Moulin Rouge Sucks
Moulin Rouge Sucks No, really, it does. And don't let its eight Oscar nominations fool you into believing otherwise. by David Skinner 03/21/2002 12:00:00 AM David Skinner,
assistant managing editor
HERE'S MY
considered opinion of "Moulin Rouge": It sucks. There's no need to get
defensive. It's no big deal. A lot of movies suck. But then again, a lot of
movies don't snag eight Oscar nominations. Okay, okay, calm down. The truth
hurts, I know. In fact, the movie's suckiness was, in fact, a bit of a
disappointment to me, too. I rather like several of the actors involved, and I
adored director Baz Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet" a few years back.
Sadly, I was
one of a very small number of people who seemed to realize how bad "Moulin
Rouge" was. After the Oscar nominations came out, there were those other awards,
you know, the ones that are supposed to predict the Oscar winners, and
everywhere I looked this crapalicious pseudo-musical was being feted.
It made me
wonder if my hostility to the picture was rooted in ignorance. See, I haven't
watched all that many musicals, so I decided to rent a few. My choices were
"West Side Story," "Cabaret," and "My Fair Lady." These weren't picked from a
hat, of course. They are the three most Oscar-winning musical movies ever. And
here's what I learned. It's not musicals that suck, it's only "Moulin Rouge."
An important
thing to know about musicals (I just learned this myself) is that they have
music original to themselves. And, in fact, the quality of their music is a
primary criterion for judging their overall quality. In fact, a musical without
its very own music would be something like a drama without any drama.
Yes, yes, I
realize I don't know that much about musicals. One of my most shameful memories
ever is falling in love with Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Cats" when I was in fourth
grade. (No, really, it was kind of cool when those slinky feline creatures
crawled into the audience rows.) So I can't actually make any claims about
having the most exquisite taste in the world, but this thing about musicals
having original musical was, until the Oscar nominations, kind of a hard and
fast rule. Furthermore, stringing together numerous, unrelated pop songs to
merely tickle the memory chords of an audience was something only insufferable
piano-lounge hacks were supposed to do.
Now back to
these other musicals. Not only was their music original, but their songs
constituted a permanent contribution to the culture. "Wilkommen," the opening
song from "Cabaret," "Tonight" and "America" from "West Side Story," or "Get Me
To The Church On Time" and "On The Street Where You Live" from "My Fair Lady"
represented net additions to preexisting music. Now, as far as I can tell,
"Moulin Rouge" is merely borrowing music that was already around. Which means
that, musically, "Moulin Rouge" offers nothing.
The storylines
of the three classics I saw were also much, much stronger. Even after watering
down George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion," "My Fair Lady" was bursting with
character and ideas. Rex Harrison as the mischievous, self-pleasing misogynist
versus the romantic-souled "guttersnipe," played beautifully by Audrey Hepburn
(though of course sung by someone else), helped provide a thoughtful and even
wise comedy about men and women.
More than any
individual performer, New York City provided a wonderful geometric vision to a
running, splaying choreography that made me laugh only about three or four times
in "West Side Story." The warring of sides and the two romantic hearts in
between--borrowed of course from Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet"--made for an
excellent story of gangs and young love. Not a great character movie, but a
splendid picture show with several classic songs.
"Cabaret" I
feared the most, having never seen any version of it. But the movie was
hilarious, erotic, and unnerving--a double picture of sensual amoralism
oblivious to the raised fist of Nazi evil. As for the performances: I now
understand why Joel Grey is forever associated with the role of the emcee; and
you'd have to be gay to have enjoyed Liza Minnelli's Sally Bowles more than I
did.
"Moulin Rouge,"
which had been hyped by its director and others as an homage to the heyday of
music on the silver screen, is really an embarrassment to the great Hollywood
musical. Its story (one area where it might have compensated for its lack of
original music) is a 19th century dime-store melodrama that uses the phoniest
dramatic devices imaginable to keep it moving. (Somehow, audiences love to be
reminded of songs written five years ago, but are totally amnesiac when it comes
to age-old melodramatic cliches about starving artists and dying beauties.) Only
in its spectacular picture-book cinematography can "Moulin Rouge" lay claim to
singularity. And if the movie's visual teams win awards, justice will have been
done. Any other Academy Awards "Moulin Rouge" receives will be no more than
spectacular proof that the competition was consumptively thin this year.
David Skinner
is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Correction to my hard and fast rule: In my ignorance of the great tradition
of Hollywood musicals, I overstated the originality of their music. Although the
three Oscar-winning musical movies I discussed used original music, many others
did in fact recycle already published and recorded songs, but not in the
winking, post-modern manner of "Moulin Rouge." By distinction, the music in such
classics as "Singing in the Rain," "A White Christmas," and "An American in
Paris" was not intended to be merely allusive--to tickle your nostalgia for the
present. Furthermore, it is my understanding that these movies tried to
accommodate their unoriginal music in a narrative and not simply trot them out
for thirty seconds at a time in the fashion of a cancan revue. Thanks to Joseph
William Naccarato at the University of Delaware.
-DS
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