The Phantom Menace
By Eric Cox
The Phantom of the Opera
Released by Warner Brothers
Rated PG-13 for brief violent images
The long-anticipated movie version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's smash musical The Phantom of the Opera has done so poorly at the box office that it may go down in history as one of the greatest cinematic flops of all time.
With a budget of approximately $60 million, the film grossed only about $4 million during Christmas week, one of the two biggest release dates of the year, and since then has barely made an additional $2 million.
Signs of trouble were detectable from the very start of preproduction.
First, controversy was created among Lloyd Webber's legion of fans--who, judging by Phantom's box-office receipts, apparently number around 600,000--when Lloyd Webber made the decision not to cast 61-year old Michael Crawford, who became identified with the role during its initial Broadway run, because he was too old.
In a delicious bit of cosmic justice, Lloyd Webber next passed on Antonio Banderas--who has performed on Broadway and who starred in the film version of Lloyd Webber's Evita (1996)--reportedly due to Lloyd Webber's concern about the actor's recent box-office history.
Lloyd Webber then chose director Joel Schumacher, one of the most overrated names in Hollywood, to direct Phantom. Schumacher proceeded to pass over two more legitimate stars who were interested in the film, John Travolta and Katie Holmes, saying he wanted younger actors.
In a very surprising move, those actors turned out to be two unknowns: Gerard Butler (the Phantom) and eighteen-year old Emmy Rossum (Christine).
The lack of star power was almost certainly one contributor to the film's undoing, and no doubt Lloyd Webber's detractors--and there are legions of them as well--are taking pleasure in his latest box-office catastrophe.
But the reason for Phantom's demise likely has little to do with the reasons why Lloyd Webber's critics hate him.
Lloyd Webber is derided by many music purists for the quality of his compositions, but modern musical comedy is hardly the province of Mozart anymore. And though I personally might not be able to stand Cats or Phantom, audiences around the world have made them hits of unprecedented proportion.
Whatever one thinks of him, Lloyd Webber does deserve credit for helping to revive the popularity of the stage musical at a time--the 1970s and '80s--when it was considered dead.
By the same token, what Lloyd Webber truly does deserve derision for is setting the form back by several decades.
In 1943, Rogers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! revolutionized the traditional American stage musical by making the songs serve a dramatic purpose within the context of the plot. Songs were no longer simply crowd-pleasing show-stoppers, but, quite the contrary, vehicles for propelling the show forward seamlessly.
Lloyd Webber writes hummable tunes, but he is no dramatist. His original collaborator, Tim Rice, is. What one gets in works like Phantom and Cats, as opposed to works on which Rice worked, like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita, is a regression to the pre-Oklahoma! musical, in which the actors pause in the middle of the action to sing ditties that do nothing to move the action forward.
For a number of reasons, one can get away with this on the stage but not on film. For one thing, the sheer spectacle of a stage production like Phantom can transport an audience to a realm of make-believe in which it doesn't much matter what the characters are saying to each other: the stunning visuals and the power of the human voice booming across the proscenium provide a kind of thrill that simply does not come through the screen. As the earliest filmmakers discovered, movies are a much more intimate form than theater.
In the filmed version of Phantom, we are subjected to long and tedious scenes of characters singing trite love songs to each other, or commenting on the action in ways that could be much more efficiently accomplished through spoken dialogue. Song cues appear simply because it is time for another song--not because a moment has arrived in which the audience must be made aware of a character's inner state (one of the best uses of a song in the modern musical), or because the music serves as a motif meant to remind us of something that happened earlier in the plot, or any of the many other functions of music that innovative writers and composers have discovered.
Phantom's failure is certainly not due to poor performances or to the look of the film. The actors do the very best they can with the material they have been given, and the costumes and sets are terrific. As a collaborative artistic effort--which every film is--Phantom is actually deserving of the Golden Globe nomination it received for Best Comedy or Musical, even though the nomination may have more to do with the fact that it happens to be a musical.
In the end, Phantom fails because the camera mercilessly reveals all of the underlying dramatic problems inherent in the stage version.
A star or two might have enabled the film to perform better financially, but nobody could make this material sing on the silver screen.
Eric Cox is a research fellow at the Sagamore Institute for Policy Research and a movie columnist for TAEmag.com.
