‘Order of the Phoenix’ finds brilliance in contemplation of darkness

Mike Newell’s putrid adaptation of “Goblet of Fire” nearly sunk the “Harry Potter” film franchise for its depressing literality and slavish devotion to its source material. It was a blind attempt, in other words, to take a 600-page tome and pare it down to a two-and-a-half hour script using nothing but a pair of gardening shears, to shove in as much of the novel’s happenings without ever really understanding the narrative and emotional complexities involved. Conversely, David Yates’ “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” brings a great deal of interest back to the film series, and seems to embody the very essence of successfully adapting books to film.

Taken from an even longer, more complex novel, “Phoenix” seems to understand that it cannot possibly do justice to all of the subplots from which it must cull its script, and subsequently almost consciously ignores the narrative in favor of becoming a series of conceptual successes and emotional truths. As a dark stormcloud passes over the cinematic landscape in the first few minutes and refuses to leave until the end credits, the film doesn’t just prompt discovery of the ever-growing darkness of Harry’s world, but it also forces us to realize that such darkness has always existed within the hearts and minds of its inhabitants.

Despite the protests of Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and Professor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), the bureaucratic Ministry of Magic believes that the news of the Dark Lord Voldemort’s (Ralph Fiennes) resurrection is an elaborate lie created to stage a coup in the magical world. After a kangaroo-court attempt to oust Harry from Hogwarts fails, Minister Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy) sends prim-and-proper Delores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) to the famed school of magic in order to discover any such plots against the ministry and dismantle them. Her methods, however, prove much more megalomaniacal. In her ever-tightening grip on the school’s infrastructure, Umbridge turns the Defense Against the Dark Arts class into a theory and appreciation, and as more and more students come to believe that Voldemort has indeed returned, they turn to Harry (the only student with actual combat experience) to teach them more practical means of defense. But considering that he’s also saddled with romantic concerns, pubescent angst and the constant threat of everything he holds dear being annihilated in a single stroke by his arch-nemesis, the pressure may prove too much for our boy-wizard hero.

Like I said—look too closely at the story in this skeletal form and it’s bound to collapse like a house of cards. A wiser idea, then, to consider it to be the story of a bunch of screwed-up teenagers fighting for their right to remain screwed up, battling a pair of villains who are attempting to foist their moral objectivism onto everyone else. Voldemort acts as the inexorable terrorist, exerting his religious fervor on the unsuspecting masses; Umbridge, meanwhile, with her godawful pink cardigans being the brightest attraction in a thoroughly pale world, represents some unholy cross between Julie Andrews and Ronald Reagan, doing her best to keep the bad thoughts away with an eduict that everything is normal and that there’s nothing to worry about. Refusing to submit to either end of that black-and-white spectrum, the protagonists of “Order of the Phoenix” know that reality exists in a disturbing shade of gray, and that denial of that fact can only lead to further detachment. At the same time, however, the film also manages to exude the characters’ innermost desire that life really could be that simple, bringing “Order” to a position that towers over “Spider-Man 3” and marks it as the superior “battle within” blockbuster of 2007. “We’ve all got light and dark in us,” Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) tells his godson Harry, who is struggling for some relief from his constant, pubescent anger—but in his frequent nostalgia trips, reminiscing on the good old days of fighting Voldemort and clearly marking the lines between good and evil, too often does Black forget that most of his friends from the good old days are either dead, insane or traitorous.

As brilliantly dark and dire as “Order of the Phoenix” can be, however, it’s also exhilarating in a way that reminds you of your formative years as a filmgoer—Yates somehow finds a way to cram his cinematic frame with all sorts of excitement without being too crowded or cacophonous; an eleventh-hour duel is easily the highlight of its action scenes, a moment of such manic, dizzying creativity that it’s somewhat reminiscent to similar scenes from the original “Star Wars” trilogy. But even these moments are tinged with sadness and fear (after many of its lighthearted moments, Voldemort’s snake-like visage appears in a series of abstract nightmares); it doesn’t kill the fun so much as it sobers us up, makes us realize just how thin that line is between light and dark, success and failure, good and evil—and how frighteningly easy it is to cross it.