The film stands or falls on their performances. Who can forget Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman caterwauling through Moulin Rouge! or Gere, Zellweger and Zeta-Jones in Chicago dancing like they were trying to stamp out burning newspaper? Schumacher and Lloyd Webber instead opt for relative nobodies Emmy Rossum as the starry eyed ingenue Christine and Gerard Butler as the Phantom. The whole thing looks ravishing too – all candle- and gas-lit, as befits its 1870s setting.īig names bring with them big expectations. It’s loud, very loud in parts, and lively, with chorus girls, stagehands, dressers, dance mistresses, impresarios, all the elements of a proper backstage musical. This injects cinematic energy into what might have been a lifeless theatrical retread. In bombastic mode Schumacher opens out Lloyd Webber’s original production to include more backstage action.
He turns out to be the appropriate choice here. Schumacher is a director with no visual signature, but he’s a slick operator who can turn out a real stinker (remember Batman And Robin?) but he can also hit the odd, perhaps accidental, bullseye (Phone Booth).
Through all that time Lloyd Webber had only one choice of director – so he says – Joel Schumacher. But divorce, the intervening years and the southerly tug of gravity made these first choices redundant. And along with fellow stage star Michael Crawford she had been ready to start work on the film version way back then. Brightman was the original Christine when the show opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London’s West End in 1986. It’s often said that the story is a coded version of the relationship between Lloyd Webber and his ex-wife, Sarah Brightman. It’s a story we all know – a hideously disfugured creature, endowed with a gift for music, yearns for the love of a pretty, young singer. But with this film version of his stage phenomenon (billions of dollars at box offices worldwide, and counting) it looks like the musical lord is once more going to be having the last laugh. It’s something of a minor industry to make fun of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
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