Past the point of no return
There is a paradox at the heart of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s empire that Joel Schumacher’s 2004 Phantom of the Opera makes impossible to ignore: everything that made the stage show a phenomenon is precisely what makes the movie unnecessary. The spectacle of Phantom on Broadway — the chandelier crashing, the boat gliding through candlelit mist, a body swinging from the catwalk — is staggering because human beings are pulling it off live, eight shows a week, in real time, before our very eyes. Translate that to cinema, where spaceships can dogfight… and ocean liners can split in half… and dinosaurs can eat lawyers, and suddenly a guy in a rowboat surrounded by fog machines doesn’t hit quite the same way. Any adaptation of a Webber show will be hindered as such; ironically, their spectacle-forward presentation makes them less likely to translate to screen
And yet. That organ riff kicks in, those big, churning, Bach-esque chords that must have been recorded on an actual pipe organ, perhaps in a cathedral, and something in my chest responds whether I want it to or not. Webber’s melodies are unkillable. He exerts. You can dismiss his shows as gaudy, shameless and slightly inhuman without crossing over into charming camp, and plenty of people do. But the tunes knock you on your butt.
This adaptation is pretty illegible and incoherent, to be frank. It’s not doing the source material (or the source’s source material, a much-adapted 1910 novel by Gaston Leroux) many favors. This Phantom (Gerard Butler) is a handsome but disfigured musical genius who lives in the lake beneath the Paris Opera House (which really exists, though not in any way it could be inhabited). He manipulates the theater’s owners to follow his whims, and he grooms the ingenue Christine (Emmy Rossum), an orphan who also lives in the opera house, to be a star. When Christine reconnects with her childhood sweetheart Raoul (Patrick Wilson), now a wealthy patron, a love triangle between the phantom, Christine, and Raoul rots into coercion and violence. The story shares DNA with Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a part of that noble tradition of French stories about ugly dudes pining from the shadows for beautiful maidens.
But Phantom of the Opera, at least in this screenplay, only scratches at the contradictions lying within those themes rather than fully digging at them. This version, which exists more as a romantic melodrama with some murders than a romantic horror the word “phantom” suggests, delivers a glancing blow of a conundrum about where Christine’s heart lies: with the dangerous, passionate outcast or the dashing nobleman. It never really earns the chemistry or tension required to make the triangle land; the Phantom is just too cartoonish and misanthropic, the connection a flat, fairy tale romance without pulse. You have to bring your own subtext if you want much to chew on.
Schumacher reportedly wanted a “rock and roll guy” for the Phantom regardless of vocal ability, and that’s how you end up with handsome Butler wearing a quarter-face mask and straining through songs written for Michael Crawford’s operatic tenor. The unmasking itself, one of cinema’s all-time great images in the 1925 Lon Chaney version, is a total non-event here. By the time we get a full prosthetic reveal late in the film, it amounts to some scarring on a conventionally attractive man. Who could love a monster such as Gerard Butler? Rossum, to her credit, brings adorable, wide-eyed sincerity to a role that doesn’t have much psychological depth, though the fact that she was seventeen during filming adds an uncomfortable layer to the romantic material that’s ripe with lust.
The structural choices are similarly muddled. On stage, the chandelier crashes at the end of Act One: that’s your defying gravity moment, your big curtain-dropper. But movies don’t have intermissions (unless you’re The Brutalist), so Schumacher relocates the chandelier drop to the climax, where it gets mixed up in the chaos of the finale. It’s a reasonable enough decision in theory, as movies typically crowd their third acts with action, but it robs the moment of its singular, turning point impact. It’s a disconnect that captures the movie’s broader problem of not quite translating the spectacle of a stage show into commensurately satisfying joys on screen.
Schumacher gets at least one thing right, and that is the production, which is busy and extravagant. And unlike Wicked, it’s cleanly lit so you can enjoy it: The film lets you soak in the tremendous sound stage recreations of the Paris opera house. The costumes are good fun, too; a black-and-white masquerade evokes the climax of An American in Paris, and it wasn’t the only garment that reminded me of classic studio Hollywood glitz.
I keep coming back to the grand sweep of the music, though. It gets to you. Webber’s motific vision of shifting genres and moods between characters, then resurfacing melodic fragments to signal an emotional connection or shift in mood, is satisfying and more sophisticated than his detractors give him credit for, even if the execution is a messy panorama rather than a focused statement. Phantom of the Opera is far from a great movie, and it might not even be a good one. But I watched it and I accepted it for what it was. Not every musical needs to be a piece of art. Sometimes the chandelier just needs to fall.
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.