A great visual achievement, missing a truly moving tragedy

Rating: 7/10 (7 December 2001)

***MAY CONTAIN MINOR SPOILERS***
Having just seen 'MOULIN ROUGE' for the fifth time, I am ready to deliver my verdict on this visually challenging, but somewhat emotionally distant film. It's chief asset, and it is a wonderful asset, is director Baz Luhrmann's original and imaginative view of Paris, circa 1900. The film is a how-to exercise in making big, grand entertainment and making it entertaining rather than resulting in an exercise of self-congratulation. I enjoyed the way that, visually, everything was brazenly overdone, down to the decision to film all scenes, particularly the dance scenes, in gaudy reds and yellows.
Performances, save one, were particularly well done in a film that must have been difficult to perform in. Nicole Kidman delivers another superb performance, proving that she is also a very adept singer. Jim Broadbent and Richard Roxbrugh are also very fine in roles which they seem to have been instructed to not hold back; I particularly enjoyed Roxbrugh's immensley entertaining villian, who reminded me of the man in the pantomimes in the black hat who grins wickedly at the audience, and Roxbrugh embodies this persona wonderfully. The one performance that just doesn't reach the same level of excellence of the rest of the cast is that of leading man Ewan McGregor. His singing voice, particularly in the scenes where he must hit, or struggle to hit, the high notes of 'THE SOUND OF MUSIC,' grew increasingly tiresome and irritating for me, (I have spoken to other people who have said that McGregor's voice was acceptable, so it must be a matter of personal choice.) I also found his constant reliance on looks from his puppy-dog eyes to be somewhat nauseating.
Luhrmann has said that, with his movie, he wanted to present a view of the Moulin Rouge that would be shocking/exciting to contemporary audiences. This results in the usage of music that is some seventy to eighty years out of its time. I don't know where Luhrmann found the inspiration to have Kidman sing 'DIAMONDS ARE A GIRL'S BEST FRIEND' as an opening cabaret number, or to stage Madonna's 'LIKE A VIRGIN' using Richard Roxbrugh and Jim Broadbent careening around on a bed on wheels, or to stage the Police hit 'ROXANNE' as a tango dance led by Jacek Koman, but these scenes create moments of true movie magic and stand out in my mind as some of the great moments in modern cinema.
The one final fault with this film lays with its love story. The love story didn't work for me because it involved laying heavy human emotion on two characters who had insofar been established as caricatures. I think back to Luhrmann's own 'STRICTLY BALLROOM' (1993) which treated the love story between its two caricatures as secondary to visuals and therefore succeeded. I must confess to feeling very restless during the final curtain-call scene. I stared at the screen and wondered whether I was supposed to care about a character who wasn't even human. The tragedy would have worked far better for me had it been a more metaphoric one, to fit with the mood of the preceding two hours.
It is still one of the greatest looking films I have ever seen and the music and set design are first-class, as you will see from my 'out of 10' rating. However it misses its potential to be a great film because of Luhrmann's inability to decide which way he wants it; all style or all substance or, (and this would have been the mark of a great film) a bit of both. 9 out of 10.