Login
God knows I love musical theater, but I have cared for the ponderous and thunderous work of Andrew Lloyd Weber. He of the simplistic and pedestrian musical and lyrical refrain, of crafting stage shows with scores that all sounds the same except for the one big song, of being nearly single-handedly responsible for terraforming Broadway into gargantuan ugly spectacles that liter the community. You would correct in assuming that I came to Phantom of the Opera with suspicion and trepidation.
Imagine my surprise (or the complete lack) to discover that Joel Schumacher managed to both transpose the show onto the screen but still somehow manage to make it badly done. How you can take something that was seemingly engineered to appeal to legions of bombed out wine moms and do it so poorly is an amazing feat of daring. I’d venture to label this a disaster of misguided ambition on par with Showgirls, but this lacks that movies sense of accidental camp and art.
This is just boring and self-serious. Wherefore art thou grand kitsch of Batman Forever? A sense of irony, however intentional or not, would liven up the proceedings, but there’s a never-ending parade of ostentatious white elephant art instead.
Everyone knows the story of Phantom by now: young ingenue (Emmy Rossum) becomes object of desire for tragic, disfigured hermit (Gerard Butler) while romancing her childhood sweetheart (Patrick Wilson) and upstaging the opera’s diva (Minnie Driver). There are time jumps, spooks, and a parade of elaborate costumes and big scale numbers, most of which garnered laughter from me that was probably not the desired effect. C’mon, they put in a vogue dancer in the middle of “Masquerade” for no discernible reason. That’s funny, especially as Schumacher seems incapable of understanding how to edit on beat and he’s clearly trying to go for that.
It doesn’t help that the entire film is awash in fussily overdesigned scenes that literalize things like scene transitions on stage. Something like candelabras rising out of the ground to symbolize the descent into the Phantom’s lair are literalized in this film, so fully lighted candelabras are rising from the water. This doesn’t inspire the giddy sense of unreality and magic that Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast does but calls attention to itself for being unable to adapt itself from stage to screen.
Nor does the cast help matters much. Emmy Rossum and Patrick Wilson sing well and are very pretty to look at but generate no heat and are self-consciously artificial. Gerard Butler and his singing voice (if we’re being generous) are grossly miscast as the Phantom, and his makeup looks more like a bad reaction to shellfish than hideous deformity. The likes of Miranda Richardson, Simon Callow, and Ciaran Hinds are largely wasted in thankless roles that don’t use their prodigious talents in any way befitting of their stature. Only Driver manages to evince anything resembling a personality in this garish spectacle and bless her heart for it.
I suppose Schumacher’s ineptitude with the material means it was successfully translated to the big screen as The Phantom of the Opera is essentially a dime store bodice ripper set to a Meatloaf album. It’s big, loud, and empty in the end, so it follows a logical progression that the movie version would expand on those issues and make them bigger. A gaudy stage spectacle gets blown-up for the cinema, and its tilt-a-whirl aesthetics and blaring soundtrack are enough to leave you dizzy and vaguely queasy in the end.
