(Originally written December 2, 2006)

Moulin Rouge is a story of how music and art bring people together, and the norms of society and commercialism that attempt to tear people apart. The film is sometimes beautiful and passionate, but it is sometimes hyperactive to the point of obnoxious excess. The sequences introducing the Moulin Rouge, a ballroom and brothel, are more dizzying than mesmerizing. The visuals attempt to grab the viewer with an inundation of visual tricks, a postmodern mess that makes the story difficult to enjoy and impossible to comprehend.

Then all this momentarily changes when Ewan McGreggor cries out, “My gift is my song, and this one’s for you” from Elton John’s “Your Song.” It’s a tender moment in the film where the characters and the film itself awake from the drunkenness. The film begins to have a heart at the center of all its unnecessary madness. As much as the post-modern musical explosion could be seen as a bit pretentious, the Elephant Love Medley is a beautiful sequence full of sincere emotion. Indeed, the film is a tiring experience with only a handful of truly brilliant sequences. The film impresses on the first viewing, but this film’s success was not because this film was truly great but simply because it was different. The quirks are not enough to make this film the modern masterpiece is often purported to be.