A film review by Craig J. Koban

AUSTRALIA

2008, PG-13, 165 mins.

As far as the sheer obviousness of its title goes, Baz Luhrmann’s AUSTRALIA is a $130 million budgeted love letter to his native outback country…and to the simple, old fashioned classic Hollywood films of yesteryear in general.  This is a big, bold, lavish, colourful, and voraciously ambitious ode to Australian history and its forcefully beautiful and imposing landscape.  

Beyond its frequently gorgeous artifice (Luhrmann is utterly incapable of making a film that isn’t a spectacular feast for the eyes), AUSTRALIA is also a love story of opposites that become forever attracted to one another, a western-esque tale of cattle wrangling and herding, a bombastic war film involving the 1942 Japanese bombing of Darwin, and last, but not least, a rallying cry to the Aborigines of the nation that have were victimized by its intolerably racist assimilation polices (which were shockingly still in effect as of 1973).  In short, AUSTRALIA is epic, but it falls short of ever being a New Age GONE WITH THE WIND or THE AFRICAN QUEEN (which it appears to be emulating).  Instead, it’s more like PEARL HARBOR, but with a more powerful artistic vision and a hell of a lot less gag inducing schmaltz and cheese. 

Luhrmann is certainly a filmmaking artist with an impeccable eye and a ferociously jubilant spirit.  He’s only made three films previous to this one, the last one being MOULIN ROUGE, coming out way, way back in 2001.  That work effectively concluded his self-anointed Red Curtain Trilogy (comprised of 1992’s STRICTLY BALLROOM and 1996’s ROMEO + JULIET).   ROUGE was the best and most memorably energetic musicals that I’ve seen in the current decade, and that film’s intensely spirited and Technicolor-inspired explosion of Bohemian culture, modern day pop tunes, and marvelous art direction was stupendous.  Not too many films will ever rival ROUGE's infectious tone and nearly schizophrenic stylistic impulses: the film was simply alive.  AUSTRALIA is in no way as inventive or as daringly original as a vision as ROUGE was, but this is also a work that is a wonder for the eyes: It gives us a sweeping and alluring panoramic canvas that shows the ruggedness and splendor of the outback.  There is no denying that Luhrmann’s heart – not to mention his indefinable passion – is in every pore of this film.   

But…crikey…the film is a narrative and thematic mess.  A grand and extraordinarily beautiful looking mess, but a mess nonetheless.  There is simply too much thrown into AUSTRALIA: too many half conceived ideas, too many predictable and routine story threads, too many historical and cinematic references, and too much inconsistent shifting between all of these tangents.  Leaving the theatre I was left puzzled by the divergent scope of the piece and, more or less, asked myself what this film was really trying to be about.  Is it attempting to be a Scarlet O’Hara and Rhett Butler romance set against the backdrop of real-life historical conflict?  Is a western-themed picture about a woman’s attempt to stand up on her own convictions in an effort to defend her ranch against the interests of a domineering, moustache stroking villain?  Is it an emotionally powerful war film about the Japanese invasion on Aussie soil?  

My guess would be that its real heart is firstly with the smoldering romance between the two stars (Luhrmann is an unapologetic romantic) and secondly with the terrible issues of racial intolerance and bigotry that the country’s white society had against its aborigines.  It is here where the central dilemma with AUSTRALIA exists: Luhrmann wants to film to be thoughtful and meaningful with its condemnation of his country’s past re-education polices, but they are marginalized somewhat by the film’s predilection of being a fairly conservative, Golden Aged, Hollywood romantic melodrama.  Because of this, the film is never able to emerge as thoroughly intriguing or compelling…at least not as much as it thinks it is. 

Alas, the film succeeds as eye candy, and aside from the gorgeous production values, we also have gorgeous lead actors.  We are introduced to Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman, as radiant as ever, but lacking a bit of conviction in the part), an uptight and snobby aristocrat that has arrived Down Under from her native England to catch her husband in the act of adultery, but instead finds him brutal murdered.  As a result, she ends up managing a cattle ranch that has fallen on bad times since her husband’s untimely death.  Her attempts at managing the ranch’s affairs are not easy, mostly because she is definitely wet behind the ears, but more because she faces some serious opposition in the form of King Carney (Bryan Brown, in very good form here) a local business man that is trying to rule the meat market, and Neil Fletcher (David Wenham), whom she fired after he showed his true colors as a degenerate racist.   

