OxfordPress.com

Grade: C-

Verdict: Someone please calm down this movie.

Details: Starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor. Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Rated PG-13 for sexual content. Two hours.

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Review: Could Baz Luhrmann be the love child of Ken Russell and Terry Gilliam?

So you might think after watching his new film, “Moulin Rouge.” As ambitious as it is over-stimulated, this movie swears by the motto, “Too much is never enough.”

MGM meets MTV in Luhrmann's madhouse musical set in a digitalized fin de siècle Paris. Christian (Ewan McGregor), a penniless writer, comes to Montmartre to learn about love. He gets a mega-lesson when he enters the Moulin Rouge — sort of the Studio 54 of its day, but with better costumes. There he fnds and falls for the main attraction — Satine (Nicole Kidman), a stunning singer/courtesan who, sounding for all the world like Pinocchio, wants “to be a real actress.”

The Moulin Rouge's impresario, Harry Zidler (Jim Broadbent), points out that the easiest way to do that is to be very, very nice to a lecherous duke (Richard Roxburgh) who's loaded. Not so coincidentally, the duke is also financing Zidler's next show. Problems? Well, Satine has fallen for Christian. And she has this persistent, teeny-weeny cough.

The wispy plot is a not very clever recycling of “Camille.” However, story is the last thing on the movie's mind.

Luhrmann, who made the appealing “Strictly Ballroom” and the appalling, though popular, “William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet,” has created his own fever-dream musical. One that marries a 19th-century melodrama — full of cancan dancers, slumming gentlemen, bohemians and someone who calls himself Toulouse-Lautrec (John Leguizamo) — to a 20th-century potpourri of pop music.

Christian woos Satine with a litany of love-song lyrics (from the Beatles, Dolly Parton, U2 and others) before breaking into Elton John's “Your Song.” For her part, Satine makes a dazzling entrance, dressed like Marlene Dietrich and singing a Marilyn/Madonna homage (“Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend” and “Material Girl”). Also heard — to name a few — are Rodgers and Hammerstein (“The Sound of Music”), the Police (“Roxanne”), Nat King Cole (“Nature Boy”), and Nirvana (“Smells Like Teen Spirit”). While your ears adapt, Luhrmann fills your eyes with a parade of visual effects — digital images, hand-held camera, fast motion, jump cuts. At times the camera soars through the air; so do the characters. Even the moon — think Oliver Hardy done by Melies — gets into the singing act (voice provided by Placido Domingo).

For the first hour, “Moulin Rouge” succeeds through Luhrmann's sheer boldness and untrammeled imagination. You may be exhausted but you're certainly not bored.

As the movie careens into its second hour, however, your indulgence gets over-taxed. It's like watching a hyperactive kid on a sugar high; after a while, you just want to send it to bed. And when the movie takes a breather and the cast gets a chance to act, there's nothing to act. The picture has only two settings: everything or nothing.

That McGregor and Kidman manage to make a favorable impression in the midst of the maelstrom says something about their talent. McGregor may be one of the most gifted actors around, seguing from “Trainspotting” to “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” to this. And he can sing, too.

Kidman is as game as she is gorgeous. She's not completely comfortable with her character's abrupt shifts but her Technicolor charisma (red lips, white skin, blue eyes) is unmistakable.

As for the supporting players, Broadbent is watchable as a kind of jumbo-size Joel Grey from “Cabaret.” Far worse are Leguizamo and his charmless posse of “comic” Bohemians. When Leguizamo is on-screen, you want to hide your eyes out of respect for a good actor stuck in an odious role. To Luhrmann's credit, “Moulin Rouge” is exactly the movie he wants it to be. But the question is, is it a movie audiences will want to see?

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, (none)