Movie #531: The Phantom of the Opera

The Phantom of the Opera is the movie version of the musical, directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Emmy Rossum, Gerard Butler, Patrick Wilson, Minnie Driver, Miranda Richardson, Ciaran Hinds, Simon Callow, and Kevin McNally.

We begin in 1919 Paris, in black and white, as Raoul, Viscount de Chagny (Wilson), attends an auction at the Opera Populaire. We get the famous transition from the auction into the opera house's height of popularity in the late 19th century, and jump into the days after the opera house is purchased by Firmin (Hinds) and Andre (Callow).

And then, unfortunately, every time there's a story beat we have to flash to old Raoul looking sad in black and white for some reason, and it utterly fucks the pacing of the story and adds exactly nothing.

The story is pretty familiar to us theater kids. The opera house is haunted by a "phantom" (Butler), who sneaks around and drops things on people and scares everyone, and whom the previous owner paid a salary. The new owners decide "screw that," but the lead soprano Carlotta (Driver) still walks out before opening night of Hannibal, and so a chorus girl named Christine (Rossum) steps in and crushes it. The Phantom has been giving her singing lessons, and after the performances leads her down into his subterranean lair, but she also knows Raoul from her childhood and they become lovers, Phantom becomes jealous, kills a couple of people, stages a performance of an opera he's written to get back at Christine...honestly, it starts to drag.

So, the issue here, I think, is that a stage play can afford to go on longer than a movie and we accept certain jumps in time and place without the establishing shots that a movie requires. Also, Phantom is a sung-through musical. There's very little spoken dialog, but that means when there are scenes of people talking normally and then people start speaking lines that are supposed to be sung, it sounds weird, because songs are written with a particular meter and rhyme and they sound dumb as hell being spoken.

I'm not saying that every musical needs a framing device like Chicago, wherein the songs only happen in Roxie's mind, but shit, we've got the "Raoul is remembering the past romantically" thing right there, couldn't the flashback, which is already offset from "now" by being in color, also be sung-through and with a greater sense of pomp and performance? That would allow for overt magic and other impossibilities, and we wouldn't need to see anything that wasn't from Raoul's perception (like, say, the overlong sequence where the Phantom kills Buquet (McNally)).

Anyway. Rossum as Christine was pretty amazing and managed to convey some pretty convincing moments of conflict about the Phantom (particular considering how young she was when this was filmed, holy cats). Butler is decent as the Phantom, and Wilson is honestly perfect as Raoul. My issues with the movie lie squarely with the director, and more than once I found myself shaking my fist at the screen going "SCHUMACHER!"

My Grade: C-
Rewatch Value: Low

Next up: The Phantom Planet