Adrian Sibley’s documentary is a genial, if sometimes incurious film about the legendary Irish actor and singer, who began his screen career as a pressure-cooker of rage on the rugby field in Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life and finally became the beatific face of snowy-haired wisdom as Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter movies.
This watchable film goes easy on Harris’s boozing and brawling: in fact, it takes an almost a counter-revolutionary approach to the whole subject. In recent years, talk of Ollie and Peter and Richard’s hell-raising has usually been countered with a frowning diagnosis of alcoholism, and this film simply quotes Harris’s own roistering dismissal of all that: (“I drank because I loved it!”) and pretty much leaves things there. Incredibly, Harris hired a press photographer to cover a week-long post-divorce European jaunt via private plane he took with his entourage, which took in many bars and brothels – to humiliate his ex-wife, it is alleged, although his high-jinks were covered with giggling hilarity in the papers. Harris’s cocaine habit is hardly mentioned: I suspect because it doesn’t fit in with the essentially sentimental narrative of booze.
