The director is Mike Newell, most famous for the audience-dividing “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” My opinion of that film is that it’s mostly a good movie with a bad one tacked on to make for a happy ending. The good parts are the Altman-esque, vaguely documentary segments of well-drawn, insecure characters milling about at wedding receptions. The same can be said for “The Goblet of Fire”—these characters have become rich enough, and the place where they live is delightful enough, that I half-wish the movies would abandon their rigid fidelity to the books and go wherever the characters lead them.
Even the new characters appear less interested in advancing the plot than in hanging out with each other. Harry forms an uneasy friendship with a dreamy older boy during the course of the magic contest. The older boy is popular and beloved, yet, like popular boys everywhere, half-imprisoned by his own popularity. How he goes from pitying Harry to helping him and finally to respecting him feels right.
So does “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” work? Maybe not the way it wants to, but there are plenty of isolated good scenes and an endless reservoir of visual invention. The third act pulls things together, the way third acts do in “Harry Potter” movies, as we find our hero running through a hedge maze while older members of the audience hoarsely moan “Danny!” I could keep on going, about how the series seems to have reached that crossroad where it can either continue being good movies or it can continue being faithful to the books, but it can’t do both—but I won’t go on about that right now.
Finished Saturday, November 19th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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Fake "Goblet of Fire" review.