Dir. Joel Schumacher, 2004, USA/UK, 143 min
Cast: Gerard Butler, Miranda Richardson, Minnie Driver, Simon Callow
Review by Lizzy Griffin
It’s 1870 and the Opera Populaire in Paris is under new management. Firmin (Ciaran Hinds) and Andre (Callow) are eager to make a success of the enterprise and please their wealthy patron the Vicompte Raoul de Chagny (Patrick Wilson). But the show’s star, cranky diva La Carlotta (Driver), doesn’t want to play ball and there is also superstitious talk of a terrifying figure said to haunt the opera. When young chorus girl Christine Daae (Emmy Rossum) steps into the breach and captivates the public with her beautiful voice – trained by an unseen musical tutor whom she knows only as ‘Angel of Music’ – the show appears to be saved. Yet the mysterious phantom of the opera (Butler) has also heard his protégé. While Christine basks in the admiration of her audience and the Vicompte, her tortured mentor cowers in dark spaces beneath the theatre struggling with his desire, jealousy and thirst for revenge.
Lloyd Webber’s smash hit stage musical has not translated comfortably to the big screen. While the performances are generally strong (Miranda Richardson is underused as Mme. Giry and stage actor Patrick Wilson seems out of place), the singing is far stronger than, and at times almost overwhelms, the straight acting. Having said this, the world of the Opera Populaire is given a great energy as the backstage bustle and activity of plasterers and wig makers, as well as the chorus of singers and dancers and the shrill complaints of Carlotta, permeate throughout. Schumacher apparently chose to stage these scenes in Pinewood Studio’s North Tunnel – a service passageway not normally used for filming – to convey the theatre’s labyrinth of dressing rooms, prop stores and corridors. The tunnel’s proximity to Pinewood’s main stage also enabled cinematographer John Mathieson’s ( Gladiator ) camera to travel smoothly from here into front of house scenes. In this way the director and production designer Anthony Pratt, convey the vigorous life of the theatre and also set up a nice contrast with the lonely cavernous underground dwelling of the Phantom.
Lloyd Webber has described the film as “an extraordinarily fine document of the stage show”, and this is where much of the problem with The Phantom of the Opera lies. Many of the key scenes – Christine’s sparkling debut performance, Carlotta’s downfall, and the Phantom’s climactic self penned duet with his muse The Point of No Return – necessarily take place on the theatre stage. But other scenes – the rooftop romance of All I Ask of You and the glitz of Masquerade – are also overtly, and arguably unnecessarily, stagy. This often makes the film seem stilted, as if confined and overshadowed by its truly theatrical predecessor.
Only the snowy graveyard scenes where Christine, shrouded in mist, is pursued by the Phantom, escape this claustrophobia. Indeed these scenes have an indulgent gothicism and perhaps even a touch of The Lost Boys – the film which tuned Lloyd Webber on to Schumacher as a possible director for Phantom back in the eighties. Of course, the project was shelved due to the composer’s divorce from Sarah Brightman, only to be dusted off in 2002 when the composer again approached the director.
Despite the intervening years and lavish production the collaboration struggles to shake off its eighties origins, and at times looks strangely dated and naff – like a Spandau Ballet video with a side order of Ferrero Roche.
