Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The Get Down, the new Netflix TV series produced by Baz Luhrmann, debuts the first six episodes of its first season on Friday, and already it’s proving to be divisive. Vanity Fair calls it a “kinetic, muddled mess”; Variety says it’s “messy and wonderful”. Even here at Decider.com, we’re torn. I found it intriguing and heartfelt, but with a frightfully overstuffed and taxing first episode; my colleague Meghan O’Keefe found it to be a “frenetic fantasy” that was pretty darn magical.
None of this is new territory for Baz Luhrmann, whose feature films have always been love-it-or-hate-it affairs. He’s always trafficked in a kind of high style and frantic pace that has always and likely will always drive audiences to one pole or another. But in an era where big-budget blockbusters are Hollywood’s only appetite, Baz Luhrmann consistently presents a brand of bigness that goes for something different. A superhero epic or even a Spielberg movie wants to hit your awe receptors and/or your funny bone. It wants to make you exhilarated with the thrill of victory, or to make you cringe at the darkness. Luhrmann wants you to be awed and exhilarated to, but his is — and I realize how cheesy this is about to sound, though that’s really only appropriate — a spectacle of the heart.
Ultimately, what makes Luhrmann such a polarizing director isn’t only that the quality of his films vary wildly (and besides, nobody can seem to agree on which are his best ones), but that his go-big tendencies are just not cool. In Captain America: Civil War, Chris Evans drags an airborne helicopter to the ground with his bare hands, his biceps bulging out of his shirt; it’s over-the-top and ridiculous, but it is MASSIVELY cool. Ewan McGregor climbs to the top of an elephant-shaped pagoda and starts singing a jukebox’s worth of unironic platitudes about love and a lot of people have to look away in embarrassment.
While Strictly Ballroom was the movie that put Luhrmann on the map and Romeo + Juliet was the movie that made him a box-office hit, truly Moulin Rouge! represents Baz at his most purely concentrated. The colors were either dazzling or garish. The actors were either expressing emotions in the style of golden-age screen legends or left hung out to dry by their director. The barrage of pop songs was either inspired or obnoxious. But who else is going to go big this way? Who else will replace the crumbling Metropolis skyline with Kylie Minogue’s green fairy?
So then let’s talk about The Get Down, which both succeeds and fails in the way that a lot of Luhrmann movies succeed and fail. In just its first three episodes, it’s clear to see the throughlines to Luhrmann’s other work.
- He believes in love. To an almost foolish degree. While others have interpreted Romeo and Juliet as two lovestruck but ultimately foolish teenagers playing out two families’ curses, Luhrmann saw the fireworks display therein. Moulin Rouge!, Australia, hell, even in The Great Gatsby, which as a novel has no real affection for its central characters, Luhrmann sees a soul connection between Daisy and Gatsby.
- He’s a masher-upper. Fitting since The Get Down deals with the way hip-hop was able to re-shape music to serve its own purposes, so Luhrmann has constantly re-shaped great literature (Romeo; Gatsby) or history (Moulin Rouge; Australia) in order to resemble something else. Shakespeare as a violent teen soap. Belle Époque Paris as a jukebox musical. What’s interesting about The Get Down is that the music is by necessity all era-appropriate; an odd and unfamiliar Luhrmann constraint. What that means so far is that while the soundtrack is some high-quality disco, there isn’t that element of surprise that Luhrmann likes to include, like Jay-Z in Gatsby.
- He creates worlds (but doesn’t always populate them so well. Perhaps it’s Baz’s partnership with Catherine Martin — his production designer, costume designer, and wife — that has helped the worlds of his movies always seem so vibrantly thought-out. The sets and costumes are as much of an attraction as the actors and dialogue. It’s when it comes time to put the people in those sets that we get stuck with cardboard villains or one-note sidekicks. The Get Down is attempting to do what great TV shows do and create a landscape populated with dozens of characters. It’s a daunting task for a filmmaker who often likes to focus on two lovers. In the early going, while the batting average isn’t great (there are a LOT of characters), there are signs, such as the strong chemistry between lead teen Ezekiel and his group of friends, that indicate some artistic growth.
In the end, nitpicking Luhrmann’s flaws seems besides the point. They are many and apparent. And none of them change the fact that he’s one of the only filmmakers out their making big, loud, (expensive) love stories. Fail or succeed (and there will always be people saying he’s done both), we need him doing what he does.
Stream The Get Down on Netflix starting Friday.
Where to stream Strictly Ballroom
