emmy rossum phantom of the opera real voice

#EMMY ROSSUM PHANTOM OF THE OPERA REAL VOICE MOVIE#
#EMMY ROSSUM PHANTOM OF THE OPERA REAL VOICE DRIVER#

Wilson and Rossum are at least pretty to look at, especially in Alexandra Byrne's sumptuous costumes. There are a few admirable performances, especially from Simon Callow, one of the theater managers, who gives sparkle to the musical's best moments of comic-opera pastiche.

#EMMY ROSSUM PHANTOM OF THE OPERA REAL VOICE MOVIE#

It's an action flick with singing, and a three-ring circus of dead plot devices reanimated by movie magic.

If you can forget the venerable tradition of movie musicals, Schumacher's latest goes down easy as well. If you could forget the entire tradition of romantic and Gothic literature, then the plot didn't hurt so bad and if you could pretend that Puccini never existed, Lloyd Webber's music sounded pretty darn good. He was making a stew, not weaving a fabric, and to really enjoy his work you had to put the past out of mind. He wasn't playing with and honoring his artistic forebears - he was stealing, with the craven hope that no one would notice. In the original musical, all of Lloyd Webber's borrowing felt ungenerous. Operatic references abound in the original score, and in the movie Schumacher adds emphasis to the simple family dramas, wrenched straight out of 'Freud for Dummies.' Lloyd Webber adds to the novel the Shakespearean mousetrap device, a fateful play within a play, a la 'Hamlet' and in his hands, the Phantom morphs from evil genius to suffering artist, and becomes a weirdly sympathetic character, like the Elephant Man. To other characters Schumacher has added his own touches, turning the nonentity Raoul, played by Wilson, into a swashbuckling hero on a white horse - making it yet more inexplicable why Rossum's Christine would waver between a dashing young man of fortune and the eponymous Phantom, a subterranean homicidal maniac with only half a face.įor cliche, there's a parade in borrowed rags of material cadged from other dramas and sources.

#EMMY ROSSUM PHANTOM OF THE OPERA REAL VOICE DRIVER#

Driver has made her character not just a shrew (that much is believable of a diva) but a shrew with no surface charisma. Nobody spins better desserts from caricature and cliche than Lloyd Webber.Ĭaricature, thy name is Minnie Driver, who acts (but doesn't sing) the role of Carlotta, the reigning diva of the Opera Populaire. When psychological logic fails, there's always caricature, and when dramatic logic fails, there's always cliche. So the whole thing feels breathless and exhilarating, even if, at the end, one can't be sure why any of these characters gathered in this place - an opera house in Paris in the 1870s - and persisted in the various amours and ambitions that bind them together. And when Lloyd Webber's score grows particularly repetitive, the camera steps discreetly into the void, supplying visual momentum when musical momentum falters. But there's the ever-loving camera, emphasizing not her singing but the response of others to the music, so we love her through them, and forgive a voice that would be laughed out of a real opera house. It apologizes for the fact that when Rossum's character, the ingenue soprano Christine, gets her first big break, she doesn't actually produce very good music. In a dazzling ballroom scene that marks their betrothal, the camera swirls around them, supplying the moves that, in a real movie musical, would be danced by the cast. It apologizes, for instance, for Patrick Wilson and Emmy Rossum, who, as the dashing leads, can't or won't dance.

Perhaps it's because the camera is the ultimate apologist. It's gorgeous nonsense to look at, and in director Joel Schumacher's hands, 'Phantom' emerges as one of those queer works of art that actually improve somehow as they get tackier and more removed from the original. anger? - leads almost instantly to a metaphysical logjam.įortunately, the movie version of Lloyd Webber's smash hit does to the music what the music did to the words and story: It distracts the mind and cajoles the eyes to the point that one doesn't really care that everything the ears are hearing is pure nonsense. Certainly not on the philosophical level, where any attempt to reduce it to an intelligible conflict - art vs. And the plot of this drastic adaptation of Gaston Leroux's 1911 novel, about a soprano seduced by a murderous genius who lives beneath the Paris Opera, simply makes no sense. When words are set willy-nilly to repetitive music, you don't pay much attention to them - this can be a blessing - and if you're not paying attention to the words, then you can't scrutinize the plot. There wasn't a lot of actual music in Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical 'The Phantom of the Opera.' A handful of maddeningly catchy tunes did triple and quadruple duty, suggesting often contradictory emotions: love and malevolence, resolution and anxiety.

Emmy rossum phantom of the opera real voice