The Phantom of the Opera (2004)

Joel Schumacher's 2004 adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage musical, itself drawn from Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel, arrives in a fog of gold leaf and organ chords and shows no interest in the cultural debates of a later decade. The Paris Opera House is rendered in shadow and candlelight, the chandelier falls on schedule, and the plot concerns a masked composer who murders his way toward a soprano's affections. The triangle of Phantom, Christine, and Raoul runs on jealousy and possession, the sort of doomed Romanticism that nineteenth-century fiction specialized in. The film wants to be swooned at. It does not want to be argued with.

On the matter of social consciousness, the cupboard is bare, and not by accident. The principal cast is uniformly white, the gender arrangements are those of a Victorian melodrama, and Christine functions as a prize to be won by whichever man sings more forcefully. The Phantom's disfigurement is a gothic plot device with no modern aspirations toward self-acceptance. The opera managers, Firmin and Andre, are buffoons with ledgers, which makes them comic relief instead of a critique of commerce. There is no race consciousness, no climate anxiety, no liberation theology lurking in the catacombs. Minnie Driver's Carlotta is camp, and camp is not a politics.

The result is a clean slate, an artifact from a period when a musical could simply be a musical. The film earned mixed notices and three Academy Award nominations, losing all of them, and audiences handed it an A anyway, which tells us something about the divide between critics and people who like songs. Its historical setting is decorative. Its villain is tragic. Its ending is a rose on a grave. We can search the corridors for a sermon and find only a mirror. Nothing to report, and the nothing is sincere.

{"thematic_tags": ["remake", "book_adaptation"]}