Thank goodness someone wasn't taken in by it...
The review in the Toronto Star:
The mucus of the night
PETER HOWELL
MOVIE CRITIC
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The Phantom
Of The Opera
Starring Gerard Butler, Emmy Rossum, Patrick Wilson and Miranda Richardson. Directed by Joel Schumacher. 143 minutes. At major theatres. PG
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The celebrated chandelier takes its sweet time smashing down in the long-awaited screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom Of The Opera, waiting until near the end to make a climactic clamour.
The movie itself crashes to Earth long before that.
In attempting to update the story while also remaining true to its popular stage musical rendering, director Joel Schumacher commits the cardinal sin of choosing sex appeal over sincerity.
He rejected original stage Phantom Michael Crawford for the role of the Paris Opera spook of the title, reasoning that Crawford was too old to play a convincing lover at 62 — despite Crawford's youthful looks and his undisputed mastery of songs that sound ludicrous and too loud when not properly performed.
Crawford has been supplanted by Scottish actor Gerard Butler, an unskilled singer and largely unheralded actor who once haunted a Tomb Raider sequel. Butler's woeful lack of vocal chops is just one of his painful deficiencies. He's the eighth screen Phantom since Lon Chaney's 1925 silent-film original and he's quite possibly the worst. (And yes, I have seen the Freddy Krueger slasher version.)
Schumacher argues, unconvincingly, that the Phantom needs to be sexed up to appeal to contemporary audiences and to make Butler seem a more appropriate romantic foil for 18-year-old co-star Emmy Rossum (Mystic River), who plays Christine Daaé, the rising opera diva and object of too much male attention.
Butler's Phantom still calls himself a "loathsome gargoyle," but he is really just a pretty boy with a skin infection, as evidenced by his skimpy mask revealing a mostly handsome face. In making him only slightly less shaggable than Patrick Wilson's Vicomte Raoul de Chagny, the gentleman opera patron who jousts for Christine's affections, Schumacher reduces the love dilemma to its most ridiculous terms.
Should Christine choose as her suitor the suave and caring society man with loads of cash and a sweet disposition? Or should she go with the psychopathic killer, extortionist and egotist, who is madly swinging about the rafters and laying waste to the Opera Populaire? Hmm, can she get back to us on this?
The story has been robbed of its raison d'etre, which is to dramatize the yearning of unrequited love, the cruel vagaries of fate and the shallowness of human behaviour, where people pay only lip service to the notion that beauty is only skin deep.
None of this might matter to the many who cherish The Phantom Of The Opera for its thunder and lightning, which Schumacher provides at sonic-blast volume. No expense has been spared on costumes, which are beautiful to behold, and when the film remains true to the play's campy heart — as in Minnie Driver's winking portrayal of the uppity Italian opera diva Carlotta — it revels in gaudy glory.
A commendable attempt has been made to give the story some context, notably with an Elephant Man-style flashback in which Miranda Richardson's opera matron Madame Giry takes in the young Phantom-to-be, sheltering him from cruel stares and threats of freak-show abduction. But this Phantom remains as wispy as ever on the Opera Ghost's essential link with Christine, who has followed the whispered coaching of her unseen "Angel of Music" since childhood.
The songs occasionally rise above the din. When Rossum sings solo, as she does the aria "Think Of Me," she is indeed a revelation, justifying the faith of her risky casting. And not even Butler's hollering can ruin the beauty of "The Music Of The Night," the one great song of the entire production.
But most of the time, the film overflows with overkill, from the amped-up orchestra that constantly threatens to submerge the singers to the ornate silliness of each and every scene involving the Phantom. There haven't been this many roses and candles since Princess Diana's funeral, and the obviousness of the lad's sexual innuendo (including the clamshell bed he takes Christine to) would make Austin Powers cringe.
Weirder still is the lack of anything truly sexy in this hormone-fuelled endeavour. This Phantom is all phoreplay and no phun. Phancy that.
One would have thought after Schumacher destroyed a lucrative comic-book franchise with Batman & Robin — a kitschy travesty memorable for its leather fetish wear — that he would never again be handed a big budget and free reign to indulge his inner Liberace. Schumacher should only be allowed to make small movies with strong actors, like the Colin Farrell-starring Tigerland and Phone Booth that helped restore his lost lustre.
But Lloyd Webber apparently dotes on the man, having fallen for the director's earlier exercise in grotesque behaviour, The Lost Boys, and he was amenable to the idea of tarting up The Phantom Of The Opera. Lloyd Webber's only stipulation was that the actors should be able to actually sing, an edict that Butler somehow managed to skirt.
It's a case of two out of three being okay, I suppose, since Emmy Rossum, despite her youth (she was 16 when she made this) is more than capable as Christine, a role originally brought to life by Lloyd Webber's then-wife Sarah Brightman.
The opera-trained Rossum actually does know how to sing, as does Patrick Wilson (The Alamo), who starred in a Broadway redo of Oklahoma! Wilson's acting may be another thing, although he's not given much to work with, at least until the cacophonous final act when he engages in a snowy swordfight with the Phantom in a mist-shrouded graveyard that may have been last glimpsed in Michael Jackson's Thriller video.
Joel Schumacher's The Phantom Of The Opera is a textbook example of how difficult it is to transfer the thrills of a powerful live stage musical, one steeped in the showiness of 1980s event theatre, to the subtleties demanded by the very different medium of film.
Saddest of all is the thought of how good this movie might have been, had Lloyd Webber proceeded with his original plans to make it in 1990 with original leads Crawford and Brightman. To quote another song murdered by Butler, waiting this long has taken this Phantom literally past "The Point Of No Return."
Toronto Star review
Updated On: 12/22/04 at 09:42 AM
