Dazzling but totally empty...

Rating: 2/10 (21 October 2001)

It is a depressing indictment of Hollywood that a film such as MOULIN ROUGE is apparently considered to be one of the best films to emerge from Tinseltown in recent years. Visually it is certainly fantastic, and - assuming your taste is very much in the mainstream - it must have value in purely musical terms. But it is also a soulless and in my mind rather cynical film, and one that demonstrates contempt for many fundamentals of good cinema.
The cinematographer, choreographer, special effects team and so on should all be congratulated for some dazzling work. Indeed I'm sure many of these people will be nominated for Oscars. And so they should be. However the plaudits should end there.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it customary for a fictional film drama (whether musical or otherwise) to have a story and/or some characters? MOULIN ROUGE's lame excuse for a "story" is in fact revealed in a Ewan McGregor voice-over in the first reel of the film. There are no twists, no surprises, no sub-plots...in short it is feebly, depressingly, almost mind-numbingly predictable from first minute to last. Characterization fares no better, with no hint of personality detectable in any of the protagonists (the Duke comes closest by at least being a caricature - MacGregor, Kidman, etc don't even get that). This is truly one of the most lazily written films I have ever seen.
Of course it could be quite reasonably argued that the very same criticism could be leveled at all sorts of films, and that is true enough. However MOULIN ROUGE has the breathtaking temerity to purport to be about "truth, beauty, freedom, love". It could not have chosen grander themes, and could not have made a more pitiful attempt at exploring them. In fact the film is so wretchedly written that at absolutely no point does it ever, even once, make a sincere effort to engage the audience on an emotional or intellectual level. Of course the renditions of 'Your Song' might have brought a tear to the eye to some, but if so then the credit is due entirely to Elton John, and no more due to Baz Luhrmann than it is to a radio DJ who plays it on Heart FM or whatever. The great musicals, SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, TOP HAT and so on did actually bother with an involving and emotive screenplay between numbers. CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG had more of a script than this.
MOULIN ROUGE is the product of someone being given a lot of money to make a big crowd-pleasing movie, and him making it without actually having anything whatsoever to say. To me a great cinematic spectacle comes from having an idea and building a film around it; not from hiring some big stars, spending the GDP of a small country on SFX, and then rather grudgingly putting a story and some characters in it as an afterthought.
If you are attuned to its humour then I can see how this could be a fun movie to watch, but if you expect something more than an extended MTV video for your time and money, it's a wearying and ultimately rather insulting film. MOULIN ROUGE isn't - even for one second - about truth, beauty, freedom, or love. It's about making as much money as possible for the people behind it.