The Phantom of the Opera
July 2005 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

I have loved this show ever since I purchased the early CD recording by the London cast. That was one of the first CDs ever put out. It had one chapter for each act: chapter one. That was it. Primitive efforts in a then new medium. But I loved the thing. It was grand and campy, the operatic music underscored with relentless disco rhythm. It was the granddaddy of event musicals. I never was able to catch a stage production, so I was keenly anticipating a movie version.

Friends had warned me about this long-awaited movie: if you liked the show, you will like the movie; if you didn’t like the show, you won’t like it. Well, I do like the show, and they were all wrong. If you like the show, you will hate the movie.

Just so you know, this is the same story immortalized by Lon Chaney and other great actors. A demented musician haunts the halls and caverns of the Paris Opera. He falls in love with Christine, a young soprano, a star-wannabe, and he manipulates the opera company’s events and schedule to insure that she will reach the heights. Christine reveres him as teacher and has compassion for his disfigured face, in this movie not so scary and more like a bad case of poison ivy. But, she loves another man.

For reasons unknown to anyone but the people involved with the contracts, Joel Schumacher, who has shown no previous interest in musicals, was hired to direct this movie. That proves one of the wiser choices. Perhaps due to his experience with a few of the Batman movies, he seems to have a good sense for special-effects scenes. The famous falling-chandelier sequence is thrilling in this movie; you want to yell to everyone to get out of the way. The masked ball scene, modeled on that in the Chaney movie, is grand and grotesque -- just right! And there are some delicious and snide little asides and tributes, as in the final act when Christine and her lover pole boat down the underground canal in a scene that tips its hat to The Abominable Dr. Phibes. The video on the DVD is rich in color and nicely defined, if not sharply etched.

But this is a musical. I repeat. A musical.

Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber originally wanted to make a film with the show’s original Phantom, Michael Crawford. A waiting period close to 20 years made Crawford too old for the role, so they hired Gerard Butler, a non-singing actor known mostly for his good looks. Because he cannot sing, he shouts. It is painful to hear. Almost as bad is Emmy Rossum as Christine. She certainly looks the part but she cannot really sing opera well, swallowing the ends of phrases and striving for effects beyond her grasp. The quality of her voice is irritating. The other singers are okay, but with two leads that are not real opera singers, it is like seeing Madama Butterfly without music.

And it gets worse. The lip-synching is the poorest I have seen in quite awhile. The score was recorded first, so, as in a music video, the actors must pretend to sing. But you never believe these folks are actually singing. They move as if they are store-window dummies. The songs seem enshrined, not performed. The orchestra is too large and miserably recorded. Though the center-channel vocals are okay, the orchestral sound is muddy and thick, with little presence, and those all-important rhythmic ostinatos are so hard to hear they might as well not be there. At a few points it is impossible to tell what instruments are playing. This is horrible cinema sound. For an idea of how to record opera and classical music for movies, take a look, and listen, to Stage Beauty.

If you want Phantom of the Opera, the musical, buy the Polydor soundtrack of the original London cast. Ask for the release in a high-resolution format. The only thing worse than this DVD might be the soundtrack recording of it. Without the brilliant visuals, there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to recommend it. Oh yes, there’s a two-disc special edition DVD of this release with featurettes showing how this movie was made. If you really want to know, you are masochistic.

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