Recently Seen: Phantom of the Opera (the movie)

Obligatory Musical Theatre Nut Confession
As I have recounted elsewhere on Ascending Chaos, I love musical theatre. I don't have the highest opinion of Andrew Lloyd Webber as a composer of "thru-sung" musicals, but he does churn out pretty melodies in the manner of other musicians who rank somewhat below the highest echelon (Meyerbeer and Mascagni, to name a couple in the same mould of composers of "popular opera"). I certainly don't get sniffy about ALW musicals. He is unashamedly mainstream and knows how to appeal to a mass audience. There's nothing wrong with that. It's not high art, but it brings pleasure to many more people than would an experimental opera by Phillip Glass (I have seen Einstein on the Beach, so I know that of which I speak).

I own a copy of the Original London Cast recording of Phantom, and have done so for 17 years. I saw the show on stage around 15 years ago. I have the VCD of Andrew Lloyd Webber's 50th Birthday Celebration concert. And I have two versions of Michael Ball singing All I Ask of You (Ball's voice is one of my favourite theatre voices).

At one stage in my life, I could sing along to the recording, even the overlapping parts, so imprinted had the libretto become in my mind. There was a time when I didn't listen to the recording for months on end, but each time I returned to it, I could remember every note, if not every word.

My favourite parts of the score:

• All I Ask of You (especially the introductory notes, that swell with romantic ardour approaching Puccinian levels. I also like the bittersweet aftermath, with the Phantom sobbing "Christine, Christine")
• Music of the Night (great theatrical piece and I especially like the ending, and the haunting chord changes when the singing stops)
• The three part harmony in the Graveyard scene (the fragment Wandering Child, after Christine sings Wishing you were Somehow Here Again),
• Prima Donna (a lush, swinging main melody and interesting overlapping lines)
• Notes (nice comedic writing and a welcome respite from the high drama of the lair scenes) and Notes 2 (clever lyrics)
• He is Nothing but a Man .... Twisted Every Way (Raoul tries to calm Christine as she voices her fear over his plan to trap the Phantom. It's a relatively short segment at the end of an ensemble piece but the music expresses the emotions with great economy - tender and wistful on his part, terrified and conflicted on hers).
  

I am pretty familiar with the music of Phantom, although not the staging, as I have only seen it once. This is why I was pretty excited to watch the Phantom movie, to see if the stage experience could be captured (I did not expect it to be emulated or even recreated, as these are two very different art forms). I saw Phantom on stage in Melbourne, with Anthony Warlow singing the role of the Phantom. This remains one of the most memorable nights I have spent in a theatre, and I have had a fair few of those. Whatever else you might think about the syrupy music and overwrought sentimentality, Gaston Leroux wrote a wonderfully atmospheric piece of Gothic romance and a halfway decent adaptation would be gripping. On stage, it worked marvellously. How would the movie do?

The Movie
I had not followed news about the movie, only knowing that they had cast relative unknowns, as the original cast of Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman are now too old to assume the roles. Other than this fact, I knew nothing else about the cast or crew.

Director: Joel Schumacher ??? Here's a head scratcher. Joel Schumacher made Batman and Robin, for crying out loud! This was the movie that killed the Batman franchise, before Chris Nolan's current rescue mission. What would Joel Schumacher know about making a musical? Could they not get Baz Lurhman? This was not promising.

And so it turned out that Joel Schumacher had a decidedly pop music-video approach to this movie. The movie is very glossy and visually beautiful but in achieveing this, Schumacher loses the Gothic edge and darkness that worked so well in the theatre. I suppose it helps to make the movie more accessible to audiences not familiar with the stage show.

This is also the Sexy Phantom of the Opera. Erik the Phantom (not named in this movie) is years younger than both the book and stage versions. In casting Gerald Butler, the film maker had a conventionally good looking leading man who is supposed to be horrifyingly disfigured. He wears a half mask, the edge of which traces his chiselled profile to perfection. He is filmed as often on his uncovered side as he is on his masked side. Before Christine ripped off his mask, I found myself thinking more than once that the actor must be quite nice looking if the right side of his face looked anything like the left.

When the mask came off to reveal the Phantom's deformity, I thought - "oh, is that all?" You see worse on an average episode of Nip/Tuck when they are introducing the case of the week. Really, the disfigurement was hardly terrifying, and the libretto describes the face as being so distorted, "it was hardly a face". This did not come anywhere close to that description.

