Joel Schumacher’s filmography could never be described as “boring.” Uneven, sure. Indulgent, maybe. But boring? Never.
Schumacher was a relentless showman, a flashy, flagrant storyteller who believed that more is always more. The New York-born director and one-time costume designer made movies that certain audiences and critics loved to hate, and he certainly had all manners of unkind critical pejoratives hurled at him over the course of his long, unpredictable career.
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Schumacher helmed some great movies, some compelling curios, and a few outright turkeys during his thirty-plus years in the business. Then again, what seasoned director doesn’t have a few considerable failures under their belt? When Schumacher was on, there was a kind of live-wire unpredictability to his work that could be dazzling. He was a filmmaker both praised and vilified for his flamboyance, and he will undoubtedly be remembered as an iconoclastic, albeit inconsistent studio risk-taker who refused to color inside the lines.
Earlier this week, Schumacher lost his battle with cancer and passed away at the age of 80. Love him or hate him, Joel Schumacher was an American original. He was an openly gay Hollywood filmmaker who celebrated his homosexuality long before it was fashionable to do so. The success of early triumphs like “St. Elmo’s Fire” and “The Lost Boys” enabled him to gamble with established I.P., whether it was the director’s two John Grisham adaptations, or his widely maligned “Batman” films, both of which have found a second life as trashy camp items. Schumacher’s batting average as a director was never steady, but even when he failed, he failed beautifully, swinging for the fences and taking real chances. The work he left us with is extravagant, unapologetic, and ultimately, very unique.
In the wake of Schumacher’s passing, we’ve decided to take a look back at seven of his best movies. In a filmography that’s incontestably scattered to a certain degree, these are the Schumacher features that we believe will stand the test of time. And no, including both of the director’s “Batman” films here is not an oversight or mistake. They deserve a place on this list, as well.
“St. Elmo’s Fire” (1985)
Given the ubiquity of coming-of-age comedies in the 1980s, it makes sense that Joel Schumacher’s breakthrough film was a spirited entry in this aforementioned genre. Of course, we’re talking about “St. Elmo’s Fire,” a staple of the “Brat Pack” subcategory that Schumacher eventually grew out of in the 1990s. Viewed today, “St. Elmo’s Fire” definitely feels familiar, with its focus on youthful disaffection clearly indebted to “The Graduate,” and its gabby, philosophically inclined characters foreshadowing the early work of both Whit Stillman and Noah Baumbach. The movie also boasts enough iconic ’80s performers that you could conceivably build a game of bingo around it (Andrew McCarthy, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, and Rob Lowe, just to name a few). Upon release, “St. Elmo’s Fire” earned comparisons to hangout touchstones like “The Big Chill” and “The Breakfast Club.” Warm and amusing as it can be, “St. Elmo’s Fire” may not exactly be the most memorable entry in Schumacher’s filmography. Alas, the film offers a showcase for the late director’s ability to work within a well-worn genre and lend it an authentic personality.
“The Lost Boys” (1987)
There’s a nihilistic flair to the vampire movies of bygone decades (“The Hunger,” “The Addiction”) that seems increasingly foreign in our post-“Twilight” movie landscape. What’s great about “The Lost Boys” it’s that essentially a fun, witty teen movie that just happens to feature vampires. Much like Kathryn Bigelow’s more turbo-charged “Near Dark,” “The Lost Boys” leans into the outsider mystique of the vampire archetype, and the result is a gloriously goofy throwback to a time when mainstream Hollywood entertainment wasn’t afraid to be weird. It’s no small wonder that this and “St. Elmo’s Fire” secured Schumacher a kind of blank-check status in Hollywood. “The Lost Boys” is a great example of how craft and self-awareness can elevate an otherwise standard genre exercise (the film also features excellent location work in my college town of Santa Cruz, all of it photographed by regular Scorsese D.P. Michael Chapman). Any film that features Jason Patric, Jami Gertz, Corey Feldman, and a brooding Kiefer Sutherland can automatically be deemed a quintessential ’80s pop culture relic, but “The Lost Boys,” in spite of how hokey and unfashionably earnest much of it is, has endured as a clever, irreverent piece of bloodsucker myth subversion.
