Musical Phantoms Reductio ad Absurdum
(originally posted on IMDb 28 November 2018)

"The Phantom of the Opera," of course, began as a novel by Gaston Leroux. One of the first adaptations to the screen was one that still largely had to be read--a silent film starring Lon Chaney. It also had a glorious production design, including the auditorium replicating that of the Palais Garnier. It was so magnificent (and steel reinforced) that the studio, Universal, reused it in many films thereafter, including its 1943 remake. While the 1925 Chaney version added sound for its re-release, the Phantom remained silent. A loose Chinese reworking of the story, "Song at Midnight" (1937) made the Phantom a singer. The 1943 remake, along with its imitators such as the 1962 Hammer film, added a backstage musical--an opera, which was appropriate on one hand, but, on the other, it entirely disregarded the point of the "Faust" play-within-a-play aspect from the book, so the inner opera had nothing to do with the Phantom menace of the main narrative. It was just a sop to the mainstream crossover appeal of a baritone like Nelson Eddy, who actually received top billing over the film's Phantom, Claude Rains. Brian De Palma's "Phantom of the Paradise" (1974) restored the Faustian layers while retaining the backstage musical, and it's the one to see for those who want a good Phantom musical. Anyways, now, there's this movie based on the Andrew Lloyd Webber stage version, which is an integrated musical where the singing takes up so much time that despite lasting nearly 2 and 1/2 hours, the whole Faustian thing had to be thrown out. Besides the music, what's left is an inane love triangle, but the movie does restore one important aspect, and that's the glorious production design.

Jerrold E Hogle's critique of the stage version in "The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera" sums up this screen adaptation just as well: as the romance consisting of arrested adolescence and Freudian Oedipus complexes. Christine is misled by the attraction for her dead father, who she mistakes as the Phantom, and the Phantom is like a teenager with a bad case of acne who desires the pleasures of the flesh to sooth his rejection from his mother. They sing about this ad nauseam, so it's blatant, and despite the characters being portrayed by adults, the treatment is of characters with no shared sexual experiences. On top of this, the screen version, at least, adds a Disney-fied iteration of Raoul as a long-haired Prince Charming for the princess of the opera. To prove their love, the men also perform feats of physical aggression, whether its Prince Charming employing his muscles in slow motion to escape a trap that conveniently offers its own escape route, or the Phantom merely killing everyone who gets in his way.

The design of the opera does look grand, though, and I like the electric lights of the chandelier lighting up the color of the opera house; yet, the camera tends to twirl around it and cuts away quickly often times in a fashion derivative of "Moulin Rouge!" (2001). There's the entering of the mirror, as per the book and other adaptations from the 1925 version to "Phantom of the Paradise," to reach the Phantom's subterranean lair, plus the funhouse mirrors trap, but, unfortunately, shots only tend to linger during singing and on lovelorn faces. The 1943 iteration had similar problems. Playing into the arrested adolescence and the emphasis on architecture, the Phantom plays with dolls on his model opera stage. Even more creepy, he keeps a full-size model of Christine in a wedding dress.

Despite being seemingly plot-less at times and scrapping so much of the original narrative in service of the songs, it still adds a pointless origins story for the Phantom, again like the 1943 remake except for this time as a flashback, and adds some equally irrelevant black-and-white future scenes. Moreover, the main payoffs of the unmasking and the final confrontation over the love triangle are teased and, then, withdrawn, only to inevitably come back for the climax. Even the songs, music and lyrics, are repeated. One interesting addition here is the staging of the Phantom's opera "Don Juan Triumphant," although even this was done better in the staging of "Faust" in "Phantom of the Paradise." Minnie Driver is amusing as a prima donna, although the transitioning between her Faux French accent and the more-English sounding singing and the still-different Soprano shrieking can be disorienting, and most of the opera parts in general seem more like what one would imagine to be how horrible opera might be rather than what it is or was. And, I didn't like any of the songs, which made this quite a chore to get through. The masquerade ball, one of the most memorable moments from the 1925 version, with its two-strip Technicolor standing out in a mostly black-and-white film, was the worst part here with that singing in unison.