Schumacher's directorial choices remove the mystic of the Phantom; he is supposed to be mysterious, other-worldly and a figure of horror. The mild disfigurement makes the character more tolerable to look at on a storey-high cinema screen, but ultimately, less complex and conflicted. This is compounded by having his illusions (so thrilling and inexplicable in the stage version) explained early in the game, so that we know from the start that this is NOT a ghost. I understand that the movie Phantom does need to be more human than the stage version; the nature of cinema dictates it. But to so completely strip him of his mystical qualities makes a mockery of the title Phantom of the Opera. In the end, this could have been a high-school teen-drama about a slightly deranged boy with skin problems, the newly discovered star of the cheer squad and the Porsche-driving football captain. The point of Gothic romance is that it is somewhat over the top and larger than life. It could have worked on screen - a Phantom at once human and supernatural. It just needed a better understanding of the material, and probably a better director.

Schumacher also plays up the sexual tension between Christine and the Phantom, rather than underlining the romance, which is inherent in the score or the theme of redemption which has always been the point of Leroux's novel. The Phantom is overtly an object of sexual desire. He stalks with feline grace into the Masquerade scene, generally exudes masculine swagger before his final breakdown, and enacts two seduction scenes, firstly during Music of the Night and later, on stage performing Point of No Return. In both seduction scenes, Schumacher drapes Christine provocatively over the Phantom, her cleavage heaving in time to the music.

Talking about cleavage, Christine wears one bosom-baring dress after another. Even in the cemetary scene, where she is wrapped up everywhere else, with snow falling around her, her cleavage is on decorative display. I suppose that part doesn't get cold?

In all, Schumacher's vision for this movie appears to have much more to do with sexuality than romantic tension. That is fine, in so far as that is the director's prerogative. Where I feel it fails is that this sexualised approach doesn't work with the music, which is rendered tawdry, instead of yearning, despairing and romantic (and I mean romantic in the sense of being about naked emotions, not in the sense of mist-swirled ardour). The danger has always existed with this particular ALW score; it is overwrought and unsubtle in construction. It can be served well if interpreted as a form of opera seria, self aware of its own cliched trappings within the conventions of the genre. Otherwise, it is one note away from being schlocky.

The Cast
It's not easy to cast a musical movie, especially if you insist that the actors do their own singing. They have to look right for the screen (all those close ups!) - something which is less critical for the stage, must sing reasonably well and must act decently. I would have thought that the best thing to do was to scour the musical-theatre stage for suitably photogenic actor-singers, but that is not apparently the way that Schumacher and gang went about it.

Gerard Butler (the Phantom)
As I said earlier, he is somewhat younger than expected and considerably better looking. He has screen presence, being tall and broad and having a gravelly speaking voice and an ability to emote through his eyes. Having such a good looking Phantom presents problems, as his burden of ugliness just does not seem that much to bear when the disfigurement on his face isn't particularly terrible. When Gerard Butler sighs, sobs and wails in anguish, I admire his craft and believe in his internal struggle, but wonder, all the same, if he isn't just being a tad melodramatic. But this is not the actor's fault, so much as the director's. Butler has obviously found a motivation for his character and portrays its many facets with subtlety, skill and charisma. His redemption scene at the end, when he releases Christine, evokes real pathos. He understands, more than his director seemingly does, that the key to the Phantom is his sadness and suffering. His acting is perfectly fine. He rises above Schumacher's mishandling of the character and delivers a heartfelt and emotionally nuanced Phantom.

His singing, though, is far from ideal. The voice itself is not bad; his tone has an unabrasive rock hoarseness, and he manages decent resonance on some of the head notes. But the Phantom is a difficult role to sing and his lack of training tells. He has trouble hitting notes and on Music of the Night and Point of No Return, he sounded like three completely different people singing as he moved between registers. His interpretation of the music was also sometimes overly forceful when subtlety or insinuating sensuality was called for; he resorted to shouting instead of singing, which probably has to do with lack of technique,

Emmy Rossum (Christine)
She received a Golden Globe nomination for her performance, and I am not quite sure why. She certainly looks right for the part, with her doe-eyed beauty and unaffected screen presence. Christine Daae should have a touch of the unworldly innocent about her, and Rossum has the youth and charm to convey this. The camera loves her and she is simply luminous, with her glowing, flawless complexion and her dark hair and eyes. In terms of looking the part, she cannot be faulted.

