The Phantom of the Opera (Warner Bros., Odyssey Entertainment, Really Useful Films, Central Partnership, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9:10 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the 2004 film version nf Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera. Charies and I had seen a bootleg production of this at a local theatre – where the famous falling chandelier was a cheap thrift-store item and its collapse occurred at the very beginning – but the plot of the film, directed by the ever-reliable (you can count on him to screw up potentially good material, including the Batman and Jurassic Park franchises) Joel Schumacher, who also co-wrote the script with Lloyd Webber, withholds the collapsing chandelier to the very end of the story and makes it a big set-piece. Charles said he can’t be fair-minded about the Phantom music because his boyfriend before me had had a copy of the soundtrack CD and played it incessantly, whereas I nad bought the Phantom album when it first came out and liked it but still didn’t obsess about it at all, let alone to that extent. I also remember loaning my copy of Phantom to my good friend Cat Ortiz so she could learn the songs for that bootleg production.

The 2004 film of Phantom joined that odd list of mega-hit stage musicals that have been turned into flop movies (can you say A Chorus Line or Lloyd Webber’s Cats?), and it’s a film that virtually defines “uneven.” Passages in the film of great Gothic beauty and genuine terror alternate with others of almost stupefying banality, and for that I’m more inclined to blame Andrew Lloyd Webber rather than Joel Schumacher or anyone else. Lloyd Webber is a master at one type of song, the power ballad – though even there he’s hot always good at delineating the characters musically: the big duet between the Phantom and Christine Däae, the ingenue lead (“Music of the Night”) sounded almost exactly the same as her later duet with the male lead, Raoul de Chagny (“As If We Never Said Goodbye”). They should sound different from each other, reflecting the conflict that grips the entire story – whether Christine should embrace the light and love of Raoul or the darkness, despair and ultimate triumph of the Phantom’s legacy – but even in the power ballads that are his specialty and the one thing he does well as a composer, he’s not all that good as a delineator of character.

And on the non-ballad songs, including the so-called “book songs” that are there to advance the plot, like “Masquerade,” Lloyd Webber is competent but not particularly inspired at all. It was his bad luck to be a contemporary of Stephen Sondheim, who never wrote the big blockbuster hits Lloyd Webber did but was a far more creative force in musical theatre and a much more creative composer. One can imagine Lloyd Webber thinking of Sondheim the way Bing Crosby thought of Frank Sinatra: “A talent like that comes along once in a lifetime. Why did it have to be my lifetime?” I remember when Carol Williams was civic organist in Balboa Park, where she would routinely play music from Phantom and other Lloyd Webber hits, and I would write afterwards that I didn’t think Andrew Lloyd Webber was the greatest show composer of all time and I didn’t think he was single-handedly ruining music, either: I liked some of his songs, disliked others (his much-ballyhooed Requiem I thought was quite good except for one middle movement of crushing banality) and could generally take him oir leave him. And both the good and the bad aspects of Lloyd Webber’s Phantom are done justice (or injustice) in this movie, where the producers threw the full armamentarium of modern-day “production values” at the story.

The cast is as uneven as the rest of it: the Phantom is played by Gerard Butler, who’s a good actor but too closely associated with the action-hero Secret Service agent in the … Has Fallen movies he’s credible as a darkly romantic lead in a Gothic thriller. (One expects at any moment him to reveal that the real reason he’s wearing the mask is he’s there to protect the president of France from some dastardly terrorist plot to assassinate him inside the opera house.) His voice is uncomfortably reminiscent of David Bowie’s and simply does not have the “chops” for Lloyd Webber’s material, and Patrick Wilson as Raoul is properly boyishly handsome but doesn’t sing much better than Butler. Byh far the best singing is done by the Christine, Emmy Rossum, who handles Lloyd Webber’s not particularly adept attempts at coloratura as if they were the real deal. Though only 18 when the film was made, she sings and acts her part with a vitality and virtue that eludes her co-stars; the film gained her a Golden Globe nomination and a lot of praise even though her credits list since then has not exactly done justice to her skill level here. I also loved the cameo performance of Minnie Driver as Carlotta, an aging over-the-hill diva whom Christine replaces at the opera, even though they camped her up too broadly and gave her a Susan Alexander level of incompetence.

Overall, I’m not sure what to make of this “official” film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera; the Lloyd Webber-Schumacher script deserves credit for retaining at least some of the Phantom’s booby traps (not since the first and still the best version, starring Lon Chaney, Sr. in 1925, has a film crew bothered to stage the vivid sequences in Gaston Leroux’ source novel) but Raoul still gets caught in one of the traps (the old cliché of the escape from the water-filled dungeon, in which he uses his last breath to turn a valve and open it just before he suffocates). There are also some pointless sequences set at the Paris “Opéra Populaire” in 1919, 49 years after the main action, in which various props are being auctioned off and an aged Raoul is bidding on some items associated with the elements of the main story. (And the script ignores the fact that France fought an existential war with Germany in 1870 and another that had just ended in 1919.) Still, there are some sequences that work beautifully (and not just when Emma Rossum is singing) and an overall air of chill that suggests Joel Schumacher is a better director than I have often give him credit for; this is the man who made The Lost Boys, after all, so he had (he died in 2020 at the age of 80) some idea of how to make the Gothic horror sensibility accessible to modern audiences.