbledore on screen: very playful, very wise, but also a little bit off. A touch mad. I love the suggestion that he knows everything that’s going on, even down to the time travel shenanigans, and is running interference for the gang the whole time. Gambon’s Dumbledore is a genius, but he also has a screw loose – exactly as it should be.

As for Alan Rickman, who wears the series' overall performance crown, I would say this is his best turn in all eight films, with the possible exception of Deathly Hallows Part 2. You really see what a good read he has on Severus Snape here – a better read than Rowling, I would strongly contend. Rickman’s Snape can be petty and mean, is short-tempered and strict, but as we see in the climax, he is also the kind of person who would throw himself in front of his students if they were threatened, even if those students are ones he personally dislikes. And that absolutely makes sense for the person we ultimately know Snape to be from the revelations at end of the series – a man who puts his life on the line day in and day out by playing double agent – even though Rowling, bafflingly, never gave him any similar moments of everyday decency in the books.

Prisoner of Azkaban is pretty much the platonic ideal for me of a book-to-film adaptation, and not just for Harry Potter. Nothing that ends up on screen here is merely a simple translation of what’s on the page; everything we see and hear is an active reaction to the book, every scene, every set design, every performance taking ideas from the text and then running forward boldly, adding its own creativity, its own soul, tweaking things wherever necessary to be maximally effective as cinema, on its own terms. No matter how well one knows the book – and no matter how strained one’s relationship with said book might be all these years later – Cuarón’s film will astound, surprise, and challenge you. And that is absolutely crucial when adapting from one medium to another, the exact kind of attitude one should have when making new work from an existing story. The book is just a springboard, one Cuarón and company use to jump, taking a dive into waters of their own artistry. Twenty years later, in a Hollywood landscape that’s so much more grim, colorless, and hollow, it feels all the more miraculous that this film exists.

NEXT WEEK: We finally celebrate the 100th anniversary of Buster Keaton’s classic SHERLOCK JR. For real this time. I promise.

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1. Well, listened to them, via the excellent audio books by Jim Dale – easier to fit in something like that while walking the dog or running errands.