Moulin Rouge! - 2001
This film shouldn't work. For me anyway, most things Baz Luhrmann touches don’t amount to great art. The quite decent Strictly Ballroom aside (my wife would add Romeo + Juliet), I find his productions to be loud, frenetic, garish, tonally mixed up, and more than a little bawdy. Australia was only moderately watchable. The Great Gatsby as filtered through the Australian was downright offensive to my classic literature sensibilities.
Yet here we have it. The monumental exception, towering above his other works like the Moulin Rouge over the neighboring Parisian streets. The thing is: the film IS STILL all of the things I mentioned above, and yet it works perfectly. Why? Because love is a many-splendored thing. Love lifts us up where we belong. All you need is love!
In this tale of a penniless writer falling for a woe begotten courtesan in the airspace of the gaudy Moulin Rouge, Luhrmann's strengths shine brightest. In the hands of Leguizamo and the other Bohemians, his jerky camera tics and penchant for oddball line readings are comically masterful. This hilarity is balanced pitch for pitch by one of the more riveting musical soundtracks of all time. That these numbers are themselves mash-ups of some of the most famous love song lyrics only adds to the film's charms.
But, why this film works MOST for me is its naked, bold, and all-in assertion of love’s ability to conquer all things. While the characters names are a little on the nose (Christian and Satine...come on!), this is a story of good triumphing over evil in the grand tradition. It is also a nice "meta" look at mounting a stage play whose characters mimic the actions of the players offstage. Against all odds, the lovers fight for their way in the world. Though they are almost derailed by the evil, possessive maharajah (it's the duke, folks), they stand in an embrace at the close.
Watching this again nearly 20 years after my first viewing, I thought perhaps the magic would have worn off. I've come, after all, to a much more grounded view of love in the interim, for instance. Yet as Touloose shouted the powerful thematic statement from the rafters - "The greatest thing you'll ever learn, is just to love, and be loved in return" - and McGregor again summoned his powerful pipes to shout forth COME WHAT MAY again and again, the tears once more fell from my eyes. Maybe love isn't always like this, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't fight passionately for it every single day. In the end, love wins.
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