The Phantom of the Opera

The Phantom of the Opera

Is “The Phantom of the Opera” scary anymore? This popular art product has become so institutionalized that it is nearly impossible to think of its original inspiration, a “loathsome gargoyle who lives in hell but dreams of heaven,” without also thinking about Dracula. In 1925 Lon Chaney’s hideously damaged face was unforgettable mouth a lipless rictus, eyes off-center in gouged out sockets. When Christine tore off his mask, she and the audience were horrified. In Lloyd Webber’s version, now filmed by Joel Schumacher, the mask is more like a fashion accessory and the Phantom’s “good” profile is so chiseled and handsome that it fails to be an object of horror; it becomes a kinky babe magnet.

There was something unwholesome and pathetic about the 1925 Phantom, who scuttled like a rat in the undercellars of the Paris Opera and nourished a hopeless love for Christine. The modern Phantom is more like a perverse Batman with a really neat cave. The character of Raoul, Christine’s nominal lover, has always been a fatuous twerp; at least in the 1925 version Christine is attracted to the Phantom only until she removes his mask. Here any red-blooded woman would choose him over Raoul knowing what she knows now.

But I dislike not so much this film as its underlying material. I don’t think Lloyd Webber wrote very good musicals thin beer for the time it takes to tell them; maddeningly repetitious music. When that chandelier comes crashing down, it’s not a shock it’s a historical reenactment. You do remember these tunes when you leave the theater; you don’t walk out humming them you wonder if you’ll be able to get them out of your mind again after they’ve returned.

Every time I see Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom,” the bit about the “darkness of the music of the night” bounces between my ears, as if, like Howard Hughes, I’m condemned to repeat it until I go mad. (I have the same difficulty with “Waltzing Matilda.”) Lyrics like:

Let your mind

Start a journey through a strange new world

Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before!

Let your soul take you where you long to be!

Only then can you belong to me.

Wouldn’t get past Simon Cowell, let alone Rodgers & Hammerstein.

Yet Schumacher has bravely taken this dreck aboard and made of it a movie I am pleased to have seen. To have seen, that is, as opposed to have heard for Emmy Rossum is only 18 and sings her own songs and is a great beauty and has perfect pitch and projects from here to the Ahwahnee; she carries this movie on those slender shoulders, stands up straight in Schumacher’s splendid tableau compositions when anyone else would be sagging with embarrassment or kitsch. She deserved a better screenplay.

(What an Eliza Dolittle she might make.) But these songs are dirges or show lounge retreads; the dialogue laboriously makes its archaic points meanwhile meanwhile did I mention how sensational this movie looks? Schumacher knows more about making movies than this material deserves; he simply goes off on his own, bringing greatness to his department and leaving the material to fend for itself.

Only recently had I visited a rehearsal of “A Wedding,” the new production by Lyric Opera, where I spoke with its co-writer and director Robert Altman. “I don’t know $#!+ about the music,” he said to me. “I don’t even know if they’re singing on key. That’s not my job. I concentrate on how it moves, how it looks, and how it plays.” Did Schumacher feel the same way? You wouldn’t ask him, would you?

He has always had an eye for the macabre; look at his 1987 teenage vampire movie, “The Lost Boys,” or consider his “Flatliners” (1990), about medical students who induce technical death. His “Batman Forever” was the best of the Batman movies, largely because of its sets. Here he works with production designer Anthony Pratt (“Excalibur”), art director John Fenner (“Raiders of the Lost Ark”), set decorator Celia Bobak (Branagh’s “Henry V” and “Hamlet”) and costume designer Alexandra Byrne (“Elizabeth”) to create a film that is so visually resonant you want to float in it.

I love the look of this movie. I love its cellars and dungeons and its Styx-like sewer with its funereal gondola; I love the sensational masked ball, and I was impressed by those rooftop scenes, with Paris as a backdrop in the snow. The scarlet of the Phantom’s cape is like a bloodstain against Christine’s pale skin and monochrome cityscape but she rises to an occasion her rival lovers have not earned; she responds to more genuine tragedy that the movie provides for her; she has feelings her character must generate from within she is so emotionally tortured and romantically torn that both Raoul and Erik should ask themselves if there is another man.

I know there are fans of the Phantom. For a decade in London, you couldn’t go past Her Majesty’s Theater without seeing them with their backpacks, camped out, waiting all night in hopes of a standby ticket. People have seen it 10, 20, 100 times I mean they have never done anything else in their lives but see “The Phantom of the Opera.” They will embrace this movie, and I congratulate them; because they have waited too long to be disappointed.

Some still feel Michael Crawford should have been given the role he made famous onstage; certainly Gerard Butler’s work doesn’t argue against their belief. But Butler is younger and more conventionally handsome than Crawford, in a GQ kind of way; Lloyd Webber’s play has long since forgotten that the Phantom is supposed to be ugly and aging and, given the conditions down there in those cellars, probably congested, arthritic and neurasthenic.

This has been a nutty review; I know that. I am recommending a movie that I do not seem to like very much. But part of the fun of moviegoing is sheer spectacle just sitting there and looking at great stuff and knowing it looks terrific. There wasn’t much Schumacher could have done with the story or the music he was handed (although “All I Ask Of You” does supply an unanticipated laugh), but within the areas over which he held sway he has triumphed splendidly. This is such a fabulous production that by recasting two of its three leads and adding some better songs it could have been well, great!

The Phantom of the Opera review from 1925 by Ebert is available at rogerebert.com. His serial named “Behind the Phantom’s Mask” (1993) is now a bestseller at Amazon.com, which is a murder mystery about a substitute actor who drinks too much.

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