Moulin Rouge!* (2001)

Having met some artsy fartsy types in high school and especially college, I can understand why this movie got so much praise. In case it hasn’t been made clear yet, let me address this issue right now- I am not an artsy-fartsy fruitball who goes gaga over campy Broadway-esque productions that force your suspension of disbelief to work overtime to make the absurdity assaulting your eyes palatable. Even if you’re doing a musical, there’s still a way to get the job done right and make it seem realistic.

Needless to say, Moulin Rouge! is not that movie.

It’s not terrible though. The story works, and could potentially make for a genuinely enjoyable feature, but something in the execution plagues this movie, and his name is Baz Luhrmann. His frenetic style of directing, with a cacophony of vivid colors and an endless supply of jerky camera movements is perfect for the ADD generation and the fruitball Academy members and critics who I do not and will never see eye to eye with.

On top of all this, the film is rife with camp and boisterous overacting. And the music! Whoever thought that using a few lines from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” would be a clever out-of-context use for a highly recognizable piece of nostalgia should be shot in the public square. Nirvana songs do not belong in fruitball musicals. If they were trying to make it seem like the music department couldn’t come up with anything original and enchanting with all the out of context lyrics that were mish-mashed together, they did a good job.

The sum of all this left me feeling like I had been assaulted rather than entertained. There’s just too much trying to be done in this film, and when a director doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone, you end up on the outside looking in at the film, rather than being immersed into its world. I’m not a big romance guy, so it doesn’t help that the cheese ball love affair is overblown, idealizing the bohemian lifestyle and making it seem like some kind of blissful ignorance where down-on-their-luck writers struggle to make a living but it’s ok, because they have a song in their head, love in their heart, and friends who blah blah blah!

If they’d have portrayed the bohemian life as it really was (and some would say still is), there’d be more urgency to the story, and the love affair even more heart-wrenching. But what you’ve got with Moulin Rouge! is a film that could have used a few more rewrites, a smaller budget and a different director. The semi-solid story makes up for a lot of its shortcomings.

RATING: 3 out of 5