A few charms.(FILM)(Harry Potter film adaptations)

I DON'T envy anyone the task of adapting a Harry Potter novel for the screen; it's a thankless assignment that I wouldn't take on if you paid me. Well, all right, maybe I'd do it if you paid me ... and okay, I'd probably do it for free ... and fine, maybe I'd empty out my savings and pay you for the privilege. (Warner Brothers, are you listening?) But the original point stands. J. K. Rowling's novels are well-nigh unadaptable, and the proof is in the pudding. Of the five Potter films to date, only Alfonso Cuaron's Prisoner of Azkaban has soared more than a broomstick-length above the pedestrian, or conjured up enough cinematic magic to rival its beloved source material.

Rowling's books succeed by blending a host of different genres: Her fantasy landscape is closer to C. S. Lewis's Narnia than Tolkien's Middle-Earth, a mythological pastiche more than a proper sub-creation, and she takes the pastiche further than even Lewis did, filtering the fantasy through a Tom Brown's Schooldays setting and a red-herring-strewn, Agatha Christie style of plotting. In a big, baggy book this comes off marvelously, but it's murder on a screenwriter. You can be faithful to Rowling's originals and find yourself losing any chance of narrative thrust in the subplot-strewn sprawl of her wizarding world; or you can compress the story and gain the momentum that cinema requires, while sacrificing all the flourishes and complications that make the books worthwhile.

This dilemma has impaled every Potter movie so far. The hackish Chris Columbus, of Home Alone fame, chose the slavishly faithful approach in the first two films, turning out lifeless, ponderous white elephants that felt like the most expensive school plays ever mounted. Alfonso Cuaron and Mike Newell took the other tack, with more success; but Newell's Goblet of Fire, while lively, showed the strain of compressing Rowling's ever-more-complex universe to fit a multiplex-friendly 150-minute running time.

Now comes Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the leanest of the Potter movies, compressed from the longest of the books. Gone are subplots and Quidditch matches that only Rowling obsessives will miss, but gone as well are the details that might have made this outing more than a breakneck race to the finish line. It's the first Potter film where you can sense a director's cut hovering just slightly out of sight: New characters are introduced with a single line of dialogue and then shuffled quickly offstage; the camera lingers significantly over actors and artifacts without bothering to identify them; and crucial scenes pass in an eyeblink as the story rushes onward to its war-of-the-wizards finale. The trajectory of Harry's first love affair, from infatuation to betrayal, merits about five minutes of screen time; a shocking revelation about his father's relationship with the ambiguously malevolent Severus Snape comes and goes too fast to startle anybody; the death of a beloved character, which when encountered on ...