Now Showing: Moulin Rouge

Now Showing
Candid Reviews of Movies Just Hitting The Big Screen

by Cole Smithey

Moulin Rouge

Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge is an over eager attempt to reinvigorate that most detestable of theater and movie genres known as the musical. Just as Broadway refuses to put musicals to bed, even though the medium has been dead for 20 years, Luhrmann attempts a rococo detonated shock treatment to bring the beast back to palpitating life on the big screen. The ‘red windmill’ of Paris’ 1900 underworld serves as a metaphor for Hell in this limping interpretation of the Orpheus myth. Ewan McGregor is a poor poet/writer drawn to Satine (Nicole Kidman), a courtesan showgirl set up to secure the financial favor of a repressed English Duke (Richard Roxburgh), to keep the Moulin Rouge alive. The actors do fine jobs of singing from a demanding list of pop music snippets by Elton John, David Bowie, Madonna, Paul McCartney, Nirvana, Beck, and on infinitum. For all of the meticulous efforts of the actors, production designers, costume designers, and the rest of the filmmakers, it’s painful to watch tireless labors squandered on a movie that’s an exploding pinwheel of bastardized pieces from too many other musicals and from too many kinds of pop music.

Baz Luhrmann, who came into prominence with his visually ornate debut feature Strictly Ballroom (1992), completes his self proclaimed Red Curtain Trilogy with Moulin Rouge. Behind his 1996 cult atrocity William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge puts a cap on Luhrmann’s “metaphor for lush theatricality.” His rules for this bizarre trio of films have been that they “allude to the use of an archetypal myth,” that they “prescribe a setting that is both faraway and familiar, allowing the audience to recognize universal types within an exotic world, as you would in a cartoon.” And lastly, that they “encourage a sense of alienation: there must be a device that keeps the audience awake and off-kilter by constantly undermining its expectation of a naturalistic world.” While this intellectually overwrought map may assist in a more literary appreciation for the director’s intentions, the rules don’t change the fact that both Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge over-saturate an audience with sound and visual clutter to a point of utter estrangement. When the camera pans in on an exterior shot of a model replica of the Moulin Rouge for the fourteenth time, you can’t help but be critical of its obvious fakeness because you’ve been forced to swallow too much overblown theatrical spectacle.
If The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the most redeemable musical movie ever made, it’s specifically for its clever binding of great original rock ‘n’ roll songs with an intentionally low budget take on B-movie sci-fi films of the fifties. Then comes the sexual innuendo and just plain sexiness of Susan Sarandon and Tim Curry in roles that really went places creatively, and took them places as actors. A movie like High Fidelity utilizes a stream of very specific songs to conspire with the audience about how the film’s characters feel at specific moments, in much the same way that people put on a particular CD depending on their mood, company, or intention. It’s this very specificity that Moulin Rouge not only lacks, but dismisses as some kind of virus that would somehow ruin the film’s barnyard attack on its subject. I suspect that this oversight is due to the film’s self-proclaimed themes of “truth, beauty, freedom, and above all love” because that article is far too vague to be of any use in telling a coherent story.

Ewan McGregor has bad luck with musical roles. His hit and miss portrayal of Punk Godfather Iggy Pop in Todd Haynes’ ode to Glam Rock Velvet Goldmine missed a lot more than it hit. In Moulin Rouge, McGregor is stranded in a role that calls for him to pine for a chanteuse prostitute who looks like she’d be much more comfortable with a plastic phallus than the real McCoy. You can see McGregor really pouring his heart out when he sings Elton John’s “Your Song” to win Satine’s heart, but it leaves you feeling pity for the rebel from Trainspotting who should, by all rights, be belting out Elvis Costello’s “Welcome To The Working Week.” Instead, McGregor is stuck as a simp and a fip chasing, rather than leading, the wiry affections of Satine as the Eurydice substitute.

As for Kidman’s icy performance, her matter-of-fact vocal delivery leaves you wishing for a younger version of Deborah Harry as the harlot at the helm of Hell. Kidman doesn’t sing from her loins, and her brittle figure can’t insinuate the curvy energy that an Angelina Jolie would have induced. It doesn’t help that Kidman is caked in white pancake make-up that foreshadows her character’s imminent meeting with death.
For a movie jammed with color and even more jammed with up to 250 tracks of music at any given time, Moulin Rouge will make you forget about a lot of things. So, if it’s cinematic distraction, to the point of white noise brain washing, that you’re after, you will definitely get your money’s worth.