Scott Foundas |
| Photo by Jay Maidment |
And there are Louis and there are Georges . . .
—Stephen Sondheim
Sondheim wrote that memorable lyric near the end of the
first act of what is probably the greatest of his musicals, 1984’s Sunday
in the Park With George. The words issue from the mouth of Dot, mistress
and muse to 19th-century Impressionist painter Georges Seurat, and serve to
contrast Seurat against the simpleton baker with whom Dot has just conceived
a child. (“Louis’ thoughts are not hard to follow/Louis’ art is not hard
to swallow,” she sings a few bars earlier.) Of course, what Sondheim was
really talking about was the great divide between the glib and the rigorous
in the popular arts — the struggle to do mature work in a culture that persistently
embraces the sophomoric. In short, Sondheim might just as soon have been describing
the relationship of his own oeuvre to that of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the enterprising
Brit composer whose event musicals began arriving on Broadway in the 1970s,
helping to transform the American musical theater into a kitsch junkyard of
singing cats and hunky Jesuses.
In 1986, Webber and lyricist Charles Hart musicalized Gaston
Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera and its tale of the oddball love
triangle between rising young opera star Christine Daae, her dashing suitor
Raoul, and the disfigured Phantom who himself pines for Christine. Two decades
and some 80 million admissions later, the show is a bona fide global phenomenon,
albeit one that, until recently, I’d managed to evade. The trauma I’d already
sustained from the touring production of Webber’s Cats and the film version
of his Evita had been enough to quell my curiosity. But now Phantom
is a movie too, produced by Webber and directed by Joel Schumacher (another
“artist” unlikely ever to be accused of exercising restraint), and
movies, alas, are not so easily evaded . . .
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If only The Phantom of the Opera could be accused
of being kitsch or camp or trashy good fun. Instead, Schumacher and Webber treat
their material with the solemn reverence of two museum guards assigned to protect
some indisputably valuable heirloom. Which isn’t the only thing that makes the
movie feel like an excavated artifact from another era. A film of Phantom,
with Schumacher attached, has been in the works almost since the show first
arrived on Broadway (where it continues to run), and having finally been made,
the movie plays like a not-so-brief history of why Hollywood stopped making
musicals in the first place. Whatever one thinks of Moulin Rouge and
Chicago — and I didn’t particularly care for either of them — they were
at least sexy and vivacious, and it was possible to imagine a young audience
going to see them and actually staying through to the end credits. Conversely,
watching the passionless Phantom, with its geriatric story-framing device,
gooey dimestore romanticism and tawdry pop ballads about unrequited yearning,
feels akin to dying and waking up in your parents’ easy-listening-radio hell.
In its broad outlines, the Phantom story is a perennial
— the suffering beast (here played by Gerard Butler) who can only be redeemed
by the love of the gentle beauty, Christine (the vocally strong but emotionally
distant Emmy Rossum). In the 1925 silent film version starring Lon Chaney, it
was even possible to feel empathy (if not exactly sympathy) for the titular
hero-villain. Here, as conceived by Webber/Schumacher and interpreted by Butler
— an actor who never hesitates to bellow when mere shouting would suffice —
Phantom’s Phantom seems less misunderstood monster than stark raving
madman. Yet Webber’s opus has a reputation as a grand romance, and surely 80
million theatergoers can’t really be wrong, can they? The extent to which
Webber’s simplistic melodies have become the background Muzak for an entire
generation seems in itself a supernatural feat. But in Schumacher’s hands, even
the famous crashing chandelier and fog-shrouded gondola ride don’t quite register.
The film is less directed than event-planned, with lots of extras and decorous
pageantry trotted before the camera, but no real feeling for atmosphere; it
doesn’t lift us up in the way a good movie musical can, let alone carry us away.
In other words, we can always see the strings — or, at least, the dry-ice machine
just off camera, blowing its smoke.
If The Phantom of the Opera is content to rest on its laurels,
the holiday season’s other musical offering, Beyond the Sea, never stops
trying to prove itself — much like its subject, one Walden Robert Cassotto.
With a heart weakened by a childhood bout with rheumatic fever, Cassotto wasn’t
expected to live past the age of 15, long before he rechristened himself with
his celebrated stage name. But Cassotto didn’t die, and Bobby Darin was born,
henceforth driven by a relentless ambition to become the best he could be at
everything that he did.
Starring Kevin Spacey as Darin, Beyond the Sea traces
the singer’s too-brief life from his early days as a nightclub act through his
overnight success with the hit “Splish, Splash,” his marriage to Sandra
Dee (powerfully played by Kate Bosworth) and his largely unsuccessful bid to
reinvent himself as mustachioed folk singer Bob Darin. The film purports to
be a movie about Darin’s life made by Darin himself, and that’s exactly how
it feels, like the go-for-broke vanity project of a man who knows he’s living
on borrowed time. As many have pointed out, Spacey, at 45, is already eight
years older than Darin was when his bad heart launched its final, fatal attack
in 1973. But not only hasn’t Spacey (who, in a Darin-worthy gesture, also directed,
co-produced and co-wrote the film) let such literal-minded concerns stop him
— he’s elected to shine a great big spotlight on them. Like Bob Fosse’s phantasmagoric
All That Jazz (to which it owes some, but not all, of its moves), Beyond
the Sea is a bejeweled dreamscape about the surreality of a life lived in
show biz, and about the make-believe of the movies themselves. It’s about how
a performer steps onto a stage or in front of a camera and is momentarily transported
into another dimension, free of mortal concerns — where a Kevin Spacey can become
a Bobby Darin and where a Bobby Darin might well live forever. And it may be
that, in Darin, Spacey has the best role of his career, the one that thrives
on the superciliousness that is part and parccel of his own screen persona.
Put simply, the film is a dazzling and fearless piece of showmanship.
From early on, when the residents of Darin’s Bronx neighborhood break out into
an eye-popping Vincente Minnelli–esque production number choreographed to Sid
Arodin and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Up a Lazy River,” you can see that
Spacey is on to something, that in a season brimming with superficial-bordering-on-fraudulent
biopics (Ray and Finding Neverland chief among them), Beyond
the Sea is the only one aside from Bill Condon’s Kinsey that really
gets inside the head of its subject, that pulses with his life blood. In doing
so, Spacey has also crafted the only American screen musical in eons — maybe
since Fosse’s — with a genuine feel for the musical form, for the geometric
movement of dancing bodies in brilliantly colored costume, for the expressive
power of words sung instead of spoken. Whether Darin is courting Dee to the
strains of the title tune or tap dancing with the spirit of his own childhood
self to “As Long As I’m Singing,” Spacey is constantly imagining new
ways of associating image, performance and music, and it’s a thrill to watch
him do it. He may not be a George just yet. But there’s definitely no mistaking
him for a Louis.
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA | Directed by JOEL SCHUMACHER
| Written by ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER and SCHUMACHER, based on the novel by GASTON
LEROUX | Produced by WEBBER | Released by Warner Bros. | Citywide
BEYOND THE SEA | Directed by KEVIN SPACEY | Written by
SPACEY and LEWIS COLICK | Produced by ARTHUR E. FRIEDMAN, ANDY PATERSON, JAN
FANTL and SPACEY | Released by Lions Gate Films | At ArcLight and the Royal
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