“Falling Down” (1993)
In 1993, Joel Schumacher’s “Falling Down” was a very bad day movie taken to the extreme—something many people could relate to. But now, given the toxic state of the culture, “Falling Down” feels much more chillingly prophetic—a scary portrait of White Male Aggrievement/Lone Male American shooter and the violence and guns that often follow with white disenfranchisement (there are no incels in this movie, but one bets they can relate too). William “D-Fens” Foster has had it. He’s lost his job and his wife, and his car’s such a piece of junk that he ends up abandoning it in the middle of a traffic jam. In other words, D-Fens, the royally pissed-off white-collar peon at the center of Joel Schumacher’s darkly comic hot-button diatribe “Falling Down,” is the prototypical Angry White Man. He’s played by Michael Douglas in one of his most seething, tightly-wound performances, and the actor’s rage is so convincing that we occasionally find ourselves siding with the character’s dispossession, this in spite of the fact that he’s very clearly a ticking time bomb in human form. Not all of “Falling Down” has aged well, and it’s tough to sympathize with D-Fens when aggrieved, entitled white maniacs are a daily threat to our American way of life in 2020. Still, “Falling Down” has endured as a certified cult classic, and Foster’s frenzied journey through the seedier corner of L.A. sometimes plays like a sweltering Southland spin on Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours.” “Falling Down” is a Molotov cocktail of little-guy rage and “screw-you” punk rock energy that remains, in spite of its flaws, one of Schumacher’s most memorable directorial accomplishments.
“Batman Forever” (1995) and “Batman and Robin” (1997)
Joel Schumacher had massive shoes to fill when he inherited the then-ascendant “Batman” franchise from director Tim Burton. Whereas Burton’s “Batman” flicks were mournful, downbeat, and awash in his signature, chilly Gothic elegance, Schumacher charged steadfast in the opposite direction with his two entries in the canon of the Caped Crusader. “Batman Forever” is admittedly the better of the two films: like much of Schumacher’s work, it’s garish and overblown, but it contains genuinely fantastic work from Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones as The Riddler and Harvey “Two-Face” Dent, respectively. “Batman & Robin,” meanwhile, is a brassy, astonishingly illogical, and totally hilarious dumpster fire of a movie that also happens to be one of the most perversely fascinating cult artifacts of the 1990s. Understandably, Schumacher’s attempt at re-interpreting the “Batman” series was met with nearly-universal derision upon its release. That said, “B&R” is a gas when compared to today’s cartoonishly self-serious superhero epics; it’s not for nothing that Schumacher’s movies gave us Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze one-liners (“Everybody… chill!”), bat nipples, and Seal’s “Kiss From A Rose.” You can love it, you can loathe it, but you cannot deny it!
“8MM” (1999)
The hard-boiled noir template gets twisted into something truly nasty in “8MM,” an unflinching collaboration between Schumacher, Nicolas Cage, and “Se7en” screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker. This was Schumacher’s follow-up to “Batman & Robin,” and here, he’s playing like he’s got nothing to lose, fashioning an unabashedly lurid, hyper-sensational genre wallow that purports to explore the most sadistic corners of the human mind. “8MM” is comprised of certain archetypical noir ingredients – a grizzled private dick as a hero, a dead girl, a wealthy family – but the film unfolds in the underworld of snuff pornography, meaning Schumacher is free to indulge in his least tasteful, most over-the-top tendencies. While mileage on this incredibly scuzzy brand of cinema will almost certainly vary, “8MM” remains a lean, focused, and proudly unsavory bounce back from the grotesque and bloated pageantry of the director’s “Batman” films. It’s also a beautiful-looking movie about a rotten subculture (thanks, Robert Elswit!), and a film in which Cage gets to chew the scenery next to heavyweights like James Gandolfini and a more-demonic-than-usual Peter Stormare. A warning: “8MM” is still the definition of an acquired taste, so watch at your own risk.
“Tigerland” (2000)
Picture, if you will, a war movie directed by the guy who gave the world “The Number 23.” Not an easy thing to envision, right? Then again, it’s important to remember that “Tigerland,” Joel Schumacher’s textured, close-to-the-bone 2000 military drama, isn’t technically a war movie, not really. Named for an American Advanced Infantry training camp that existed in the swampy marshlands of pre-Vietnam Louisiana, “Tigerland” sees this normally more uninhibited director operating in a more restrained register. One could almost say this is the closest Schumacher has ever gotten to naturalism. Shot with a dreamy, desaturated edge by regular Aronofsky D.P. Matthew Libatique, “Tigerland” examines a group of U.S. army privates under an extreme degree of stress. The result might be Schumacher’s best-acted picture, and the fact that cast members Shea Whigham and Clifton Collins Jr. were unknown at the time only enhances the movie’s sense of fine-grained realism. “Tigerland” is also a true star platform for Colin Farrell, whose turn as recalcitrant draftee Roland Bozz is an electrifying early example of his movie-star charisma. In other words, “Tigerland” might be the Joel Schumacher movie for people who don’t otherwise respond to Joel Schumacher movies.
