Andrew Lloyd Webber's
The Phantom of the Opera
**
out of ****
At
the very least, I have to thank Joel Schumacher for helping me
realize exactly what it was about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
record-shattering stage play that has never worked for me. Such
criticism will probably fall on deaf ears, as The Phantom
of the Opera remains the most popular musical in the history
of Broadway, but I've nevertheless got a job to to do here. I’ll
admit, I’ve seen the show twice, once on Broadway and once
in San Francisco. I think it’s visually a stupendous show,
but for some reason, I was never as successful in connecting with
it emotionally as the women to my left and right, who sobbed throughout.
There
were many elements that I liked in the shows I saw. The costumes
and sets were the best I have ever seen. The songs are catchy
and likable, if not profound. Then there’s the story: It’s
about, as we all probably know, an obsessed, deformed musical
genius living in the catacombs/ancient torture chambers of the
Paris Opera House who falls in love with an innocent girl who
he secretly trains to be the star of an opera. These lessons take
place in the shadows of her dressing room where he never reveals
his true identity to her. It’s a winning formula, sort of
a mix between a Gothic romance, a pulp novel, Beauty
and the Beast, and Rocky. So what doesn’t
work about the musical?
Schumacher
has helped me see the light, for better or for worse. Simply put,
the Phantom and Christine fail to generate any plausibility. They
are so naive and melodramatic that they never create any depth
or generate any truly gripping drama between them, except the
most shallow love story that could possibly be imagined. It’s
almost as if the musical's creators only read the Cliffnotes of
the novel and entirely missed the point.
Ah,
the book. My memories of it fare much better: Gaston Leroux’s
fiction is a bona fide pulp classic that I enjoyed immensely,
but only on the level of a pulp novel. Andrew Loyd Webber’s
musical and the subsequent film adaptation are faithful to the
book, more or less, with one key variation that makes all the
difference: In the novel, the Phantom was a sickening, twisted
old man who straddled the line between genius and homicidal maniac.
The most compelling aspect of Leroux’s story is Christine’s
dilemma once she realizes that this angelic, anonymous voice that
has been mysteriously teaching her to sing turns out to be a half-crazed,
sewage-smelling, dried up old man with a hideously deformed face.
His motivation is also far from pure: He is consumed by an intense
lust for her youthful features, and he demands her love. She is
sickened by him, yet she also owes him her career as the new diva
of the opera—the only thing she’s ever wanted her
whole life. So what is she to do, especially after she has fallen
in love with Raoul, a childhood sweetheart much more befitting
her youthful innocence?
Leroux
created a gripping, melodramatic yarn with this premise, and
he was a very good storyteller. The problem with Webber’s
play, relatively faithful to the novel though it may be, is
that the Phantom is now a dashing renaissance man—a
strapping young rouge who successfully seduces Christine into
his underground world. Other than the bad face, it’s
clear that they’re
perfect for each other.
As
I watched these events unfold in Schumacher’s film, this
debonair, youthful Phantom quickly became the most problematic
element of the whole exercise. The problem is never quite clear
in the play because the characters and their youth are upstaged
by the spectacle of their stylized set decorations. But here,
on film, are close-ups of the Phantom, his roguish singing, his
slicked-back hair and dashing good looks (at least on one side
of his face). I realized for the first time that, no, this is
not the Phantom that Gaston Leroux envisioned. Gone is the sickening
monster, and in his place is a French James Bond. No woman could
ever resist his charms. And, as the success of both the play and
the film reveals, no woman has.
If
they could have made the Phantom more savage, sicklier, and more
disgusting, then the entire film could have been saved, because
this correction alone would have raised the stakes for Christine
and shifted the film’s entire perspective into one of horror
and true pity for the Phantom, not soapy romance that comes across
more as a teenage drama. Yet Schumacher makes two crippling mistakes
with the film: A) He casts Gerard Butler, a very good actor who
is simply too young and handsome, and B) he decides to downplay
the Phantom’s deformities so that his face, when it is revealed,
seems more like a bad sunburn than a true reason to scorn and
fear someone for all of time. This decision might have been an
attempt to portray the Phantom as even more dashing,
but it simply makes the two leads come across as superficial.
