HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX
Grade: B-

I'm in like, not in love, with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I had hoped that the franchise would continue the steep upward ascent that started with 2005's surprisingly potent Goblet of Fire, which is the best and most enthralling installment thus far. But the makers of the Harry Potter films should be credited for their consistency. If Order of the Phoenix is my least favorite of the series, I still can only say that it's slightly less good than all the others.

The film's greatest problem is its meager story progression. Over the course of four films, the story of Voldemort's return had gradually been building and building, until at the end of Goblet came a game-changing development: The Dark Lord returned in all his slithering glory, and the death of one of Harry's classmates signaled that the stakes were higher than they ever had been before. Order picks up where Goblet left off, but by the end, it hasn't moved us much further than that.

The film is driven by a MacGuffin. Right away, we learn that Voldemort is seeking something that may give him the advantage in the war between good and evil, but the screenplay buries the lead; it's a while before we learn what it is, and after they tell us, we're still not sure what it is. It has something to do with a prophecy, but when we hear the prophecy it sounds like something we already knew, so I'm not sure why good and evil would fight over it. (I conferred with a friend who has read the book; she tells me that the film leaves out pivotal details of the prophecy, and when she explains the whole thing, it's much more interesting.)

The quest for this mystical object leads to a strange, conceptual climax. It plays like a metaphor, staged to convey Harry's internal conflict more than for one side to defeat the other — is the young wizard like his revered father, or is he becoming more like Voldemort? It inevitably ends in a stalemate, and I'm not sure what, if anything, has been accomplished.

This is the first Harry Potter screenplay that wasn't written by the talented Steve Kloves (who prior to Potter earned an Oscar nomination for writing my favorite film of 2000, Wonder Boys). The writer instead is Michael Goldenberg, who is no slouch (his credits include the underrated sci-fi film Contact), but there are problems. As with the previous Potter films, which have averaged close to two-and-a-half hours in length, there are detours and side stories, but in this film many are underdeveloped.

A flashback shows us a scene from Snape's past, which is provocative in that it shows us a version of Harry's father that isn't as heroic as we've been led to believe. Does the darkness within Harry come as much from his own father as from Voldemort? The flashback is fleeting and is not addressed again. There's a subplot about Harry's love interest, Cho Chang (Katie Leung); she seems to betray him, and later is vindicated, but we don't see much of this either. And Harry's best friends Ron and Hermione are more than ever reduced to background players.

But what works in the film works well. There are two intriguing new characters. One is Luna Lovegood, a strange misfit student who seems to exist on a different wavelength from everyone else. She's eerie and loopy, but knowing. No scene is uninteresting when she's in it.

The other is Dolores Umbridge, through which the film presents its most fascinating ideas. She is a member of the Ministry of Magic, an organization whose official position is that Voldemort's return is a false rumor. She is installed at Hogwarts to subvert the school and bring it under the same cloud of denial that the Ministry is under.

Stiffly mannered and dressed in matronly pink costumes, Umbridge is like a caricature of the 1950s, but she is truly insidious. She's scarier even than Voldemort, because hers is a kind of villainy that corrupts from within. She looks to weaken Hogwarts not because she wishes Voldemort to succeed, but because she so desperately clings to the belief that he doesn't exist. The truth of his return is so fearsome and the dangers of the world so troubling to her sensibility that it drives her to censorship, abuse, and — make no mistake about it — fascism.

Umbridge is played by Imelda Staunton in a performance that works on the level of comedy and a level that is more thoughtful. Beneath her strained pleasantness, Staunton gives a noticeable wince. She cannot bear the thought that the truth is as terrible as Harry and Dumbledore understand it to be. She suppresses that knowledge at Hogwarts — and all other useful knowledge with it — because, I suspect, her fragile worldview could not withstand the shock of reality. Versions of Dolores Umbridge can be seen throughout the real world; they're the ones who deny global warming and advocate abstinence-only sex education.

The Umbridge character, more than the Harry or Voldemort characters, makes Order of the Phoenix worth seeing. She is evidence that the films themselves, along with the characters and the audience, are growing up.