BEFORE: Well, I guess you can say I avoided this film as long as I could. The temptation is there to put it off further, like maybe to the romance chain in February, or preferably to...how about never? Would never work for you? But as soon as I say that, I realize I'm passing judgment on a film I've never seen. Sometimes you read reviews and you think, "Eh, that's not for me" or you make a judgment if you know people who swear by a certain film and you question THEIR judgment, but I've found over time that that's the lazy way to go. I shouldn't hold a film accountable because I don't like its ardent fans. (Although, that seems to be what keeps me away from "Transformers" and "Twilight" films, and so far, so good.)
But this Nicole Kidman chain allows me a chance to finally cross this one off the list, while two years ago I had no intention of ever watching this movie. But I can judge it all I want, after I watch it, that's really the way it should go.
THE PLOT: A poet falls for a beautiful courtesan whom a jealous duke covets in this stylish musical, with music drawn from familiar 20th century sources.
AFTER: Well, sometimes you should go with your gut, and sometimes you get exactly what you expect. I didn't care for this, but at least now I have a reason to complain. This is loud, bombastic, silly and over-the-top in most ways. The theory seems to be bigger, louder, stupider - why should a character simply sing when they can sing LOUDLY, why should a character love when they can love DEEPLY, why should a character be jealous when they can be SUPER-JEALOUS? At some point, this becomes pandering - what a director seems to be saying is, "I don't think the audience will get this unless I really, really hammer home every plot point", which to me, really sells the viewers short.
Somehow this is the hyper-dramatization of everything, and you saying over and over that this is the deepest, strongest, most meaningful love in the history of love begins to sound like over-compensation at some point. I'm glad now that I watched "Irma La Douce" a week or so ago, because it riffed on the same theme - a man falls in love with a prostitute, and by the very nature of her job, she's got a different take on love than he does. Also, there's some confusion over the identity of the man when he falls for her - in "Irma La Douce" he could only love her when he dressed up as a phony British lord (hey, whatever gets you through the night, I guess...) and here the poet/writer is at first thought to BE the duke. If not for this confusion, he wouldn't have even been given the opportunity to fall for Satine.
To me, this does not sound like the basis for a solid relationship - she was only attracted to him because of mistaken identity, and he somehow falls in love with a prostitute. A very beautiful prostitute, sure, but still, why not aim a little higher? You're only going to torture yourself with the thoughts of her being with other men, which is her JOB, or don't you want her to have a career? What is this, the 1800's or something? (Oh, wait, it is.)
And ugh, it's writers and artists again - because I SO enjoy scenes of writers using typewriters when they're getting inspired, or even worse, when they're not. What a tired trope, not to mention that we see the writer at the beginning typing, and that story is the story we're about to see, and it's going to be the greatest story in the history of every story ever typed - give me a break. And why have Toulouse-Lautrec, famous painter, in the story as a character if we never see him paint? He's not exactly known for his acting or his affiliation with theater groups, so why include him at all in this pointless exercise?
The only thing I really dug here was the play-within-a-play, and the way it mirrored the love triangle between the writer, the actress/whore and the Duke. (Same question to you, Duke, you can probably have any woman in Paris you want, why do you want the one that's been with everyone else?)
I haven't even touched on the inclusion of modern-day music in a story set in 1899. Dear God, why? I know that every film is a product of its time, and modern sensibilities are always going to creep in here and there, but this is so blatant in its pandering to modern audiences. People like Madonna, right? OK, let's throw one of her songs in there. People like The Beatles, David Bowie, Queen, Elton John, Phil Collins, The Police, Nirvana and U2, so let's throw them all into this cultural blender, who cares about historical accuracy? Well, I do, for one. There's just no reason to do this, unless you're using it as a crutch, a musical stunt that you do just because you can, or to garner a little extra publicity. It's practically an admission that if they didn't put modern songs in this film, no one would give it the time of day. Right?
Because I recognize those songs for what they are - modern songs, not 1899 songs - every time one of them got used anachronistically, it took me out of that reality for a bit, and since it happened again and again, it put so many holes into that structure of the past that in the end I couldn't believe in it at all, not one bit. It's easier for me to believe in a reality where the X-Men have superpowers and time-travel than one where Kidman and McGregor are residents of 1899 Paris, and singing modern songs.
A little research on IMDB tells me that even the main storyline is a patchwork of sorts, cobbled together from three sources: "La Boheme" (young writer falls in love with terminally ill girl), "La Traviata" (courtesan learns about ideal love), and "Orpheus in the Underworld" (man travels into the netherworld to try and bring his love back from it). I happen to know that the famous "Can-Can" music (also used annually in the NYC area by a particular grocery chain to sell canned food) is from Offenbach's operetta version of "Orpheus in the Underworld", so I dig the reference - but it all goes to prove what a crazy mish-mash of story this is. It's the literal version of "Frankenstein" - not being a monster movie, but being an animated corpse made up of re-assembled dead pieces. The monster shouldn't be alive and walking around, because it's just a brainless mockery of a living being.
Same NITPICK POINT as in "Practical Magic", by the way - if a character is terminally ill, or has a death curse placed on them, whichever, why does this not color all of their decision-making? I mean, people who know they're going to die just plan things differently, right? They don't make long-term plans, and there's some indication that whatever they do in the coming weeks is going to be something of a wash. In this case, the resolution to the love triangle didn't matter, at least to a certain extent, because in a few months, it would have just been a moot point. But nope, this didn't get addressed, not in the slightest way.
Also starring Ewan McGregor (last seen in "August: Osage County"), Jim Broadbent (last seen in "The Iron Lady"), John Leguizamo (last seen in "Kick-Ass 2"), Richard Roxburgh, Jacek Koman, with cameos from Kylie Minogue, Placido Domingo and Ozzy Osbourne (?!)
RATING: 3 out of 10 narcileptic episodes
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