Unfortunately, this musical goes out of its way to excuse the Phantom’s behavior. Beneath the surface, he’s just a lonely man who never learned how to be human - which is not an excuse, especially in this day and age. The thing about Gerard Butler’s Phantom is that his alpha-male sexuality is all an act, a mask even more flimsy than the one that covers half his face. That Phantom can get it.Įxcept no! No, he can’t! Once again I’ve tricked myself into believing the music over the actor behind the performance (and, to quote Movies in 15 Minutes, the Phantom’s fairly moderate Sunburn of Doom). His attempt at tenderness in “Music of the Night” is embarrassing in an endearing “aww, you tried” kind of way, but his magnetic and entirely too on-the-nose sexual draw in “The Point of No Return”? Hoo, mama. It’s that quality on which the entire attraction between Christine and the Phantom rests, and the only aspect of it Butler believably pulls off. The latter is the most effective, since his Phantom could charitably be described as animalistic. Butler speaks only 14 of his lines, sings the rest and does some truly formidable vocal somersaults to disguise his natural Scottish accent - alternately pitching his voice higher, speaking in a mealy-mouthed whisper, or straight-up growling. ![]() ![]() The Phantom is basically the worst, and Butler’s performance of the Phantom is … something, to say the least. (The less said about Raoul and Patrick Wilson’s terrible wig, the better.) Like any other lonely basement dweller, he believes he’s entitled to Christine’s love, that she’s the only one who can look past his disfigurement to see his true self or whatever, even though Christine is very clearly in love with someone else. He’s obsessed with a chorus girl named Christine, whose rise to prima donna he orchestrates through the humiliation of the Opera’s current star along with some seriously top-notch gaslighting. In late 19th-century Paris, a disfigured genius lives below the Paris Opera House and controls every aspect of its management through a combination of ordinary blackmail and stagecraft terrorism. The story of the Phantom is one that’s basically tailor-made for the Twilight (and, dare I say, Kylo Ren) generation. Let me jam to my ’80s rock opera in peace.)Īnd I really do love Gerard Butler’s Phantom. (I’ve heard complaints about the chandelier? Whatever. I love the over-the-top opulence and overwrought acting of the movie, and since I’ve never seen the stage version of the show, any changes made to the musical are changes I don’t care about. I consider Emmy Rossum my Christine Daaé, not Sarah Brightman. Yet the 2004 film soundtrack is my go-to Phantom. It would be pretty generous to call what Butler does in Phantom “singing.” The director of such cult classics as The Lost Boys and Batman and Robin, it’s not exactly as though Schumacher is known as an arbiter of taste or talent, which helps explain why Butler ended up with the role of the Phantom over the likes of John Travolta, Meat Loaf, Matthew McConaughey, Heath Ledger and Antonio Banderas. In a world where Michael Crawford and Ramin Karimloo exist, how can this possibly be the case? In a world where Joel Schumacher directed the movie version of the famed musical that came out when I was an impressionable teenager, that’s how. Mine, to my eternal shame, is Gerard Butler. Darcy, every Phanatic - that would be fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, geddit? - has their preferred Phantom. Me? I’m a Macfadyen girl, which may give you some indication of where this essay is going. That’s but a small sampling of this Scottish export’s quarter-century run - whose body of work will be highlighted biweekly this month in a retrospective series.Įvery woman my age or a little older has their preferred Mr. Instinct tells us otherwise: People really love Gerard Butler.ĭisfigured catacomb vocalist. ![]() SEO tells us the piece’s popularity is thanks to its reference of one character’s inscrutable “Peckerwood” tattoo. No one piece has persisted as powerfully as our 2018 review of Den of Thieves, which we called an “unswervingly painful” waste of 140 minutes. Since 2017, Midwest Film Journal has prided itself on delivering thoughtful commentary on current and classic cinema.
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