Quite rightly, museum curators believe that few visitors now recognise stories from the Bible or classical mythology. So to make art galleries user-friendly they place cards beside Old Master paintings, explaining their iconography and significance. Popular big-budget movies, however, make no such concessions. When you see the second or third episode of the Lord of the Rings, The Matrix and the Star Wars series, you're expected to be as familiar with their newly confected mythology as earlier generations were with the Wedding at Cana or Zeus's seduction of Europa.
Thus the fifth Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, directed by David Yates, hitherto best-known for his distinguished work for British TV, and scripted by an American, Michael Goldenberg, who wrote the mystical SF movie Contact, begins in medias res, or more precisely in Little Whinging, Surrey. (There is, no doubt, a thesis being written called 'From Pooter to Potter: Suburban Life in British Literature'.) Our wand-waving hero, now 16, still wearing his NHS spectacles and with a six-o'clock shadow as noticeable as that of the teenage Richard Nixon, is spending another dreary holiday with his ghastly petit-bourgeois uncle and aunt, the Dursleys.
In the first frame he's confronting a gang of bullies led by the Dursleys' obese son when suddenly there's a storm. Sheltering in a culvert, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) resorts to magic to save himself and his cousin from wraith-like creatures that threaten to suck the spirits from their bodies. This is a pretty frightening sequence, and the creatures we're expected to recognise as Dementors are presumably working for the film's ultimate villain, Lord Voldemort (ie 'flight of death'), JK Rowling's equivalent of Satan and Darth Vader.
We are also supposed to know that Harry has broken one of the cardinal rules of the novice wizard - that he should never practise witchcraft outside the precincts of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry or in the presence of 'Muggles', which is to say the rest of us, unendowed with magical abilities. This term is no doubt to be found in fashionable, up-to-date dictionaries and is probably a conflation of mugs and grockles. As a result of his offence, Harry is suspended from Hogwarts and ordered to appear before a special court set up by the Ministry of Magic. But not before he's been introduced to a secret society of elite magicians called the Order of the Phoenix, set up by Hogwarts's wise headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, in case of dire emergency. Here the plot takes a dark, satirical turn. The Ministry's London headquarters are located in Whitehall, immediately beneath the official centre of British government, and approached by a lift that descends from a red telephone kiosk a stone's throw from Westminster tube station.
The Ministry, run by the pompous, duplicitous Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy), is out to crush Hogwarts and its free-spirited staff, though whether the aim is to assist Voldemort or merely to impose law and order is left open. When the wily Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) makes a successful defence of Harry, the Ministry appoints its own representative as Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher and then extends her powers to be the school's inquisitor. Played by Imelda Staunton, she's called Dolores Umbridge (Rowling's names are as bluntly indicative of character as those in Restoration comedy). A smiling harbinger of bureaucratic authoritarianism, she dresses in appalling taste, with pink her favourite colour. She opposes all forms of free expression, non-conformity and eccentricity. Moreover, she teaches what is in effect a form of moral disarmament that robs the young people of their ability to resist evil.
There is thus a double threat to white magic and the world of honest wizardry. From outside, Voldemort - 'he who must not be named' - is playing mind games with Harry, getting into his dreams and making him act irrationally. From inside, the Ministry is undermining the community. Inevitably, we think of the Communist takeovers in post-war eastern Europe and of the combination of eroded freedoms and reduced military expenditure in our own society. One is reminded of the moral of one of James Thurber's Fables for Our Time, written in the McCarthy era: 'Ashes to ashes and clay-to-clay, if the enemy don't get you your own folk may.'
The magnificently odious jobsworth caretaker Titus Filch (David Bradley) and students of well-established obnoxiousness like the sneering Malfoy are readily recruited by Ms Umbridge. But the cream of Hogwarts fights back. Harry's closest friends, the commonsensical Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) and the thinking wizard's crumpet Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), persuade Harry to lead a secret resistance movement called Dumbledore's Army. His dedicated followers are trained to raise their magic arts to combat-ready quality and be ready to fight to the death.
Meanwhile, on a lighter note, Harry is smitten by a beautiful Chinese student, and they kiss under a magical mistletoe. And the kids sit for their OWL (Ordinary Wizard Level) examinations, which exclude all those dreary subjects that Muggles study. There is also an exuberant insurrection that recalls the school revolutions in Vigo's Zero de conduite and Anderson's If, and the explosive, if rather confusing, showdown between the forces of good and evil is spectacular in its display of special effects.
But in general this is a sombre and at times curiously sober movie, handsomely designed as always, atmospherically lit and confidently performed, though the major adult characters take a back seat in the common room to Imelda Staunton. The exception is Gary Oldman, oddly moving as Harry's fugitive godfather, Sirius Black. His presence suggests the possibility of a guest appearance by John McEnroe to meet Oldman in the stygian gloom and exclaim: 'You cannot be Sirius!'