"Moulin Rouge" was not last year's worst film (that dishonor belongs to "Freddy Got Fingered"), but any movie that features Ewan McGregor singing love ballads shouldn't rate too high on a critic's list, and shouldn't merit an Academy Award for Best Picture.
Yet Best Picture is just what the movie is nominated for and the list of statuettes the movie has garnered include the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy, the National Board of Review's award for best picture and the coveted Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or.
Personally I can't believe audiences fell for director Baz Luhrmann's personal exercise in colorful sex appeal and over-dramatic theatrics. It seems as if he wanted to see how far he could push his ideals of beauty, freedom, love and recycled rock ballads before audiences choked on them.
Visually the film ranks with such art direction triumphs as "The Fifth Element" and "What Dreams May Come" as one of the most beautiful-looking films of the past decade. If the colors were any richer, oil paint would drip from the screen and flow through the aisles. It is a masterpiece of Technicolor and psychedelic dreams.
But "Moulin Rouge" is a concept that would work better as a series of pictures hanging on a Baroque museum wall. Luhrmann makes the mistake of putting words and plot to such magnificent images.
Like a director at the helm of a bad special-effects movie, Luhrmann fails to use the visuals to enhance the love story. The same blazing, kaleidoscopic cinematography and editing that worked to such great effect to emphasize the ultra-violence in Luhrmann's far superior "William Shakespeare's Romeo+Juliet" threatens to overtake the love story in "Moulin Rouge."
The movie plays out as if Luhrmann had thought of those pictures first and then struggled to find some sensible way to put them into motion. He tries to portray the legendary Paris night club Moulin Rouge as a magical place, but when the cast is doing the can-can to a Nirvana tune, the place and overall atmosphere comes across as nothing short of tacky.
Luhrmann doesn't even incorporate an original storyline for those pictures. It's a tired rehash of rich versus poor. Even the plot device that creates tension in their love affair is similar to the end of "Romeo+Juliet."
Nicole Kidman plays a dancer named Satine, who is betrothed to a weasely bourgeois aristocrat at the turn of the 20th Century. She is really in love with a struggling but strapping bohemian poet Christian (McGregor) living in a drafty tenement. The actors don't need to ham up their roles. Luhrmann's script does that just fine, with such lines as, "A life without love would be terrible" and, "He loves me and that is worth everything."
Kidman is the most glamourous entity in the film. She makes her first appearance bathed in blue stage lights, singing "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend." It helps that she has a nice singing voice. Unfortunately the same can't be said for McGregor, who sings his love for Satine with lyrics by Kiss, Wings and Joe Cocker.
McGregor is supposedly in a rock band, but his role as Christian proves he is better off singing loud rock tunes than silly love songs. Elton John's "Your Song" was a hit, but when McGregor's vocals skew the music, it becomes the stuff of which parody songs are made.
Not everything in the film is pretty. Jim Broadbent, who plays club-owner Harold Zidler is one of the ugliest screen characters in recent years, with his yellow handle-bar moustache, mutton chops and face like a catcher's mitt. Of course audiences should look beyond a person's appearance, but the make-up people make him look clownish. The movie's low point comes when he yelps "Like a Virgin" with a tablecloth over his head while his waiters join in.
"Moulin Rouge" was a movie so ludicrous that when I saw it on the big screen over the summer I committed the ultimate movie-going sin about halfway through. I turned my cell phone, hoping someone would call and give me an excuse to leave.
Write to Robert at rclopez@bsu.edu
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