Moulin Rouge (2003, DVD)

In the beginning we see a red curtain. In front of the red curtain we see the image of a man conducting the music we are hearing with what can only be described as reckless abandon. The curtain, the orchestra pit, and the flickering of the projection light all lead us to visions of the early days of Hollywood. Movies from the thirties and forties which had as their main objective simple entertainment. Movies that weren t even sure what movies were yet, and as in films of The Marx Brothers and such, films that had stage productions built into them because that s what entertainment was at the time. Films that could stop mid-stream and show a person playing the piano for three minutes, or a dance on stage, or a wildly elaborate night club show. Films that were, in many ways, anti-film. You half expect a news reel to start the thing.

Then the red curtain opens, and it as though you hear someone scream, Let loose the Dogs of War!


From the moment that curtain opened, critics have been clawing and scratching at each other, the movie, and movies in general. It s a love or hate kind of movie. It is simply too intense to be anything else.


I came to this movie with every intention of hating it. Perhaps I fell prey to that old magic whereby when you expect something to be horrible and it turns out decent, it seems much better than it is objectively. I don t think so, but it s possible.

I sat down, poison pen in hand, and the first twenty minutes or so did not disappoint. The best thought running through my head by that point was that it was not quite as awful as I thought it was going to be. There was the whole Three s Company plot route with the mistake about who was the Duke. There were then the further overly cheesy (and similarly Three s Company ) double entendres of the attempted seduction by Nicole Kidman. There was also the bizarre rolling around on the floor of Kidman.

Now before I go on to attempt to lend some credence to my claim that this is a good movie, I have to admit that this first twenty minutes or so is still bad. It doesn t get any better just because the rest of the movie is better, and it doesn t get better because I think overall the movie is good. It s just bad. It is, however, something that is perhaps a necessary transition. An introduction that has very little merit in its own, but that is something we need to get us to the rest of the movie. Still... bad.


So, the plot.


Christian (Ewan McGregor - Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III, Trainspotting, Brassed Off, Little Voice, A Life Less Ordinary) is a writer who decides to make the move to Paris, and moreover to its seedier, Bohemian side, on his quest for love, and more generally life. He is quickly tangled up with a group, led by Toulouse-Lautrec, who are trying to put together a musical production, which they hope to have put on at the Moulin Rouge.

The idea quickly becomes trying to get Christian to pitch his ideas to Satine (Nicole Kidman - you know where she s from). Satine is the feature attraction at the Moulin Rouge, which is, rather difficult to explain if you don t know what it is actually, a night club/dance hall/bordello of Paris circa early 1900s (1899, by the way, being the date given to us as the setting of the movie).

Satine and Harold Zidler (Jim Broadbent - Iris, Bridget Jones s Diary, Topsy-Turvy), owner of the Moulin Rouge, are plotting their little plots to get the Duke of Monroth (Richard Roxburgh - Mission Impossible II, The Last September, Oscar and Lucinda) to provide financial backing for Zidler s plans to transform the Moulin Rouge into a right proper theater, with Satine as its star.

On the night that Satine is supposed to seduce the Duke out of his wallet, Christian and montage show up to make their pitch. In the aforementioned Three s Company moment, Satine is lead to believe that Christian is the Duke, and hilarity ensues. It doesn t actually, but that s what it says in the script.

In the next minute and a half, Christian and Satine fall in love (or at least serious like), the truth comes out, the Duke enters, and Christian has to make up a plot for a stage production on the fly. Of course, he makes up a plot that mimics the real situation. A story about love, a man who loves a woman, and a woman who has to choose between true love with no money, or tons of money with no love.

The story then sort of plods along with Christian and Satine falling more in love, in their own peculiar way, and the Duke becoming jealous, and basically, etzeterra, etzeterra.

The moving points of the plot are that the Duke decides to have Christian killed if Satine does not go along with his desires, thus causing Satine to break up with Christian, for his own good(you know the gag), and the fact that Satine has consumption, unbeknownst to most, even her. In the end, as we re told at the very beginning, she dies.



So, perhaps not the most intriguing, original, or motivating plot. That s right, the plot is pretty clearly lacking. It is, however, there. Now, in a move that could hardly be better designed to irritate most movie critics, I am going to voice my belief (yet again) that plot is not necessarily a critical component of movies. In the vast majority of occasions, of course, it is, but not always. I ve said, several times, that I think one has to look at what a movie is trying to do. That is not, I readily admit, a unanimous view.

But let s go back up to that beginning for a second. Before the first part of the movie was introducing us to the movie, and being awful, we were just staring at the red curtain watching the flickering of the projection light. We were reminded of the early days of cinema. But let s look at those movies. With very few exceptions, they all had uninteresting plots. Yet no one criticizes the Marx Brothers (well some do, of course) as regards the plot of the movie. No one looks to the plot of movies of that era for some seriously engaging, original plot. You don t see reviews of any musicals, for that matter, which laugh at their sappy, cliched, simple plots. It would be meaningless to make such criticism, they all have them.

