By Leonard KladyIn Phantom of the Opera there’s a glow not simply in the warm light of John Mathieson’s camera but in the very fabric of the apparel designed by Alexandra Byrne and the rich design work of Anthony Pratt. Everything from the songs to the makeup, the stunts and the angles is pitched up a notch. In The Life Aquatic, designer Mark Friedberg creates sets that reflect a world where credulity is of glancing importance. The explorer ship Belafonte appears to be nothing more than a single giant set compartmentalized into cabins for easy camera access. That sense of fluidity infuses both the breezy editing style of David Moritz and Daniel Padgett and the smooth, long takes favored by cameraman Robert Yeoman, ASC.It’s taken more than a decade of false starts and missed opportunities to mount a film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical The Phantom of the Opera. One might imagine that some spectral presence living in the drainage pipes beneath Burbank was conspiring to undo its making rather than the usual wariness accorded musicals by today’s Hollywood majors.Finally all that matters is what’s on screen. Phantom is spectacular in all respects and deserving of immediate entry into the hallowed ground of great movie extravaganzas.Joel Schumacher, who came and went as director over the course of a decade, seized a golden opportunity and ran with it to a stunning finish. The London-based production has both the pristine credits and consummate craftsmanship that’s a rare and welcome commodity in contemporary movies. It is a lavish, emotionally rich film that’s singularly entertaining.Of course it is one of the great sagas of unrequited love that’s spawned a handful and more of cinematic adaptations dating back to the 1920s. Lurking in the depths beneath the Paris Opera House is The Phantom or Opera Ghost. We know he is flesh and blood, but to those that are only aware of his shadow and cryptic notes, he hardly seems of this earth.Wearing a mask to hide a disfigured face and a mysterious past, he reaches out to the orphan Christine. He comes to her at night and she takes him for the spirit of her dead father. But the Phantom has deeper feelings and conspires to lift her from the chorus to star in his opera Don Juan, seeing it as the triumphant vehicle for both of them and the moment when they will be united in love. However, she loves the aristocratic Raoul, a childhood friend who’s become the company patron.Passion courses through the tale and its very setting lends itself to opulence. Framed as a flashback, the film presents the future as a grainy, dour black-and-white world craving to rekindle a past of glorious color, rich tapestry and florid extravagance. There’s a glow not simply in the warm light of John Mathieson’s camera but in the very fabric of the apparel designed by Alexandra Byrne and the rich design work of Anthony Pratt. It’s rare to find these elements of film so wondrously in concert and providing a soothing comfort against the backdrop of emotions boiling over onto the screen.Webber’s score is aptly operatic, emboldened by the performances of Gerard Butler in the titular role and Emmy Rossum as Christine. It is at its core a romance despite the spectacle inherent in the setting and the ghoulish quality of the narrative. Everything from the songs to the makeup, the stunts and the angles is pitched up a notch and that exaggeration serves to ground the piece in a heightened reality.The Phantom of the Opera is pitch perfect in marrying a fantasy world with a saga of real and raw emotions. One can practically hear the gleeful shouts of the film’s artists and craftsmen as their dreams evolved into a visual metaphor for the tormented souls that loved not often but well.In abject contrast to The Phantom there is Steve Zissou (Bill Murray), a bargain-basement Jacques Cousteau and the subject of The Life Aquatic. Though the details are sketchy, there’s every indication he had a glorious past and is looking for one more heroic expedition to revive his reputation.The problem with the new film by Wes Anderson is that its parts—many of them exemplary—are vastly superior to the piece in its entirety. At any given moment there’s an appreciation for the essence of a scene, an observation or even a revelation. Still, one rarely segues logically into another and the effect is a narrative that appears hell-bent on being impenetrable and unfathomable.Anderson takes a fun-house approach to this larkish yarn. The antics of the ensemble are more befitting a slapstick comedy than the exploits of a noted oceanographer and his devoted and long-standing crew. In that spirit production designer Mark Friedberg creates sets that reflect a world where credulity is of glancing importance. The explorer ship Belafonte appears to be nothing more than a single giant set compartmentalized into cabins for easy camera access.That sense of fluidity infuses both the breezy editing style of David Moritz and Daniel Padgett and the smooth, long takes favored by cameraman Robert Yeoman, ASC. The color palette appears to have been kidnapped from Crayola to underline both an unreal universe and the simplicity to the narrative. It’s pushed even further by an array of visual effects that encompass a broad menagerie above and below the sea.Mark Mothersbaugh’s score strikes an ironic chord and the song score is dominated by David Bowie songs translated into Portuguese and sung with a solo guitar more in the manner of a Fado plaint than glam rock.It’s all rather amusing if utterly confounding. Murray’s familiar deadpan forces the normally tongue-in-cheek style performances of Owen Wilson to be jettisoned. He morphs into a sincere and appealing naïf that may or may not be Zissou’s biological son. The rest of the cast manage to find a space somewhere between naturalism and Merry Melody mayhem that if not quite larger than life is most certainly not life as we know it.The Life Aquatic steers hither and yon in a manner suggesting a damaged rudder. Yet there’s a precision to its artistic and technical components that belies such a conclusion. Perhaps the captain simply lost his compass and his crew did its best to navigate through extremely troubled waters.
Written by Len Klady
