Moulin Beige

Rating: Null/10 (15 May 2002)

Spoilers herein.
For a very long time, it has been a staple of storytelling to ambiguously mix the teller with the characters in the story. One persistent formula is to have a `psychic' character who unknowingly creates the future in his teller role and sees it as prescience in his role as character. Often that character is a drug user and runs into an equally strong opposing creative force based on ritual projection. That opposing force can be religion, the drama of monarchy, or theater. Also normal in the formula is that the sense of his visions becomes entangled with the sensuousness of sex in the person of a temptress.
We last saw this formula in the amazing `Moulin Rouge' where the narrator/participant was an absynthe user who drives/creates the story. His visions are opposed by an alliance of aristocracy and theater, and confused by his attraction to a prostitute. That film was a remarkable artistic success because the filmmaker completely understood what he was doing. One could follow him as he related one of the forces at work (sex, aristocratic power, the strength of performance, drugs) to the various ironies and uses of the manner of presentation. Very intelligent, very powerful. In this very month, `Frailty' appeared as a slight variation of the formula.
Here we have the same formula, but completely messed up because of the plain dumbness of the filmmakers. In this case, the narrator/explorer is a detective not a writer, reverting to the original mode. As with Rouge, he uses absynthe but here together with opiates (see `Edwin Drood' for a similar opium-smoker from the same era and place). He is played by Johnny Depp who thoroughly understands this storytelling device (see `Ninth Gate').
His sex temptress is the prostitute Heather Graham -- being Irish carries extra significance to the formula because the Irish invented this device (see the pooka `Harvey'). Together, they are involved in a struggle with an apparently impossibly force. In Rouge that force was the ritual power of theater backed by aristocracy. Here it is the ritual power of the Masons backed by aristocracy.
In Rouge, we had debauched Paris, here it is London, which has the extra patina of Sherlock Holmes. That introduction of the detective (read `Darwinistic explainer') as `inventor' of the world revolutionized this formula and drives perhaps half of all storytelling today.
So we have a very well thought out story, with at least one master actor in the most important role. The graphic novel understood what it was about and exploited the formula expertly. But these guys, the Hughes, are completely oblivious to what this is all about and the project collapses into a juvenile, melodramatic jelly.
That's too bad, because they are African American. Since Spike Lee is so remarkably outspoken and also so embarrassingly thick and stupid, we really don't need to reinforce the notion that it is impossible for some sectors of the society to deal with even moderately sophisticated material. African-influenced story-telling is the most evolved set of traditions anywhere, which makes this a particular shame.
Not only that, but the extras on the DVD include a segment on absynthe which is largely inaccurate.