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Mention The Phantom of the Opera to most anyone these days, and one will usually get ravings from Sarah Brightman fans, swooning from women obsessed with Gerard Butler (guilty), and renditions of songs from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The real hardcore film buff might make mention of the famous Man of a Thousand Faces (aka Lon Chaney), who played the Phantom in 1925. But in our media-saturated culture, very few people have even heard of Gaston Leroux, let alone that he was the author of the original novel, first published in 1910.
The film Angel of Music tells the story of Eric (Doug Kisgen), a formerly award-winning journalist who has become obsessed with the story of the Phantom. He is convinced the story is based in fact, and had been researching it non-stop to the point of neglecting his wife Kristen (Lisa Mader). He meets Leroux scholar Dr Gabriel Persing (John Redmond) who introduces him to the former owner of the original manuscript, Jacques Rosseau (Micheal Scott Casey). Meanwhile, a next-door neighbor named Raymond (Jordan Baranowski) is beginning to pay a little too much attention to Kristen, but Eric doesn't notice.
Added to the plot is the implication that Christine Daae - the heroine of Phantom - may have had a child and that a mysterious cult was created to protect her bloodline. According to legend, the cult will - and frequently has - killed anyone who gets in their way.
At the outset, I found myself thinking that this film bore a rather uncanny resemblance to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, with intimations of a mysterious cult tasked with protecting a secret bloodline. The problem, of course, is that the story of Phantom would have taken place less than 200 years ago, which leaves only a few generations needing protection. In that respect, it's a little difficult to believe that a large number of murders to protect the secret have already taken place.
But what I did love - as will anyone who's a fan of the original novel - are all the little hints interjected into the film. Such as the names of the characters - Eric (or Erik, the Phantom's real name), Kristen (close to Christine, the heroine), and Raymond (or Raoul, the hero). Even some of the more obscure characters pop up, such as Dr. Persing (or The Persian, an old friend of the Phantom); even Eric's assistant is named Meg - the same name as the daughter of Madame Giry, the opera house's concierge, and loyal friend of the Phantom. Several of the commonly-used phrases in the book are also used, such as "Keep your hand at the level of your eyes."
The film continually jumps back and forth between real life and a re-enactment of Phantom, which appears both on stage and in the residences of the characters. As a nice additional touch, the scenes in the story mirror what is happening in real life. The problem is that initially there is no real delineation between the real life and the fantasy, and at first I thought that Kristen was an opera singer who was actually acting in a production of Phantom. Personally, I think this would have been a great addition to the film, especially once the character of Eric begins to lose touch with reality and starts imagining himself inside the story - certainly the potential exists for a very clever re-enactment of the novel's final scene in the basement of an actual opera house.
Warning! Spoilers Ahead!
The real twist in the plot comes at the very end, and though I didn't see it coming, it still does hint a bit too strongly of The Da Vinci Code. Eric is attempting to find out the truth about Christine's bloodline, and though one might expect that the child produced was fathered by the Phantom, the real secret is much darker: the father of Christine’s famed child was actually her own father. And, to add another twist to the plot, the child was Kristen's mother, making Kristen a part of that special bloodline. This was also hinted at when a member of the cult comes to see Kristen's mother and she calls him the "Angel of Music," a title Christine uses to refer to both the Phantom and the spirit of her father. It's certainly an interesting twist on the novel, but, call me a nerd, I was looking forward to hearing more about the possibility of Phantom being more than just a story. However, this plot is still a great way to introduce an old story in a new way.
With that said, the timeline seems a little off. Supposedly Christine gave birth after the events portrayed in the novel, but her father had died quite a while before that. The fact that she would have been pregnant (and unmarried) during the entire story would not have gone unnoticed, especially in that time period. Unless the implication was that Christine's father was also the Phantom, which seems a bit disloyal to the story, as the Phantom is given a bit of a past. Another thing I didn't understand is that, even though the cult is tasked with protecting the Daae bloodline, they killed Kristen's mother. And then, to respect her wish that the secret die with her, they kill Kristen as well once Eric tells her about the incest. The film ends by suggesting that the cult is still active, even though the bloodline ended, which also seems a little strange as they would be sort of purposeless by that point.
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