Sour Notes
Andrew Lloyd Webber's production hits the musical skids. (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: If you're lucky, the sound of a chandelier crashing will wake you up.
The Downside: I said, if you're lucky...
Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera is a shattered artifact. Coming off the tradition of one of the most popular stage musicals of all time can't be easy, but to turn it into a film? You could be tempted to say that Webber's concoction remains unfilmable, and this Joel Schumacher adaptation won't throw any kinks into that theory, but I've always been possessed of enough naive faith that anything is possible in the movies. But the stretch between what can be and what is tends to be rather depressing.
To be blunt, Phantom moves like a sluggish engine whose workings are gummed up by oil that's grown viscous over years of neglect. It can be a testament to the can-do spirit of people who are willing to take on any challenge, but there is something wrong here. A film adaptation of Phantom is hardly a new idea that arose out of the Oscar win of 2002's Chicago. For the last decade and a half composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been lobbying to get his creation put up on the screen- and for most of that time, story tells, he has wanted director Joel Schumacher (The Lost Boys) to helm the project. All well and good, but I got to ask- if Webber and Schumacher have had over ten years to work on this, why does it feel so half-assed? Why does music that can strike a cord so easily from the stage seem to get bogged down on film? If I had to provide an answer, I'd say that Schumacher was probably the last person in the world who should be directing musicals. He's a gifted filmmaker, no doubt, but he doesn't seem to be able to craft a movie that is anything more than a curio, an interesting companion piece to Webber's score. What would have worked was a reinterpretation, but what we get is Schumacher coaxing up some pretty nifty sets, but not letting the visual action do anything more than follow a set of stage instructions. This might be fine on Broadway. This might be fine on a CD. In a movie, though, it is deadly.
Phantom looks good- which another of its problems. Somebody obviously was robbing the style-over-substance bank blind. Take the two leads for a moment. Christine is an aspiring actress in nineteenth century Paris who has lived her life with opera under the tutelage of a mysterious "angel of music." Raoul is a childhood sweetheart who becomes her infatuated suitor. The parts are played by Emmy Rossum and Patrick Wilson respectively, and there is no doubt that these two can carry a note. What they can't do, though, is bring the music to the same electrified pitch that put the 1986 cast on the map and when they're together on screen... Well, I'll let your imagination do the work. How much romance do you think you're going to get out of a story when the two lovers display as much charisma as a mud puddle? Every line Wilson speaks evaporates on impact and Rossum, who was so illuminating during her brief role in Mystic River, has the perpetual look of someone who's been nailed with a tazer gun. And then this leads to the Phantom himself (Gerard Butler). Call me crazy, but wouldn't a man who has lived his entire life in the catacombs of an opera house not look like a soap opera lead actor with a perfectly fleshed out California tan? As is, this Schumacher/Webber interpretation of the deformed, mad genius looks like the love child of John Travolta and Count Dracula. It becomes particularly noxious when the Phantom begins to sing of his "hideousness" despite the fact that he still looks a far sight better than your average Jerry Springer guest. I mean, jeez, take a Zoloft there, dude.
There's no doubt that Phantom is faithful to its source material. If Schumacher was wise, he would have concocted a remix a little more friendly to filmgoers with a little more narrative story and a little less, well, singing (I swear, I don't think people in this movie could go to the bathroom without breaking into song about it). Anything, anything that would have nudged the movie along would have been welcome, but it sticks to its guns and the result is a two-and-a-half hour slog that feels easily like twice that.
Say what you want about the musical, but if they wanted to make The Phantom of the Opera into a movie, they should have made it into a movie, not a filmed stage production with outrageous sets. Phantom is a tedious, petrified bore. It adds nothing to the language of musicals, nor to the language of film. All it manages is to put you to sleep to the Music of the Night. D
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