If you were a regular theatergoer during the 1990s, the movies of Joel Schumacher were as ubiquitous and as comforting as a tub of popcorn with extra butter, a box of Junior Mints, and a whole bunch of coming attractions.
For most of that decade, Schumacher, who died last week at the age of 80, was entrusted with some of Hollywood’s most prized properties. The director made the most entertaining, least pretentious entries in the then-popular subgenre of John Grisham legal thrillers: 1994’s The Client, starring Susan Sarandon as a force-of-nature attorney, and 1996’s A Time to Kill, a potent courtroom drama that gave great parts to three of the decade’s biggest rising stars: Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, and Samuel L. Jackson. Like the beach reads they were based on, the films were gripping, intense, and compulsively watchable.
More controversial were Schumacher’s infamously campy Batman movies. He took over the original franchise from Tim Burton, whose dark, dingy vision of Gotham City he tossed out in favor of production and costume design that suggested a cinematic version of one of Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book-inspired paintings. Batman Forever (1995) and Batman & Robin (1997) are bright, splashy, jam-packed with side characters (remember Tommy Lee Jones’s Two-Face? Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy?), and anchored by Batmen — Val Kilmer and George Clooney, respectively — who seem slightly overwhelmed by the circuslike quality of the productions. Nonetheless, Schumacher’s two Batman films now look like glossy, up-tempo interludes between the glumness of Burton and Schumacher’s successor in all things Batman, Christopher Nolan.
A native of New York City who matriculated at the Parsons School of Design, Schumacher came to directing from costume design, creating the wardrobes for several signature films from the early 1970s, including Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love, Woody Allen’s Sleeper, and Herbert Ross’s The Last of Sheila. He first tried his hand at directing with a 1973 TV movie about the significant other of Bugsy Siegel — Virginia Hill, starring Last of Sheila star Dyan Cannon — but did not earn the right to make features until the early 1980s, when he was assigned a series of slightly cheesy, supposedly commercial projects, including The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), starring Lily Tomlin in miniaturized form, and D.C. Cab (1983), which did not advance the big-screen prospects of Mr. T.
Finally, Schumacher found his comfort zone with the amiable Brat Pack pastiche St. Elmo’s Fire (1985), which the filmmaker, who had been penning screenplays since the mid-1970s, including the film version of the musical The Wiz, also co-wrote. Yet Schumacher’s real talent was not in generating material but applying his rather shameless, audience-pleasing instincts to scripts by others. If there are better films to curl up with on a Saturday night than The Lost Boys (1987) or Dying Young (1991), I’m not aware of them. Like LBJ, Schumacher did not seek, nor did he seem to accept, critical approval. “Because of advice Woody gave me,” the director told Vulture, referring to Allen, “I didn’t read reviews. … I was never out of the box as the critic’s darling.” Yet the smartest reviewers noted the qualities the director brought to otherwise questionable projects. Reviewing Flatliners (1990), Chicago Tribune critic Dave Kehr wrote, “Schumacher has yet to define himself as an artist, but he is certainly a hired gun of superior talent.”
To be sure, Schumacher flirted with artistry a few times over the years — see the searing study of middle-class meltdown, Falling Down (1993) — but he was, at heart, a showman with some taste. In the contest of Andrew Lloyd Webber-derived musicals, just compare Schumacher’s professional, carefully made adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera (2004) with Tom Hooper’s inept, desperate, instantly notorious version of Cats.
Schumacher led a life marked by some controversy. In a 2000 profile, he told the Guardian that his acid trips numbered in the thousands during a stretch from 1965 to 1970. But he knew where to put the camera.
At the time of his death, Schumacher had not made a feature film in nine years — his last directorial credits of any kind were episodes of House of Cards — but that does not make his absence any more palatable. We will feel the loss next summer when the multiplexes will be back and the popcorn will be buttery, but Joel Schumacher won’t be there to greet us.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
