A would-be stage delight done a disservice on the screen.

Rating: 5/10 (28 November 2008)

Ah, Moulin Rouge!. The spectacle to end all spectacles, the film that supposedly revived the flagged musical genre. This is the film that presumably, generations down the line, begat Julie Taymor's Across the Universe, a film that is obvious, poorly-acted, one-dimensional, patchwork, and frequently damn silly. It was also a film that was gloriously captivating, thanks to its tremendous visual sensibility, the soaring musical arrangements and the confidence in the material to play it seriously and believe that it would still succeed on its merits. Moulin Rouge! is a film that has so many of the same drawbacks, but fails to support its failings as Taymor did. The film is very, VERY bright and excited, but makes it mistake in thinking that being loud and obnoxious is the same as being vibrant and spectacular.
Even with this, the film's main problem is that it's so goddamn cheeky. It picks songs that they know an audience will giggle about hearing played orchestrally ("Wouldn't it be funny if we had Jim Broadbent sing "Like a Virgin"?" "Ahahaha, genius") and then have every single actor play DIRECTLY TO THE CAMERA, which apparently allows them to throw of all pretence of subtlety and pummel each line into cheap-chuckle submission, with only Ewan McGregor coming out unscathed. Not a single action is taken for the characters' benefit, not a single line is said because it's realistic in context; every single beat is insistently directed straight to the audience's ugly mugs, just to make SURE that they have a good, cheap laugh, or are aware that they're singing another song the audience should know. "REMEMBER THAT ONE?! HO HO, YOU LOVED THAT SONG, WASN'T THAT FUNNY?!" It's only one the nonsense calms down (for instance, during the 'love medley' does the film become anywhere near the sort of subtle, delicate sweetness that makes for a touching love scene.
It's a lot like being on stage, really, and trying to appeal directly to the base, the simple, the Groundlings, if you will, and, perhaps not coincidentally, the only time the film gets any real traction, is when they move the film...to the stage! The audience, the lights, the sound, and especially the improvisation! In fact, this finale is so tremendously rousing that it damn near saves the entire film (and will probably garner it an entire half-point in my score. The fact is, this is a film that would be a spectacular-spectacular theatrical revue, but people, at least, this person, looks for completely different things from the stage and the screen. I was part of a local theatrical production called Everyman, which was a stupid, simplistic story (the kind where characters' personalities are in their names) held up by our director's choice of cheesy, obvious pop songs, but thanks to energy and the buzz amongst the crowd, the show was a rousing success, and many of those famous songs I have come to closely associate with that show. But it would lose everything on the screen, because despite their similarities, they're wholly different mediums, and trying to do something so suited for one in the realm of the other just results in inconsistent, unholy mediocrities like Moulin Rouge!.
{Grade: 5.5/10 (C+/C) / #60 (of 68) of 2001}