‘Moulin Rouge!’ at 25 - The Film That Brought Movie Musicals Back From the Dead
Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! premiered in theaters 25 years ago today, and after a quarter century of changing tastes and a shifting cultural landscape, it remains one of the most genuinely singular films ever produced under the banner of the Hollywood musical – or, for that matter, under any banner at all.
The film is the third and final entry in Luhrmann’s Red Curtain Trilogy – a loose thematic trilogy of films that the Australian filmmaker built around the expressive possibilities of different theatrical art forms. Strictly Ballroom (1992) used dance as its formal language. William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) used language itself. Moulin Rouge! uses song – specifically, the idea that song is the purest possible vehicle for emotional truth, that the things human beings most need to say to each other can only be said when spoken words give way to music. The film’s thesis is stated early and simply, in a quote from Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy”:
“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”
Everything that follows for the next two hours is an elaboration of that single sentence.
Luhrmann came to this project from a very particular place. As he put it in a retrospective about the film:
“Moulin Rouge! the movie was an attempt to reinvent the movie musical. It’s not a stretch to say that my desire to do this germinated in the tiny country town where I grew up. There, we had a gas station, a farm, but we also had a local cinema and a small, black-and-white television with only one channel, onto which they dumped old movies and musicals.
I grew up on these films, and though many of them are now considered classics, at that time in the 1970s, they were sort of disregarded and disrespected. Later, as I grew up in the theatre and in film, I studied realism, Brecht, and Artaud; I was a great devotee of Coppola, Scorsese, Fellini, and Bergman; but still I never lost my love for the musical form. What I found so interesting was that each epoch or era had its own musical language.
Once I started to make movies, I became obsessed with finding a musical language that could work for now. As someone who had loved musicals from childhood, I wanted to see them live again.”
The solution he arrived at was postmodern in the most precise sense of the term. Rather than creating original songs in the manner of the classic Hollywood musical, Luhrmann and co-writer Craig Pearce assembled a soundtrack from existing popular music spanning several decades – David Bowie, Madonna, The Police, Nirvana, The Beatles, U2, Dolly Parton – and deployed these songs as emotional punctuation, each one arriving at the moment when its particular emotional register was most needed. The effect is disorienting at first and then, if you surrender to it, intoxicating. The songs carry with them all the emotional associations accumulated across their entire cultural lives. When Christian (Ewan McGregor) serenades Satine (Nicole Kidman) with a medley of love songs she already knows from a world that doesn’t exist yet, the anachronism is the point. Love, the film argues, has always sounded like this. We are simply hearing it clearly for the first time.
Roger Ebert described the film as having been constructed “with the melodrama of a 19th century opera, the Technicolor brashness of a 1950s Hollywood musical and the quick-cutting frenzy of a music video.” The quick-cutting frenzy is real – Luhrmann’s direction is so hyperactive that there is sometimes never quite enough time to take in all of the exquisite detail of Catherine Martin’s production design and costume work, both of which won the film its two Academy Awards out of its eight nominations.
But when the film slows down – when the spectacle relents and it allows its characters to simply exist in each other’s presence – Moulin Rouge! reveals the genuine love story at its center. Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman have undeniable chemistry in the film, and Kidman’s rooftop performance of “One Day I’ll Fly Away” is among the most purely affecting sequences in the film – a moment of stillness within the storm, a woman who performs desire for a living allowing herself one unperformed expression of longing. The film’s many great emotional musical set pieces ultimately build up to a showstopper of a finale, a medley of popular songs all based around the film’s original theme “Come What May” that firmly established McGregor and Kidman as actors who could carry the full weight of a film’s emotional argument.
The film was the first musical to receive a Best Picture nomination since Beauty and the Beast in 1991, a decade-long gap that itself speaks to how thoroughly the genre had retreated from mainstream prestige filmmaking. That Moulin Rouge! broke that drought and simultaneously broke the conventional rules of what a musical could be – that it could be as much music video as opera, as much postmodern collage as Technicolor romance – represented a genuine reorientation of what the genre was capable of. The doubts of Luhrmann’s peers, who questioned whether such a reinvention was possible, were answered definitively at the box office and in the cultural conversation that followed.
The reverberations are still being felt. Just recently, Jon M. Chu’s two-part Wicked adaptation arrived with the same commitment to operatic excess and spectacular production design that Moulin Rouge! pioneered, carrying the accumulated cultural weight of its source material with the same unapologetic grandeur. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, one of last year’s most discussed films, incorporated musical elements with a freedom and ambition that would have been considerably harder to imagine in a world where Moulin Rouge! had not first demonstrated that popular cinema could accommodate this kind of expression. At this year’s Academy Awards, McGregor and Kidman appeared together to present the Best Picture award, and before the announcement, sang the chorus of “All You Need Is Love” to each other in honor of the film’s 25th anniversary. The audience responded with the warmth reserved for something genuinely beloved. If Baz Luhrmann’s goal was to see movie musicals live again, it’s safe to say that he succeeded.
Luhrmann has gone on to make other great films, most notably the critically-praised Elvis, but none have quite recaptured the specific cultural electricity of Moulin Rouge!, a film that arrived at precisely the right moment with precisely the right argument and changed the conversation permanently. McGregor once told GQ magazine that he does not know if there can ever be an experience of such scale again, because Luhrmann dreams big.
At the film’s close, Christian declares it to be a story about a time, a place, and a people – but most importantly, a story about love. It feels, 25 years on, less like a story about any of those things individually and more like a story about what art is for. About why human beings have always needed to sing. About the truth that the greatest thing you’ll ever learn – stated plainly in the middle of all that magnificent chaos – is just to love and be loved in return.
The Moulin Rouge of Baz Luhrmann’s fantasy never really existed.
But he built it anyway, and it has lasted in our cultural memory for 25 years.
Moulin Rouge! is available for purchase on Blu-ray and on streaming.