No Crescendo for Sumptuous Phantom

The world’s most successful musical, and Broadway’s second-longest running behind Cats, takes center stage as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s (Evita) adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera hits theaters under the direction of iconoclastic visualist Joel Schumacher (Batman Forever, Phone Booth). As you might expect, this is a loud, garishly colorful, visually frenetic interpretation and, as these things sometimes go, isn’t actually all that bad. Not the highest recommendation, to be sure, but when you consider I’m not really a fan of either Lloyd Webber’s music or Schumacher’s directorial style, it’s probably the best either of them could hope for.

The story of Paris’ Opera Populaire, the stage is set for ingénue Christine Daae (Emmy Rossum, Mystic River) to take over as the lead singer in the company’s latest effort “Hannibal” when star and diva extraordinaire La Carlotta (Minnie Driver, Good Will Hunting, in a magical, over-the-top performance that’s really something) abruptly quits. This sits just fine with Christine’s mysterious benefactor the Phantom (Gerard Butler, Reign of Fire), a ghostly figure haunting the wooden crevices and dankly lit underbelly of the opera house.

The Phantom’s story is a long and tortured one. He’s lived most of his life behind the scenes in the Opera Populaire, his face concealed by a ghostly white mask covering one side. Christine’s story, in many respects, has paralleled his own. She, too, has lived in the opera house since her father, a famed concert violinist, passed away when she was seven. Taking up the visage of a fabled ‘Angel of Music,’ the Phantom has schooled Christine in music and art for over a decade, falling more and more madly in love with her with each passing day.

This heartfelt love and musical genius slowly turns to madness, however, when Christine gives her heart to the Populaire’s young patron Raul de Chagny (Patrick Wilson, The Alamo). Driven to ever-increasing extremes, the Phantom demands the Populaire stage an opera he’s personally written about the famed romantic lothario Don Juan and promises wrath and destruction if his orders are not followed. Now, with Christine torn between her Angel of Music and man of her dreams de Chagny, Raul makes the decision to stage the Phantom’s opera in hopes he’ll make an appearance at which time Paris’ finest will descend upon him with swift authority. But things do not go as planned, the Phantom’s final aria one certain to bring about nothing more than heartbreak, pain and tragedy.

I’ve never been a huge fan of the music to this opera, Lloyd Webber’s penchant for repeating musical phrases and sequences more than a tad annoying. It would probably explain why I’ve always avoided it when it’s passed through town. Not that I’m completely against the composer. I’ve enjoyed both Cats and Evita, and even some of the songs in his weirdly entertaining adaptation of Sunset Boulevard strike my fancy. Maybe it is because songs like “Music of the Night” have been obscenely over-played, but whatever the reason, Phantom of the Opera has never been all that high on my list to see.

Strange, then, I enjoyed this cinematic interpretation as much as I did. The music still sounds repetitive to me, and the mid section plods along with all the urgency of a turtle racing against the tide, and yet, there is something magical going on in the bookends of the picture that held me captivated. It certainly opens with a bang. Schumacher shifts from a grainy, black and white 1919 to an opulently colorful 1870 with a burst of creative energy that’s supremely intoxicating. With the familiar strains of the opera’s title track blaring, the Opera Populaire comes to effervescent life with every facet, every nuance, of late nineteenth century theatrics presented in exquisite detail.

My favorite bit: the Phantom’s absconding of Christine down to his watery layer for their first face-to-face encounter. It is a glorious, bravura piece of filmmaking, everything from the score to the singing to the cinematography to the set design working in superb tandem. It is a kinetically jolting hayride of an aria, deftly exploring the characters and the world they inhabit with equal parts style, pacing and pure cinematic joi de vive. At this point, I was sure I was going to fall rapturously in love with the picture, joining the Phantom in madness of both heart and mind.

Didn’t happen. The midsection of Phantom of the Opera not only drags, it is one, too. Characters do ever-increasingly stupid things, and everyone involved refuses to act like anything remotely resembling a human being. Some of these choices just boggle the mind, especially the ones on both Christine and Raul’s parts. After an encounter with the Phantom in a graveyard (featuring some of Anthony Pratt’s, Hope & Glory, most spectacular production designs in a film filled to the gills with them) I was almost ready to walkout after Raul inexplicably sheaths his sword. It’s stupid, and while the movie’s wonderful climax couldn’t have happened without this moment of pity, I still had trouble accepting it.

But what a rousing climax it is! The theatrical production’s fabled crashing of the Opera Populaire’s majestic chandelier is a one-of-kind movie spectacular moment, a crescendo almost worth the price of admission by itself. The swift final twenty minutes have an urgent vibrancy the rest lacks, Schumacher showing a pronounced focus making the events unfolding almost dreamlike in their verisimilitude. I was captivated, and I could feel the rest of the theater joining me in both awe and adulation.

It helps immensely that Lloyd Webber and Schumacher have cast their movie amazingly well. Butler is a rousing, sexy Phantom bringing just the right balance of mystery, pathos and pain to his performance. And while his lip-synching is rather bad, Butler’s singing voice is most assuredly not, the actor’s range and vocal assuredness a surprising treat.

Not so surprising are the voices of both Rossum and Wilson. Wilson, a veteran of the Broadway stage, most recently seen in a revitalized Oklahoma!, has a voice to die for. Rossum, meanwhile, has a pedigree linking her to New York’s Metropolitan Opera and it shows in both her poise and ability to belt out Lloyd Webber’s complex musical cadences. In fact, she’s the movie’s real find. Her Christine is a pleasure to both see and hear, and who’d have thought an actress I once called both a “Brittany Murphy clone” and “supremely terrible actress” in my review of Passionada could both win and break my heart so easily. She’s stupendous, and I cannot imagine Phantom of the Opera working at all without her.

I could go on and on about where Schumacher gets things right. From John Mathieson’s (Gladiator) beauteous cinematography to Terry Rawlings’ (Chariots of Fire) crackerjack editing to Alexandra Byrne’s (Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet) sumptuous, Oscar-worthy costumes, on a technical level this picture is pretty much as close to perfect as you could hope for. If only the pacing and writing during the movie’s plodding middle were better, I’d be more than happy to report how wonderful this is. But that mid-section is a problem, a major one, and neither Lloyd Webber nor Schumacher appear either willing or able to do anything about it, making this one Phantom to stop singing about.

Film Rating: êê1/2  (out of 4)