Very Strange Enchanted Boys

by Don Larsson

 

There was a boy, a very strange, enchanted boy . .

It's coincidental that Nat "King" Cole's "Nature Boy" runs as a theme throughout both Luis Mandoki's Angel Eyes and Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge. Both films deal with thwarted expectations and redemption by love, but they could not be more different.

Angel Eyes is promising, at first. A woman cop, Jennifer Lopez, looms over a point of view shot inside a crumpled car, the only tenuous link, it seems, between the seer and eternal darkness. The focus of the film then swiftly shifts to Lopez, battling outlaw creeps on the streets and uniformed creeps in the squad room, while coping with a family that seems to resent her past intrusion that resulted in her father being dragged away for his physical abuse.

In the meantime, a very strange, enchanted man (James Caviezel) wanders the streets unshaven, in long ratty coat, doing good deeds to the surprise of all around him. Most of the time it's pretty run-of-the-mill stuff - turning off someone's car headlights, advising a woman that she left her keys in the door - but before too long he's managed to save Lopez while she is chasing down a gangbanger. The two strike it off, but he's relunctant to be enticed into her bed, revealing only that his name is "Catch" and that he lives alone. The mysteries seem to deepen.

And then they stop.

We learn about Catch's past and his connection to Lopez. We learn about Lopez's family. Catch learns about himself.

And that's pretty much it. What had seemed set up to be a
quasi-supernatural thriller is just another romance, after all.While Caviezel and Lopez have a far more natural rapport and relationship than Costner and Robin Wright did in director Mandoki's bubble-headed Message in a Bottle, the logic of the plot is similarly disappointing, if not quite as bewildering. And there are still gratuitous bits that are there only for their plot points.

For instance, while Lopez and those members of the squad she's bonded with kick back at a local watering hole, it is attacked in a drive-by shooting. (This is the setup for the meet between her and Caviezel.) But the utter implausibility of any gangsta stupid enough to try to pull off a slaughter of a room full of cops (in Chicago, no less!) betrays everything that follows - all the more so when the incident seems to be treated as no more than the inconvenient equivalent of a hail storm.

Angel Eyes is the kind of film for which the term "half-baked" was coined. It looks good from the outside, but a firm bite reveals a cold and gooey center.

On the other hand, Moulin Rouge gleefully flaunts the fact that it is gorgeously overdone. A riot of color, movement and music, Baz Luhrman's script has taken a basic storyline from Camille (with Nicole Kidman's courtesan suffering "consumption," no less), blended it with decor from decadent fin-de-siecle Paris and decadent 1970s Studio 54, thrown in narration by Toulouse Lautrec by way of Georges Melies, and surrounded it with a non-stop score that features everything from that King Cole song to music (heavy on the glitter side) by Bowie, Marc Bolan, The Beatles, Wings, Madonna (lots of her), and many more.

As with Luhrman's Romeo + Juliet, the setting is just a base for a narrative that cuts loose from space and time, slipping into a strange dimension of its own. Ewan McGregor is the strange, enchanted boy here, a would-be writer who has come to Paris to experience life, suffer, and create. Encountering a ragtag theatrical troop of self-styled "Bohemians" (including a narcoleptic Argentianian tango dancer), he is introduced to Satine (Nicole Kidman), the headliner and prime courtesanal prize of the Moulin Rouge, administered in sinster-yet-loving style by M. Zidler (Topsy-Turvy's bulging-eyed Jim Broadbent). Of course the two fall in love due to mistaken identity. Of course she has been promised to a nasty, rabbity-looking Duke (Richard Roxburgh, whose film Children of the Revolution provides one of the film's many in-jokes). Of course, complications ensue - and all for love.

In an early scene, McGregor gets his first taste of absinthe (yes, it does make the heart grow fonder) and he gets to meet the Green Fairy, a Tinkerbelle with red eyes and a voice by Ozzy Osbourne. There is an elephant, and there are boudoir scenes in a Gothic Tower. There are rooftop trysts and an Orientalist extravagnza. There is choreography with the inevitable Offenbach "Can-Can," along with Busby Berkeley bits. Your eyes, if not your ears, will pop.

If you ever hear a critic mutter about "post-modernism" and
"bricollage" in the same breath, you can use this film as a reference point. A collage of bits and pieces, it makes for a whole that will set some people's teeth on edge and drag others in. Like that sip of absinthe, it grabbed me right away. Come meet the Green Fairy - if you dare!

©2001 Don Larsson
CineScene