I wish I could say the same about her acting. There are moments when I found her truly moving, but too many scenes where she seemed to completely lack emotion. Part of that might be Schumacher's fault, so it might not necessarily reflect her abilities as an actress. But she set the tone for the entire performance with her lack of facial expression during "Think of Me" when it transitioned to the gala performance. Here she was, with her big break, singing the star role, and she just stood there looking blank, her voice seemingly coming from an offstage recording (of course, it did!). It was almost like someone had said that singers look horrible on screen, with open mouth and possible sighting of tonsils, and she was determined to appear perfectly decorous, hardly opening her mouth at all. She relied on her eyes to do all the acting, but does not quite yet have the emotional maturity to be completely convincing.

Her singing was much vaunted as she had sung with the Met Opera Children Chorus. Her voice is certainly rich, especially in its lower register, but the girl needs lessons on technique. There were far too many cheats in hitting the high notes and in the transition between notes. And quite a few high notes were squeaked, rather than sung. When she wasn't struggling with unsupported notes, and resorting to scooping in and out of notes, she did sound lovely, rather like an old-style Hollywood soprano (Shirley Jones comes to mind, although I think Rossum might be more of a mezzo than a soprano). It's a pity they didn't give her more time to be properly trained; the promise is apparent, which makes the sour notes harder to take.

Patrick Wilson (Raoul)
Raoul is a thankless role to play, being essentially one dimensional and rather boring, compared to the complex Phantom. Patrick Wilson pulls off the acting about as well as expected; it's a dull, stereotypical romantic lead and he portrays it exactly as what it is. If it comes across as a somewhat bland performance, I think it has more to do with the role than the actor. Schumacher put in additional action-hero scenes to enlarge Raoul's role, but I felt these did nothing to make the character more interesting. Raoul is a narrative device; he is noble, impulsive-heroic and a bit dandyish - and is described as such by both Leroux's prose and Lloyd Webber's score; a fine and admirable character but not all that interesting. He is as an uncomplicated character functioning as a foil to the Phantom. A convincing performance of the role is one in which Raoul is superficially charming and ardent, and Christine's love for him is believable. In this, I think Wilson succeeded - he brings an easy laid-back charm to his early scenes and is suitably intense as the melodrama intensifies. I found Raoul in the movie to be extremely likeable, if not very interesting. It did take a while for me to warm to the character and I initially felt that he had been miscast, but much of that is because his appearance was so much fairer and paler than I expected.

He also gets saddled with a horrific hair-piece, which would be envied by any woman, so perfectly fine and silky are his tresses. This has the unfortunate effect of detracting from his great bone structure, and succeeds in making the character look even more foppish. Add the open-necked white shirts and tight breeches, and what you have is a Raoul that is styled from the cover of a bodice-ripping romance novel.

Raoul does get one of the best songs in the score, so while not a great role to act, it is a grateful role to sing. Patrick Wilson's singing is the best of the three leads, which is somewhat of a pity as he gets the least actual singing. He has a lovely lyric tenor, a light and sweet tone; it is a very "musical theatre" type of voice. He has two Tony Award nominations (one for playing Curly in Oklahoma! - I would love to hear his voice on Oh, What a Beautiful Morning) and his Broadway-cred is telling. He is the only one of the three leads without obvious vocal problems. Compared to Gerard Butler's rock-edge growl, he has less vocal heft, but considerably better technique and greater musicality.

The Supporting Cast
Miranda Richardson is a regal but human Madame Giry. Apart from the three leads, this is the most important role, at least in the movie version. Madame Giry is almost portrayed as an accomplice of the Phantom. It would have been easy for an audience to think that she approved of Buquet's murder and the obsessive stalking of Christine Daae. Miranda Richardson manages to infuse trepidation and remorse behind her icy gaze, so that this is never so clear-cut.

