Pottermania has reached fever pitch with the arrival of the film of J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" (novel No. 5) and her final book in the series, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" (No. 7).
The focus of the frenzy is not tortured-adolescent wizard Harry or the appealing young actor playing him, Daniel Radcliffe, but Rowling herself -- even with the Potter movies becoming one of the most phenomenal film series in history.
I first "grokked" to the spellbinding quality of Rowling's mythology as a pair of tween girls prattled on charmingly behind me through the whole 2 hour, 22 minute, big-screen extravaganza of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" (2004).
The experience convinced me that just as Beatlemania enriched all branches of popular culture with fresh reservoirs of poetry and melody, Pottermania has roused new generations to the pleasures of engulfing storytelling, sculpted characters and inspired inventions -- on celluloid as well as on paper or computer screens.
The girls sitting behind me responded not just with the giddiness of friends out for a good time or fans getting a fix of their favorite series but also with the combination of ebullience, erudition and irritation you'd expect, say, from traditional theater critics watching a modern vision of a Shakespeare play.
They ooohed and aahed over the perfection of witty casting coups, such as cuttingly brilliant Emma Thompson playing foggy visionary Sybill Trelawney, professor of divination. They loved it when Trelawney said, "You boy! Is your grandmother well? I wouldn't be so sure of that." They expressed perplexity over Harry and his pals, on their first night back at Hogwarts, scarfing down enchanted snacks that pushed heat clouds out of one lad's ears and made another bellow like a big cat. "Was that in the book?" they wondered -- but they did their wondering between laughs.
In short, they enjoyed pointed interpretations of the sacred text; original invention alternately annoyed and delighted them. But it was the film's core fidelity to the spirit and driving action of Rowling's book that left them sated.
As individual pictures, the Harry Potter films have been fair to great. (I think "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" is one of the best fantasy films of all time, precisely because the director, Alfonso Cuaron, and his screenwriter, Steve Kloves, fused their own lyrical talents to Rowling's storytelling.) But as a franchise they've been all of a piece. Chris Columbus, the director of the first two movies, and Kloves, who wrote the first four (and will return for the sixth) made the decision early on that they would cleave to the books' textures and tones as well as plotlines.
