June 06, 2004
The Boy Who Lived, or How Robert Hardy Is a Fine, Fine Actor
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban delights and astounds. It reveals what the previous two films were: limp, literal retellings, the delight of the books filtered through Hollywood’s Vanilla Machine. But there is no need for us to give a complete review to add our voices to the chorus of glowing opinions. Suffice to say, we enjoyed this film both because it restored our appreciation of the Harry Potter franchise and because, standing alone outside of all the hype, it simply is a good movie.
We’re here to talk about a specific facet of The Prisoner of Azkaban jewel; a small thing that leapt out to startle us into cries of “Oo! Oo! Looky!” As in The Sorcerer’s Stone and The Chamber of Secrets, this third installation abounds with a parade of familiar British character actors, including Fiona Shaw, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Lee Ingleby, and Alan Rickman. The audience meets a new addition to this formidable cast as Harry ascends the stair in the Leaky Cauldron, called to face the music by the Minister of Magic, Cornelius Fudge. Our hero, Harry, finds himself in a large suite, looking apprehensively at the back of man in a dark suit. This man’s voice rings out, pouring over Harry with a flood of light and careless bombast. The words are thrown effortlessly at the camera, leaving the audience with a pleasant sense of meaning without having heard each individual word. We didn’t immediately recognize the voice, but when Fudge whirls around and beams at Harry, we clutched each other convulsively and yelped. In a stroke of casting genius, the role of Cornelius Fudge, Minister of Magic, head bureaucrat for a magical United Kingdom, has been created by Robert Hardy.
Robert Hardy is an actor we know chiefly from his roles in the Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility and, best of all, his portrayal of the veterinarian Siegfried Farnon in All Creatures Great and Small. Like many British character actors, Mr. Hardy appears in countless television series and movies filmed in England and on the continent, but is a relative unknown in American cinema. A man of many talents, Mr. Hardy’s expertise of medieval weaponry lead to Longbow: A Social and Military History, first published in 1976.
In the infancy of our marriage we began a tradition of reading the Harry Potter series aloud in bed, sometimes till quite late as we waited anxiously to discover how Harry would manage his travails. As chief reader, Joel gives different voices to each character, striving to orally differentiate distinct personalities. This is easy to do with characters such as McGonagall and Hagrid, but when you get down to minor but important people like Lee Jordan or Lavender Brown, Joel starts to run out of voices.
A fairly major character that Joel has struggled to nail, sometimes indulging in a lisp, sometimes swerving wildly out into the terrain of Ben Kenobi, is Cornelius Fudge. Is it possible that Joel’s uncertainly of voice stems from our uncertainty about Fudge’s character? Is Fudge good or evil? Is he desperately trying to keep a fragile society from crumbling, or is he a deluded Chamberlain-figure, appeasing evil to keep it from being recognized; a child pulling the blankets over its head. In the most recent novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Fudge’s actions became almost sinister, raising the possibility that he could even be a co-conspirator with He Who Must Not Be Named’s Death Eaters.
It is with great relief as a narrator, then, that Joel finds himself able to lay this ambiguity at the feet of Mr. Hardy. As previously described, his voice and manner are like a burbling fountain that periodically effuses with enthusiasm and then, just as suddenly subsides to a deadly slow and emphatic trickle. His face beams forth with the sunniest affection, and then suddenly one detects a faith glint of steel in the eye. A glint that, as you watch it, becomes a glittery diamond and then subsides to a look of hollow stone. He is the perfect actor for this role, and, for us, the great signifier for all that the filmmakers got right in the Prisoner of Azkaban. The director, Alfonso Cuaron, signed on for this edition alone, so as high as our spirits have been raised, there’s no assurance that the next two books (difficult to film with their rambling obesity) will make good movies. For us, though, there will be a lasting legacy. Like a struggling actor in the hands of a self-assured director, Joel has been given a new voice for his toolkit. And Aimee will no longer have to sit up in the night and ask, “Who said that?”