Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s massively popular and rightfully legendary opera – featuring some of the finest music composed by the man, which is saying something – sort of receives an adaptation with The Magic Flute. But screenwriters Andrew Lowery and Jason Young have something far more metatextual in mind with this version of the story, following a young, destiny-driven prince, the princess who is his damsel in distress and the mission that radicalizes both of them. Instead of merely performing an act of adaptation, however, Lowery, Young and director Florian Sigl have afforded the events of the opera a framing device of staggering and overbearing weight – a young, grieving boy arrives at a school of music and is assigned to play the prince in a production of the opera, only to be sucked into the events of the opera himself.
It’s an ungainly decision for Sigl, who is credited for creating this vision with Christopher Zwickler and places upon his own shoulders the task of juggling a blandly formulaic coming-of-age story and the utterly fantastical fiction-within-fiction storyline. It all winds up being only halfway convincing as a form of commentary upon the act of storytelling. Our protagonist, Tim (Jack Wolfe), is as dull as they come, grieving his father’s death but otherwise with little-enough personality that one can transpose their own personality onto him. He has arrived at a prestigious school under the heat of his late dad’s notoriety within its hallowed halls. The school’s headmaster, Dr. Longbow (F. Murray Abraham, whose casting is a fun in-joke on the filmmakers’ part, for sure), has high expectations for Tim in the wake of his father’s excellence in the field of music and performance and is searching for someone to fill the role of Prince Tamino in a production of The Magic Flute.
The domestic aspects of the screenplay are almost entirely unconvincing and overly melodramatic – from the way Tim becomes a lifeline for his cagey roommate (Elliot Courtiour) to the dead-on-arrival, will-they-won’t-they romance with the mercurial Sophiie (Niamh McCormack), whose ties to the history of the school are an anticlimactic surprise left for the third act. Unfortunately, this framing device also takes up nearly half of the film’s screen time and solely exists to bridge the gap between scenes of damsel-saving derring-do and fights with gargantuan reptiles within the fantasy world occupied by Mozart and librettist Emanuel Schikaneder’s characters.
As far as all that goes, the film is at its best when focused upon the music written by Mozart, even as the lyrics of the original Singspiel have been adapted into English by the film’s own librettist. This gives Sigl a chance to cast acclaimed soprano Sabine Devieilhe (whose career has reached its critical highs, thanks in large part to the works of Mozart) in the role of the Queen of the Night, whose daughter Princess Pamina (Asha Banks) is the one in need of rescuing – or so it would seem. The plot obviously folds back in on itself to reveal the true “villain” of the story, as anyone familiar with the opera will know.
Unfortunately, all the significance and meaning of the opera dissipates any time The Magic Flute returns to the real world. A more straightforward adaptation of the play might have been more beneficial and entertaining than whatever muddled aspirations of the filmmakers had in this case.
Photo courtesy of Shout! Studios
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