Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera
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États-Unis, 2004
De Joel Schumacher
Scénario : Andrew Lloyd Webber, Joel Schumacher
Avec : Gerard Butler, Minnie Driver, Miranda Richardson, Emmy Rossum, Patrick Wilson
Durée : 2h20
Sortie : 01/01/2004
News owners, under the attention of the young sponsor Raoul of Chagny, are now leading the Paris Opera. Raoul finds back among the dancers his first love, Christine Daae, and falls again in love with her. However is the dancer under the protection of the phantom haunting the corridors of the opera and this one won’t hesitate to go the hard way to keep her for him alone.
THE PHANTOM MENACE
It would have been illusive to expect a masterpiece from the always-subject-to-controversy Joel Schumacher. Not only is he responsible for the last two total disastrous Batman films, but he also did direct the reactionary A Time to Kill and 8mm, not to forget the calamitous Bad Company. However, let’s admit that two of his most recent films had given hopes for a better time. Maybe were the mistakes of the past finally history, and maybe was he on the same path as Tony Scott, who has never been better as during the past few years. Indeed, the dogma-style-directed Tigerland (with its ‘granular’ DV image, shoulder-carried camera and natural light) and the experimental Phone Booth (split screens, units of time, action…) had led to think that the long criticized director was now back on the right film tracks. Enough to seriously want to give life to his lifetime project, a grandiloquent adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera of Gaston Leroux… or more precisely The Phantom of the Opera of Andrew Lloyd Webber, author and compositor of the successful musical played for more that ten years in Broadway. Characters wearing masks, omnipresent spur of sex, attraction to the dark side of the human soul were already dealt with in Schumacher’s cinema and could have, if not should have, been sublimated in his new film. Unfortunately, and this despite some beautifully mastered sequences (notably through the music), one can only regret the incestuous and sticky eroticism of Dario’s Argento’s version, the chirurgical bloodbath of Dwight H. Little, the fascinating enquiry of Tony Richardson’s TV-film and, of course, the baroque and video-clip-like vision of Brian de Palma for his outstanding Phantom of the Paradise.
BUTLER, THE NICE GHOST
The spectators expect, as main character for such a movie, an actor with a certain charisma, a man with a magnetic and intensely sexual attractive power, almost animal-like, and doted with a disturbing stature. Well, stop expecting any of this, the selected actor summarises the whole movie: not enough! Not big enough, not wide enough, not everything enough! Schumacher delivers a film that, with its intention to look like a video-clip, lacks of richness and scale. Each and every shot should have been plentiful, the phantom should have been this troubling, romantic and sadist creature as previously played by the yet not so talented Julian Sands and Robert Englund. So yes the costumes are wonderful, yes the set is impressive, yes the songs are beautiful and yes the choreography for the Masquerade theme is inventive but the total length of the movie, the uselessness of some scenes and most importantly of some characters, together with the main actors being so shallow can only confirm the half-failure of this film in all of its aspects. It’s all the more a pity that some scenes echoes the sincerity of the filmmaker and his obvious desire to give the spectators so much more, but his will remains unfortunately unsuccessful. We hope for this particular moment to come that will, finally, bring the movie to life, hope, and hope again but this moment never comes, so that the spectators finally get bored. Schumacher’ talent is better used in short movies (such as in the incredible Phone Booth which success does not only rely on its script) and maybe should the director forget long projects he can’t master. After the uninspired Veronica Guerin, the filmmaker kills the hopes born with Tigerland and Phone Booth. Director wanted for Batman 6?