“Phone Booth” (2003)
It’s the kind of economical storytelling gimmick beloved by screenwriting professors everywhere: the condensing of a formulaic, albeit nail-biting thriller plot to a single, confined location. We saw it in “Locke,” which followed a moody Tom Hardy in a car for 85 minutes, and we’ve just recently seen an airborne variation on the blueprint in the Joseph Gordon Levitt-starring “7500.” Schumacher was clearly ahead of the curve with “Phone Booth,” which sees the director operating at his most efficient, stripped-down, and satisfying. “Phone Booth” reunited Schumacher with his “Tigerland” star Colin Farrell, who is outstanding in full-bore scumbag mode (really, few actors do scumminess better) playing a hotshot New Yorker who finds himself trapped inside a phone booth where he’s being monitored by an offscreen sniper. The film was released in somewhat close proximity to the Beltway sniper attacks of 2003, but “Phone Booth,” to its credit, is content to exist as a tense, unpretentious standoff movie performed in mostly good taste. In a career distinguished by big swings and sometimes even bigger misses, “Phone Booth” was that rare Schumacher picture that emphasized the value of doing something traditional, and doing it exceedingly well.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
While Schumacher was most well-known for his work as a director, the truth is that the man wore plenty of hats throughout his life, at least in the creative sense of the term. He has T.V. credits that date back to the early ’70s, and he would go on to direct television movies like “Slow Burn” and “Virginia Hill,” plus episodes of the primetime soap “2000 Malibu Road,” and also Netflix’s once-beloved, now-poisoned political drama, “House of Cards.”
Schumacher got his start in the world of costumes, and you may be surprised to know that the director has costuming credits on everything from the 1972 Joan Didion adaptation “Play It As It Lays” to Paul Mazursky’s tender, problematic comedy “Blume in Love,” plus two of Woody Allen’s better early movies (the sci-fi slapstick salvo “Sleeper” and the hushed domestic drama “Interiors”), as well as Neil Simon’s “The Prisoner of Second Avenue.” Believe it or not, Schumacher also is a credited screenwriter on two of the most beloved cinematic oddities of the 1970s: the freewheeling comedy “Car Wash,” and Sidney Lumet’s bizarre, occasionally magical “Wizard of Oz” update, “The Wiz.”
As for the rest of Schumacher’s directorial filmography, it’s without question a mixed bag, but it might be worth shouting out a few of the more memorable ones for the completists who may be reading this. “Cousins” is a lighthearted trifle that re-interpreted a seminal French comedy for American audiences of the late ’80s, while “Flatliners” offers a continuation of the more fantastical elements that Schumacher dabbled in with “The Lost Boys.” “The Client” and “A Time To Kill” are adequate, unremarkable, well-assembled legal dramas that are very much of their time, while “Bad Company” is a loud, brutal action-comedy that sees the director working from within the Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster framework while forcing odd pair Chris Rock and Anthony Hopkins into a recognizable buddy-movie mold (spoiler alert: the two have no onscreen chemistry).
Schumacher’s “Phantom of the Opera” movie is a splashy passion project that only a dedicated Andrew Lloyd Weber fanatic could love (I mean, look, at the very least, you get to see meathead extraordinaire Gerard Butler play the Phantom). The gloomy, goth-friendly “The Number 23,” meanwhile, might be the director’s strangest, most ludicrous movie, which, by my estimation, is more than enough reason to check it out. “Twelve” sees the director working to redeem a sub-Bret Easton Ellis novel about rich, druggy delinquent kids in N.Y.C., while “Trespass,” apart from being another overheated B-movie starring Nicolas Cage, is notable for being Schumacher’s final feature-length directing credit.
Thanks for reading, everyone. Rest in peace, Mr. Schumacher. You left quite a legacy behind. (1939 – 2020)
