The First Look At Harry

Rob

bie Coltrane is anxious. "I've had visions of being chased by millions of children who thought I got it wrong," says Coltrane, the Scottish comic who plays the giant groundskeeper, Hagrid, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. "They're chasing me up Fifth Avenue. 'There's the guy who ruined Hagrid! Let's get him!'"

Memo to Coltrane: I have seen Harry Potter, and there's no reason for you to hire bodyguards. When the film opens on Nov. 16, lovers of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series who have worried about what Hollywood had in store for the sacred text will be relieved to see that Coltrane's Hagrid bears an impressive resemblance to the gentle giant Rowling described in the first volume: He's a lovable lug--funny and slightly sad--with "long tangles of bushy black hair and ...hands the size of trash can lids." And just as he does in the book, he makes his entrance on a flying motorcycle, with a baby in his "vast, muscular arms." Harry has arrived, and he has arrived in good health.

I flew to London and saw the film two weeks ago, before any critics (including TIME's) were allowed to see and review it. Now it can be told: with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone--the first film in what Warner Bros. hopes will be a long and profitable franchise--director Chris Columbus has bravely gone toe to toe with the imaginations of readers who have purchased 100 million Potter books and made the boy wizard one of the most beloved figures in literary history. (The author, once a struggling single mom in Edinburgh, Scotland, has become an international celebrity since Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, as the book is known in Britain, was published there four years ago.) The big-screen adaptation is a film of such eye-popping grandeur, dazzling special effects and sumptuous production values that you may not notice right away that supporting characters like Peeves, a troublesome ghost, and Piers, a troublesome boy, have been given the heave-ho.

But these visuals serve what is essentially a greatest-hits compilation of the book itself, from the snake that winks at Harry in the zoo to the owls that swoop through his school, Hogwarts, dropping mail on the magically gifted boys and girls; from Hogwarts' Great Hall with its soaring night-sky ceiling to the cavernous vaults and Munchkin-size goblins working in Gringotts bank (keep an eye out for Verne Troyer, who played Mini-Me in the 1999 Austin Powers sequel); from the wizard's version of chess, in which queens and knights come alive and beat each other senseless, to the Quidditch field, where young witches and wizards on broomsticks fly through the air playing a magical hybrid of basketball and soccer; from Hagrid's baby dragon to the 12-ft.-tall mountain troll (both computer generated), who wreaks havoc in the girls' rest room; from the teetering magic shops of Diagon Alley to the secret Track 9 3/4, where students board the train to Hogwarts.

"Fans would have been crushed if we had left too much out," says Columbus, whose adaptation runs a whopping 143 minutes. "My mantra has been, Kids are reading a 700-page book. They can sit through a 2 1/2-hour movie." The book he is referring to is Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, fourth in the series, which was published last year (at 734 pages, to be exact) and currently holds the record as the fastest-selling book in history--at least until the fifth Potter, which is expected in 2002. Says Columbus: "Instead of trying to overtake the readers' imagination, we've just given them the best possible version of the book, which means steeping it in reality...I wanted kids to feel that if they actually took that train, Hogwarts would be waiting for them." Indeed, from the moth-eaten tapestry of the dormitory common room to the well-worn Sorting Hat, which divides the first-year Hogwarts students into houses by reading their minds (as in the book, it speaks to the students and assigns Harry to Gryffindor house, but it does not sing), Sorcerer's Stone does have a dusty verite.

Lest we burden Sorcerer's Stone with expectations too great, however, we must note that it is not a perfect movie. Critics will certainly point out that the book is a more transporting piece of entertainment. (The movie assumes a sometimes too-heavy load in its ambitious attempt to bring all the novel's most memorable elements to the screen.) And child actors often require some patience on the part of viewers. Sorcerer's Stone marks the movie debut of Rupert Grint, 13, and Emma Watson, 11, who play Harry's friends Ron and Hermione. Daniel Radcliffe, the 12-year-old who already has a number of websites devoted to him, thanks to his role as the title character, starred in the BBC's 1999 production of David Copperfield and this year's spy flick The Tailor of Panama. What British producer David Heyman calls a "brutal" search for the right Harry ended only weeks before the film went into production in September 2000. "He had to embody so many qualities--vulnerability and strength, an inner life," says Heyman, who secured the movie rights for Warner Bros. for the bargain price of $700,000 before the books became a global phenomenon. (Tanya Seghatchian, a development executive in Heyman's company, read the first book after it was published in Britain and was moved to tears by the scene in which the orphaned Harry sees his dead parents for the first time in the Mirror of Erised--"Desire" spelled backward.) Columbus praises his young star's "tendency to play things so subtly," though some may wish he seemed a bit more rowdy, like the Harry in the books.