A Review of "Phantom of the Opera" and "Being Julia"

From time to time, I like to comment on current film offerings and this is one of those times. Sometimes the films will have something to do with moral or religious issues, other times, they will just be current films I found interesting.

It is not often that I agree with the reviewers in the New York Post, but when the critic described Phantom of the Opera as not so much filmed but anesthetized, I could only agree. This is a phenomenally bad movie. I went to see it because—well, why did I go? I knew it was going to be bad, it was a long movie, it was a musical—three strikes against it in my book. But, it was supposed to be set at the Paris Opera, and for those of us who are fans of American movie palaces, the Paris Opera is the mother of them all. Nearly every major city has at least one theatre which has a staircase or a lobby “based on the Paris Opera” as the designers used to delight in saying. And, I thought, how bad could it be?

Well, pretty doggoned bad. The story is pretty much presented as the Broadway musical did it. But there is a certain looseness and detachment one can get away with on Broadway because the musical is on stage. Scenes can fly around and change with no continuity—one can come through a ballroom door and find oneself in a French garden—because it is the stage, and stage does not have to honor the limits of time and space. But most kind of film do, and it is distracting—if not downright disorienting—to have no sensible continuity.

An example of that lack of continuity lies in the rather amazing conditions which were attributed to the cellars in the Paris Opera. That was one hell of a theatre, I am here to tell you. Early in the film, the heroine is required to rush into the cellar and flee down three flights of stairs. All right, except that when she came tearing around the first flight and into the second, she suddenly appeared on horseback. And when she came racing around the next flight, she suddenly appeared in a water-borne gondola. (Apparently the plumbing in the Paris Opera cellar has some problems.)

And the cellar, of course is the domain of the Phantom. The Phantom has the largest collection of mismatched ecclesiastical candlesticks in the western world. And, of course, they are always all lit. I would hate to see the wax bill, an expense with which I am familiar since I am a parish priest. The Phantom appears, as he does in the Broadway musical, with the clever little white plastic fender skirt, with lots of sturm und drang associated with prying it off, putting it back on, and speculating at what lies beneath it.

Over two hours later, convulsed with laughter, we staggered out of the theatre—staying out of its basement, let me make it clear—and wondered why we had done this thing. But, I suppose it had to be done.



Being Julia is another matter. A very clever little novella by W. Somerset Maugham, set in England in the early ‘thirties and starring Annette Benning and Jeremy Irons. What is it about? Nearly everything. There is lust of both homosexual and heterosexual species. One of the funniest scenes with very few lines is the one about a middle aged theatre investor who has a serious lesbian crush on Julia, played by Annette Benning. Julia develops a similar longing—not unrequited—for Tom, a very young American lad. Julia has a similar—but frustrated—longing for an old friend who turns out to “play for the other team” as the writer coyly puts it. There is a lot of what they now call hooking up in this play, but relatively little of it leads anywhere and even the successful liaisons turn out to be unsatisfactory.

Ultimately, Julia is all about justice and revenge. You may not agree with Julia’s final brutality at the close of the film, but you must admit that her surgically precise skewering of everyone who had tried to do her in is carried off with cunning, skill and vicious humor.

Random thoughts about movies:

Why is it that if an adventure or a comedy film is set on a passenger train, you know that before the last reel, someone is going to end up on top of the train, running down the length of the cars? I wonder about those kinds of things, don’t you?

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The Rev’d Lloyd Prator, Rector
Saint John’s in the Village Episcopal Church

New York City