We'll always have the Green Fairy

Rating: Null/10 (9 May 2002)

Obviously, this movie has its audience, though I'm not among them. I had to watch the DVD in increments, since it made me restless and impatient. "Moulin Rouge" is well cast and handsomely produced, but its thinly-plotted tale of star-crossed lovers serves only as a framework on which to hang an endless succession of musical numbers, many of which simply don't work, or go on too long, or both. Set in 1900 Paris, the movie makes use of pop songs and show tunes that are well out of period, ranging from "Lady Marmalade" to "Roxanne" to "Like a Virgin" (the occasion for an embarrassingly forced and awkward dance number) to "Your Song," to name just a very few. I've liked "Your Song" for 30 years, but if one more character, one more time, had said, "It's a little bit funny, this feeling inside," I'd have hit the STOP button once and for all. One moment, and one moment only, in "Moulin Rouge" works the intended magic on me: the Green Fairy, a wicked Tinkerbell, springs to hallucinatory life from the label on a bottle of absinthe, trailing a shower of green sparks. The scene (which comes in the movie's first ten minutes, more's the pity) is less than a minute long, but manages to feature overlapping musical quotes from "The Hills are Alive," "Children of the Revolution," and the theme song from the movie "The Boy with Green Hair" (the song about the "very strange enchanted boy"). I watched that scene about 50 times before finally returning the DVD to the video store. More of her fairy dust and this movie might have worked better. All told, though, "Moulin Rouge" is frustrating, irritating, and hyperactive. As the French say, chacun a son gout.