Thus, I reject the criticisms based on plot. The plot is admittedly not great, not even very good. Looking at the movie based on nothing but plot, you would have to throw it away. It s just that simple. The same, however, is true of countless movies, and we don t throw them away. The plot of My Dinner with Andre , for example, is wholly encapsulated in, two men have dinner at a restaurant . That s just rubbish. You wouldn t cross the street for that movie. Further, there are quite a few movies, many of them brilliant, whose plot is equally summed up in, some friends sit around talking .


What we have is a throwback to those bygone days, and a question - Do those movies still have value?

I think they do. I m no great fan of musicals generally, but you might say I respect them. They have their worth, though it be a worth that does not overly appeal to me personally. Were I to review The Sound of Music , I would have to give it five stars, but I don t want to watch it again. Similarly, give me any number of movies from the thirties or forties, and I could heap simply loads of criticism on them if I were to focus on such things as: plot, character depth, believability, continuity, and on and on. I simply don t see that these things apply. These movies are about entertainment. To me, it makes no more sense to throw plot (and other) criticisms at these sorts of movies than it would to actually go to the Moulin Rouge and throw those same criticisms at the stage.




Enough of the debate. We do have a plot, and it isn t a bad one in all ways. After all, we have grown to like the plot over time, and we sink into it like an old friend of an armchair. And, it serves its purpose, which is simply to move us from one excuse for a song and dance to another, and to pull at our heart strings. The movie uses, perhaps, rather cliched methods of pulling at our heart strings, but it does so nonetheless. Having a dog hit by a car is rather a tired, overly simplistic (and by rights practically a cheating) way to make us feel something, but it doesn t follow that we don t feel something when a dog is hit by a car.


Moulin Rouge , after the initial introductory period (and to a degree within that period), jumps right off the screen at you with both barrels, and only lets up for air on rare occasions. The dancing, singing, and all around debauchery and madness is wonderful. It is, admittedly, quite a lot to handle at times. The visual feast version of sitting down to find a twenty course, international dinner laid out before you, and then having it all shoved at you at once. But, if you can manage to ride the waves, there is excellent entertainment.

Some of the songs cause the entire thing to misfire (notably, Smells Like Teen Spirit ), but the whole thing moves along quickly, and at any point that you feel yourself falling away from the movie, it isn t long before some new aspect takes you by the hand, and pulls you back in.

There are whole scenes which do not quite work. Zidler singing Like A Virgin at the Duke is so silly as to cause silly to give you rather a hard look if you so label the scene, and actually it would have tremendous, from my perspective, if we had stepped over Madonna altogether. The scene in which Satine, Christian, and crew pitch the movie to the Duke, is not actually terrible (it s pretty bad though), but it is a little too early and we aren t properly in the movie yet for how odd it is.

The movie is gorgeous, fun, and entertaining. Most importantly, it isn t trying to be anything else. At the very beginning (with the curtain), it tells us just what it is going to be.



Nicole Kidman is, I m rather sorry to say, very good in the role. This is, in fact, the first thing I ve liked her in since Far and Away .

Ewan McGregor has finally brought me back around to liking him. Not what jumps immediately to mind when one says, leading man for a musical , still he works pretty well in this role. Of all the thoughts I had going into this movie, that I might like Ewan McGregor in it, was not one of them.

John Leguizamo is something of an enigma to me. I liked some stand up I ve seen of his, but I ve never seen him do anything in a movie that I liked, and I can t really say this is any exception. There s nothing especially bad about him in this, but I can t put my finger on anything especially good about him in this either. Toulouse-Lautrec, as I understand things, was rather a booze hound and frequented the Moulin Rouge, but reducing him to Igor is a bit much. The part is not completely bad, or distracting, but it is a little strange, and it s a different kind of strange than we are used to in the rest of the movie.

Jim Broadbent gives his standard level of performance, which is excellent. The character is a little much at times, even for this movie, but Broadbent certainly becomes that character.

Richard Roxburgh as the Duke gives us a good performance, especially considering that this type of movie is one in which it is hard to really be a bad guy . The movie, and the type of movie, lacks a certain seriousness required to really get to any point of dislike for him no matter what he does. When things just aren t very serious, about the best you can do is something like, Look at the cute, wittle, bad guy. He reminds me, for no earthly reason that I can figure out, of Gary Oldman as Zorg in The Fifth Element . I m not saying that fact is interesting, I m just saying it is actually a fact.


There are a lot of cliched things about this movie, and many will tell you that it is an overly simplistic, and altogether unreal view of love, and everything else for that matter. It s all true, in its way.

The tagline that we have thrown at us over and over is from the song Nature Boy . The greatest thing you ll ever learn is just to love, and be loved in return. That is, with few exceptions, the most trite, sappy, cliched line in the world. It s also true.




All in all, and despite all that is realistically against it, this is a good movie. It is men in tuxedos and women in gorgeous dresses, and bright marquees with names in lights, and rumbleseats, and searchlights on opening night, and sitting in the balcony, and a thousand other things. It s a good time. It s an evening out. It s an escape.

And... That s Entertainment.