Minnie Driver plays Carlotta as a completely over the top caricature of an Italian Prima Donna. I found this somewhat grating, but the blame here lies squarely with the director. The singing is supplied by someone else who was instructed to indulge in the worst ever parody of an unmusical soprano, complete with broad vibrato and ear-splitting shrieks. This is just wrong, as Carlotta is the star of Opera Populaire and is supposed to be able to SING, whatever else might be wrong about her personality.

Simon Callow and Ciaran Hinds play Andre and Firmin, the two theatre managers. They are possibly my favourite thing about the movie, especially their scenes in Notes and Prima Donna. Simon Callow is a wonderful comic actor and his lightness of touch never fails here. He also does a fine job with the singing and produces a few wonderfully plumy tones during Prima Donna. Ciaran Hinds (who played Captain Wentworth in the movie Persuasion, talk about versatility!) was a delight with his smirking and raised eyebrows. He has no singing experience, but a great speaking voice and manages to pull off the singing well enough.

General Comment on the Singing
They marshalled the resources to have a 105-piece orchestra perform the score. This is welcome news indeed to cast recording collectors. I had always wondered why there wasn't a Symphonic recording of Phantom, like the one done for Les Mis (which is a marvellous recording, sound wise). This movie soundtrack could have filled that gap. Unfortunately, the uneven singing abilities of the lead cast has voided this promise. They are by no means bad, but not equal to performers in cast recordings.


The Movie vs the Musical on Stage
Changes were made in the movie, presumably to make it more easily digestible by a movie audience. Some of it works better than others:

• Black and white flash-forward scenes, showing Raoul forty years after the main events. On stage, there is one future scene, right at the start, serving as a prologue. In the movie, the flash-forward scenes intersperse the set pieces and there is a substantial scene acting almost like an epilogue. As a cinematic device, this was useful but overused.
• Changing the Phantom's back story as told by Madame Giry. In the stage musical, she talks about a disfigured man escaping from the travelling fair, but does not know what had become of him. In the movie, she is the one who, as a child, showed him the way to the dungeons below the Opera Populaire. I did not care for this change in the Phantom's history. It establishes a strange relationship between Madame Giry and the Phantom which the movie does not satisfactorily resolve (I think it cannot be resolved, because it's not in the score at all). This backstory also wipes out the Phantom's history of being a known genious, who had built a maza of mirrors for the Shah of Persia.
• Adding spoken lines of exposition. The bulk of this took place in the first scenes as they established the characters. Later, Christine does a bit of explaining about her father and the Angel of Music and Madame Giry tells the story of how Erik came to the Opera's underground lair. I actually felt these were unecessary and broke the flow of a mostly sung-through musical.
• Having certain lines spoken instead of sung. This did not make any sense to me at all. They kep the music playing in the background, so perhas they were going for a Rex Harison style of speak singing. Why, though?
• Showing the backstage activities at the Opera. This was great, one example of how the cinematic medium can open up the action and show what happens off the scene on the stage.
• Raoul defeats the Phantom in a duel. This was a strange scene, tagged on for seemingly no reason, other than perhaps generating some Schumacher type action. In itself, that is a sound idea, to take advantage of the cinematic medium and to produce a movie that was more than just a filmed stage show. The scene was well-filmed and generated some excitement, but seemed to have come out of nowhere. Having Raoul win the duel was jarring, especially after the Phantom had been shown to be so assuredly masculine and powerful.
• Raoul almost drowning. I suppose they wanted to give the third lead a little more to do. The problem is that these scenes add nothing to the story at all. The thing that Patrick Wilson does best is sing, not play action hero. Couldn't ALW have written him a couple of extra verses if they wanted to give him more screentime? Although, I did not mind this addition as much, because it fit better with the structure of the movie - an active sequence in the midst of other sequences with people on the move - the Phantom dragging Christine to his lair and the group out to "track down this murderer".
  
