Yet it would be wrong to call “The Phantom of the Opera” a failure because it is visually so delicious. All the curtains, costumes, candles, big wigs, vases, flowers, and fake snow. All the balconies, spiral staircases, headstones, secret tunnels, rafters, rigging, catwalks, opera productions, and statues. And the Phantom’s underground lair, with its watery tunnels and gothic everything. All this is dazzling and wonderful. Many times when I had long stopped caring about what the characters were saying, singing, or doing, I was still mesmerized by all the color. And the cleavage, my God, what a celebration of cleavage! Powdered, shining, and heaving with sobs, all the way from the lowliest jailbait chorus girls to the stately and good-looking middle-age of Miranda Richardson. Even the men probably look good in push-up bras. It’s like a Renaissance Festival.
“Phantom” is bookended by grainy black-and-white sequences decades after the main story has taken place. The grains are not the scratches and lines of old movies and Guy Maddin films, but the charming jumble of underlit video. Schumacher has shot “The Phantom of the Opera” on high-definition digital video, a medium that is really starting to find its footing. Movies like “Attack of the Clones” and “Once Upon a Time in Mexico” suffer from digital video. But others, like “Collateral,” “Waking Life,” and “Russian Ark,” understand that DV can be an artistic alternative to film, not just a financial substitute, and certainly not film’s heir or replacement.
I think my local Cinemark installed a digital light projector (DLP) in the past year, which may be why I’m so glowing about the look of “Collateral” and “Phantom of the Opera” and so down on “Attack of the Clones” and “Once Upon a Time in Mexico.” Like watercolor and oil, digital video and film should be approached as different tools for different goals, not rivals. DV lacks some of the depth and hypnotic swirls of film, but it has colors all its own, and Schumacher delights in the slow-burning golds of candlelight, borrowed from Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Ark.”
It wouldn’t surprise me if Schumacher and Oscar-nominated cinematographer John Mathieson (Ridely Scott's photographer) watched “Russian Ark” over and over again in preparation. In many ways, “Phantom” is an attempt at a more mainstream version of Sokurov’s masterpiece. The most interesting character in both films is not a person, but the structure where things take place. (The only scene in “Phantom” to take place outside the opera accomplishes nothing but the performance of the brand new song.) Both “Russian Ark’s” Hermitage and “The Phantom’s” Opera are like sad, wise old trees, who have seen too much to think that passing on their wisdom will do any good. The Hermitage has a Russian sense of philosphical fatalism and slow-moving whimsy, while the Opera is part prima donna, mischievous and cunning. Both movies feature shadowy corridors, formal balls, giant white wigs, pouting lovers, queenly prima donnas, and goldly-lit backstage antics, all populated by red-cheeked grotesques. Both movies have processions on enormous stairs, Schumacher having transformed history’s farewell to the Russian aristocrats into the “Masquerade” sequence. Both Schumacher and Sokurov deal with ghosts and time travel, although Schumacher does cut a few more times than Sokurov.
I’m fascinated by the idea of cities having hidden places, of rooms and spaces forgotten when new roads were put in or renovations were made to existing buildings. The school I attended in Boston for two semesters had clear demarcations between one era and another, where the floor raised by a few inches and all the doorways looked different. The slipshod improvements one generation made over its predecessor even created a secret ladder with a dusty, forgotten room at the top. Schumacher’s “The Phantom of the Opera,” like its 1925 Lon Chaney predecessor and the novel upon which they are both based, engaged this part of me heedlessly.
Speaking of the 1911 novel: Gaston Leroux may be using the opera house to embody uncontrollable urban sprawl. The city has become so big, so fast, that no one can know all of it. Parts of it have been left off maps and forgotten, and who knows what might live there? Leroux’s Opera is a single building that has survived endless renovations, management changes, even a bloody revolution. Like the city, no one knows all its corners and no one knows what could be lurking in them. Leroux even mentions old couples who have been living inside the Opera’s walls for years, forgotten and rent-free. The novel also makes it clear that the Phantom is the nastiest of all the inhabitants of a newly-enlarged urban metroplex: A Dirty Foreigner.
Like the musical, Leroux’s novel is a little bit cheesy and more than a little overwrought. I liked it. The Phantom’s story is a great collection of elements, combining Beauty & The Beast with a love triangle, combining a haunted house with fear of the urban wilderness. It’s no wonder so many people have tried their hands at it. The 1925 version with Lon Chaney is quite good; like Schumacher’s version, it delights in art direction and spooky decadence, but it has the advantage of Chaney’s lively performance. And of being silent, hint, hint. As for Schumacher and Lloyd Webber, the result is a definitively two-and-a-half-star balancing act, in which we must weigh what is done so very well with what is done so very badly, and shrug in the end.
Finished Monday, February 7th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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