The Phantom moans about his “face, the infection that poisons
our love,” and Christine (played here by Emmy Rossum) sobs
to Raoul, “Can I ever escape from that face? So distorted,
deformed, it was hardly a face!” But his face simply
not that bad, and the entire film therefore becomes a lamentation
that sounds like over-sensitive teenagers crying over a bad bout
of acne.
Schumacher
freely admits that he only agreed to do the film if he could work
with a youthful cast. This almost assured commercial success,
but a bolder filmmaker would have attempted to go back to the
spirit of the book, which boils down to the obligation that Christine
feels towards the Phantom, even though she is repulsed by him.
Coating this significant problem was an outlandish adventure story
of Raoul’s attempts to rescue her from a certain doom underneath
the opera house, tempting all sort of terrible torture devices
that allows the book to play out like a B-grade, 1940s serial:
Absurd, but a whole lot of fun.
The
best versions of The Phantom of the Opera, which has
been filmed some ten times previously, understand what Leroux
was getting at—his book was nothing sacred, but it was certainly
a great little entertainment. The most famous Phantom was undoubtedly
seen in 1925, played by Lon Chaney Sr. This is the only version
that could truly be labeled great, no small thanks to Chaney’s
energetically demented portrayal of the psychotic and obsessed
Phantom. Only two other versions rose above average: The first
was Brain De Palma’s spoof The Phantom of the Paradise
(1974), which updated the story to modern day and suggested
that if the Phantom existed in the world of rock, he would be
just another misunderstood genius grinding out forgetful pop songs
for the music business machine. The second was Dwight Little’s
Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1989),
which starred Robert Englund (AKA Freddy Krueger) as a British,
ultra-violent Phantom. That somewhat gory version combined Jack
the Ripper legends and time-travel (!) with Leroux’s novel
to create a genuinely chilling, gothic horror/romance that bathed
in atmosphere and was surprisingly faithful to Leroux’s
text, both in outlandish spirit and in sequence of events.
Just
about every other version makes the same mistake that Webber and
Schumacher did, which was the absence of the adventure/thriller
aspect of Leroux’s novel in exchange for a hammy, gentle
Phantom who we’re meant to feel sorry for. Certainly romance
figured into the novel, but it generated more from the sympathy
and pity that Christine eventually felt for this pathetic, sewage-covered
creature. Some versions (specifically those made in 1943 and 1962)
feature the Phantom as a kind, gentle old man whose music was
stolen from him by evil publishers; others, like this one and
a 1990 miniseries starring Charles Dance, make him so dashing
and Raoul such a bore that Christine would be crazy to turn her
haunted tutor down. Both interpretations rob the story of its
true guts, which is a sensational fable about a weathered old
man who has personified his passion for music into an obsession
over a wide-eyed, virginal girl who never dreamed that she could
be an object of such lust and rage. Talk about coming-of-age.
So
yes, everything works in this film that also worked in the stage
play. Catchy songs, superior set designs and costuming, and a
great deal of detail in recreating turn-of-the-century Paris and
its grand opera house. It should also be noted that Gerard Bulter
and Emmy Rossum are both very good in their parts. It’s
the core that’s no good, and was flawed from the beginning:
The notion that Christine could actually love the Phantom; that
there was, indeed, anything there to love at all except for an
angelic voice that was better left in the shadows of her dressing
room.
Cast:
Gerard Butler: The Phantom
Emmy Rossum: Christine Daaé
Patrick Wilson: Raoul
Minnie Driver: Carlotta
Miranda Richardson: Madame Giry
A film by Warner Brothers
and Odyssey Entertainment. Directed by Joel Schumacher. Screenplay
by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Schumacher. Based on the play my Webber
and the novel by Gaston Leroux. Rated PG-13 for brief violence.
Running time: 143 minutes. Original United States theatrical release
date: December 24, 2004.