• Cutting Raoul's part in the three part harmony in the Cemetary scene. As mentioned above, this is one of my favourite parts of the score. Chopping it up this way was quite unforgivable.
• Leaving out the final verse of Phantom of the Opera. So, it's the title song, right? And they left off the final verse. Go figure.
• Leaving out the entire Notes II segment and the subsequent scene showing rehearsals for Don Juan Triumphant. Some of my favourite "Notes" lines are in this scene - the one about the third trombone is particularly droll. In the stage show, Christine has her breakdown (leading to Twisted Every Way) in this section, in front of everyone. It's a powerful scene in the theatre. The movie version has this segment as a two-hander with Christine and Raoul. It's more intimate and works quite well, but I would have preferred the old version, if only to see more of Andre and Firmin.
• The chandelier dropping during Don Juan and not at the end of Il Muto. This was necessary because there is no intermission in the movie. In the musical, the chandelier comes crashing down just before intermission, creating a nice climax point. They saved this for a later point in the movie, but it did lose some impact because they then plunged headlong into the Phantom's kidnapping of Christine, Raoul's drowning scene and the group storming the lair, out for the Phantom's blood (while the theatre supposedly burnt above them - logic gap?)

For me, the movie does not have even a fraction of the energy and magic of the theatre experience. Scenes that grip you by the throat in the theatre seems oddly flat on screen. On stage, Music of the Night is a masterpiece of creepiness and mystery. In the movie, it lacks atmosphere because of poor direction that did nothing to sustain tension. The lair was also too well lit and too beautifully appointed. On stage, All I Ask of You is truly swooningly romantic, the Phantom's sob afterwards is heart-rending and his final declaimation "You will curse the day ... " is chilling. In the movie, these scenes play out and are pleasing to the eye and not too uneasy on the ear (see comments on the leads' singing above), but lack drama. Masquerade in the theatre is simply fantastic, a great set-piece and meta-commentary on the Phantom story. In the movie, there were a few too many cuts and the gold and black theme was visually arresting, but lacked the gaudy colour demanded by the bachinallian intentions of the music.

It has been said that this movie is not only for the fans, but for those who might not otherwise watch a staged musical. Hence the young, good looking stars, sexy costumes and heightened sexuality. I suspect the movie succeeds better in pleasing these casual viewers than the long-time fan of the show. And on those terms, we have to regard the movie as a success.

It is rather hard for me to watch this from the perspective of a movie-goer without the "baggage" of a having expectations formed from the musical on stage and on recordings. I imagine, though, that in terms of appealing to a wider audience, Schumacher probably made an astute decision to cast younger actors and ramping up the sex appeal of the story. How would audiences have responded to an uglier, older Phantom, a modestly dressed Christine and a less swashbuckling Raoul? Would the lack of sword-fighting and a more dingy lair diminish the movie as a cinematic spectacle?

Schumacher set out to make a movie, not a film of the stage musical. He remained faithful to much of the material in the sense of excising very little from the original score and book. Through casting and direction, he did change the psychology underlying the events. (In particular, Schumacher alludes to the "sexual and deeply soulful" connection between Christine and the Phantom, which is more than vaguely disturbing in an Oedipal sense. Christine spends much of her time believing the angel of music to be the spirit of her father - Schumacher even has the Phantom sing "Far from my fathering gaze" during Wandering Child, instead of "Far from my far-reaching gaze", as in the original libretto.) Lloyd Webber's Phantom still owed much to Leroux's Erik. Schumacher's Phantom seems to have been inspired less by Leroux and more by Alexander Dumas or even the Baroness Orczy. It makes for an enjoyable enough 2 hours in the cinema, but it isn't really The Phantom of the Opera, neither Lloyd Webber's or Leroux's.

Final Thoughts

For those who have never seen Phantom on stage, this is not a substitute, because it isn't even really the same work once Schumacher has had his way with it. As a movie, it achieves the virtue of being entertaining. The cast provides enough eye candy to satisfy the sweetest tooth. The sets are sumptuous and beautiful, and the cinematography showcases one visual highpoint after another (sometimes at the expense of logical story-telling). Movie-goers who are not allergic to on-screen singing and wall-to-wall swelling violins would probably enjoy this. I think it would especially appeal to women because it is so ostensibly romantic, especially the dramatic denouement in final lair scene with both Butler and Wilson in half-open white shirts and Rossum in a shoulder-baring wedding dress.

This is well worth watching for any fan of the musical, if only to see how it translates onto the big screen. It is wonderful to look at and certainly never boring. For me, it lacks the spark of the live theatre experience and most disappointingly, the singing is uneven. That said, it is a welcome edition to the video library, as there has been no recorded version of the stage play or even a concert performance.

Movie rating: 7.5 out of 10 (as a movie), 6 out of 10 (as a movie version of the stage musical)