Moulin Rouge!

An often interminable musical, Moulin Rouge! details the forbidden romance that ensues between a beautiful courtesan (Nicole Kidman’s Satine) and a poor writer (Ewan McGregor’s Christian) – with the narrative following the pair as they attempt to stage an elaborate play while also keeping their relationship secret from a jealous duke (Richard Roxburgh). It’s clear right from the get-go that Moulin Rouge! has been infused with a decidedly love-it-or-hate-it sensibility, as director Baz Luhrmann delivers an excessively frenetic narrative that’s rife with unpleasantly over-the-top elements (eg garish visuals, disorienting editing, etc) – with the movie’s pervasively arms-length atmosphere perpetuated by an assortment of uniformly unmemorable songs. (It doesn’t help, either, that there’s a palpable dearth of chemistry between stars Kidman and McGregor.) The storyline, credited to scripters Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, suffers from an almost total lack of momentum that ultimately proves disastrous, as there’s never a point at which the overstuffed plot appears to be building towards something significant or interesting (and indeed, the climax is a total wash). There are, at least, a handful of marginally compelling interludes that prevent the movie from entering all-out disaster territory, with an early sequence detailing Satine’s efforts at hiding Christian from Roxburgh’s oblivious figure containing a coherent exuberance that’s otherwise absent from the proceedings. The end result is a terminally overblown (and ineffective) endeavor that rarely works on the most basic of levels, and it’s ultimately impossible not to wonder how the movie’s become a minor classic in the years since its 2001 release.

*1/2 out of ****