As much as I thoroughly enjoyed Baz Luhrmann's lushly cinematic Moulin Rouge, it's impossible to ignore that there's something more than a little ludicrous about the whole affair. Once, twice, maybe even a handful of times we can rationalize hearing pumped-up versions of classic rock and show tunes coming out of the mouths of characters who are supposed to be residents of Paris circa 1900. But by the time we're regaled with the sight of the two romantic leads segueing from All You Need is Love to Silly Love Songs, followed by a big, campy production number of Like a Virgin, it's hard to take Moulin Rouge all that seriously. A grain of salt — OK, many grains — are pretty much mandatory for the proper appreciation of Luhrmann's film. But once those grains are applied, Moulin Rouge makes for an experience that's nothing less than spectacular.
Spectacular is the key word here. It's a word that comes to mind time and again while experiencing this opulent razzle-dazzle of an entertainment, where even the show within a show staged by the movie's characters is called, with perfect accuracy, Spectacular Spectacular.
The nominal stars of Moulin Rouge are Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, who play a star-crossed pair who fall in love, experience sublime happiness and meet inevitably tragic ends while putting on a big show at the Montmartre cabaret/dance club/bordello, Moulin Rouge. He's the poor idealistic writer; she's the show's beautiful star, as well as the club's resident courtesan, who's expected to sleep with all the investors.
But the real star of Moulin Rouge, to practically no one's surprise, is its sense of style: the astonishing sets, the costumes, the choreography, the "how'd they do that?" camera moves. There's hardly a second in Moulin Rouge where we're not given something to look at that takes our breath away — and which then, just as quickly, disappears (the film's editing style being the rapid-fire shock cuts favored in post-MTV-land). Moulin Rouge barely sits still for a moment, pulsing and churning ahead like a thing pumped-up on a double-dose of Ecstasy and ready to take on the world.
Lurhmann loves spectacle and big conceits, especially ones that thrive on witty anachronisms: His William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet placed the Bard's immortal but extremely period-specific language in the mouths of an unabashedly modern Leonardo DiCaprio and a company of late 20th century boys and girls. The hook in Moulin Rouge is that the whole thing is staged as a musical; the story is told largely through song, and characters are constantly breaking into pop tunes (mostly from the '70s and '80s), poignantly intoning a line or two before bursting into a full-blown number.
We get Nicole Kidman defining her character by performing a brassy medley of Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend and Material Girl, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit segueing into Lady Marmalade, The Police's Roxanne re-imagined as a sultry tango, and snatches of other tunes from the likes of David Bowie, Dolly Parton, Marc Bolan and Freddie Mercury (the last being a rousing and resonant rendition of The Show Must Go On). It's no accident that the very first thing we hear, even as the curtains are parting to reveal the 20th Century Fox logo appearing on the screen, is an instrumental snippet from The Sound of Music.
Still, as visually imaginative and luxuriantly sensual as all this is ("a tantric can-can," as one character describes things), there's ultimately something a little cold and even off-putting about the production. The movie's song cycles are as densely layered as its visuals, but there's little that's truly unique about most of the musical choices used here. The music-as-narrative approach was a wonderful and daring idea but the specific songs heard here (some in their entirety, many as just a line or two) simply don't bring Moulin Rouge to a higher level.
Lurhmann has professed his love for Bollywood, the song-and-dance-infused movie industry of India, and Moulin Rouge clearly owes a major debt of inspiration to those wild and wacky Hindi productions. But where Bollywood movies are known for their guileless, kitchen-sink exuberance, there's a faint whiff of smugness, possibly even insincerity, that comes with all that oh-so-pomo sophistication employed by Moulin Rouge — a movie that, after all, doesn't even bother to devise its own original songs, but simply riffs on older material while all too often attaching a techno beat for good measure. In a nutshell, the film abounds in energy and in intelligent, carefully premeditated wit, but it contains almost no laugh-out-loud funny moments (or fully human characters).
All of which makes Moulin Rouge something of a dead end street, albeit possibly the most gorgeous and wildly cinematic dead end this reviewer has ever seen. Rich, bold, bloodless and supremely affected, Moulin Rouge is a spectacular contradiction — and I loved just about every gloriously artificial second of it. Sound like a contradiction? Try applying a few of those aforementioned grains of salt and see for yourself.
The basic idea proposed by twentysomething entrepreneurs Tom Herman and Kaleil Isaza Tuzman is so simple it seems astonishing that no one had thought of it before. In the early part of 1999, Herman and Tuzman came up with a plan to virtually link the public with their respective municipalities, making it possible for people to renew their driver's licenses, attend town meetings and even pay for parking tickets without ever leaving the comforting glow of their computer monitors.
The idea appeared foolproof. Tuzman and Herman seemed destined to make money — lots and lots of money. In May 1999, they set out to turn their dream into a reality by putting on their best Sunday suits and hitting up everybody in sight to raise funds for an Internet company that came to be known as govWorks.
In relatively short order, the pair raised more than $60-million — on paper, mind you — and were soon considered one of the great success stories in all of dotcomland. Eighteen months later, Tuzman and Herman were penniless, intermittently at each other's throats, and their company had been bought up by a multinational corporation.
Timing is everything, and the filmmakers behind Startup.com — a frank and remarkably incisive chronicle of the birth and death of govWorks — couldn't have exhibited better timing if they tried. Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim (associates of the revered documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker) were in at the very beginning of Tuzman's and Herman's dream, and, as luck and impeccable filmmaking instincts would have it, they were there to capture just about every significant moment of govWorks' meteoric rise and bizarre fall from grace.
Startup.com revels in the disparity between the public and private faces of success (a unique marker of our era if ever there was one). It digs deep, almost to a fault: Although we're eventually familiarized with every personality twist and turn of the company's movers and shakers, it actually remains a bit confusing as to just how the dream of govWorks eventually went sour. For once, the so-called small picture actually eclipses the big picture, but a little of both might have been nice.
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 6, 2001.