Sarah’s life is made more challenging and complicated by the immergence of a local aborigine boy named Nullah (the wide eyed and terrifically amiable Brandon Walters), who has become an orphan after his mother drowned.  Sarah takes it upon herself to adopt the young boy in order for him not to be scooped up by the law and assimilated into their morally questionable re-education strategies.   Adding even more complication is her love/hate relationship with a local cowboy that lives on the plains, Drover (in a career-making leading man performance by Hugh Jackman, who will certainly never be more appealing to lady audience members as he is here).  Sarah hopes that she will be able to take her herd of cattle across the country to Darwin where they can be sold to the army…and before King Carney can do the same with his.  Realizing that she can’t do it alone, she pleads for assistance to Drover, whom is a fairly introverted loner.  Both have nothing in common, and their initial partnership is categorically rocky, but when Sarah sees the unreservedly ripped abs and biceps of Drover as he bathes himself with a bucket, she easily begins to fall for the rugged lug.  It does not take a fortuneteller to see that this unlikely pair will overcome their differences and get seriously...acquainted...later on. 

These story elements occupy the first two thirds or so of AUSTRALIA.  The first sections essentially involve a considerable amount of playful and flirtatious exchanges between Drover and Sarah, not to mention much in the way of local ranch cattle politics regarding whether the inexperienced Sarah will be able to beat King Carney at his own game (clearly, this latter element is AUSTRALIA’s least interesting component).  The last section of the film is its finest, which leads to a shocking attack of the Japanese on Darwin shortly after the sneak attack on the Americans at Pearl Harbor.  Told within this story thread is a would-be tear-jerking episode where Nullah is stripped away from Drover and Sarah and taken to a religious commune for re-education.  When the Japanese start laying havoc on Darwin, the lives of all the characters are thrown into complete disarray. 

There is much to simply savor in AUSTRALIA, much of which is the film’s frequently breathtaking cinematography and art direction.  The film has images of grandiose power (Luhrmann will never be criticized for not having a painterly eye for detail) and some individual sequences have an awesome scope.  One scene in particular that involves Sarah, Drover and company desperately trying to save a herd of thousands from driving themselves off a steep cliff is mesmerizing.  Yes, there is considerable CGI augmentation here, but I think that harsh critics of the effects here miss the point:  Luhrmann is a showman and tries to give all his films a sort of ethereal hyper-realism to the proceedings.  Besides, I am not altogether sure how any other conventional effects techniques could have pulled this scene off.  It does not matter, because the sequence is sensational, as is the late breaking attack of the Japanese on Darwin.   

Some of the performances are also very good, especially by Brandon Walters, who gives such a pleasurable spunk, limitless determination, and natural charisma to Nullah (he also partially narrates the film in voice over).  David Wenham is also letter-perfect playing a lecherous fiend.  Then there is the two romantic leads, and Hugh Jackman does such a thanklessly bravura job playing a role of the beguiled, world-weary, and rough n’ tough anti-hero with a heart of gold.  Jackman embodies the soul of his dashing and charming leading man (AUSTRALIA shows him as a natural movie star, but with talent, as was on display in his unreservedly great performance he gave in Christopher Nolan’s THE PRESTIGE).  Nicole Kidman, on the other hand, oversells and outstretches herself a bit too far in the film, mostly during the opening passages, where she plays individual moments up to near farcical levels.  Yet, as the film progresses as does her character’s reawakening.  It’s funny, but both Kidman’s performance and character develop a maturity and strong, moving conviction as the film cascades to a conclusion. 

AUSTRALIA, on the negative side, is fairly over stuffed and padded.  The film also suffers from some odd tonal inconsistencies (the final barbarism of the war sequences and the saddening ordeal of Nullah’s capture by the Australian authorities is kind of incongruent with the film’s opening care-free and light-hearted flare).  The film is also nearly three hours long, and although the final act is its best laid out and paced, it takes an awfully long time for the story to take off.  The film’s somewhat lingering resemblance to PEARL HARBOR also devalues it’s meaningfulness.  Both films involve fairly predictable and prosaic love stories set amidst real life historical war and attack.  If anything, the characters oftentimes struggle to develop as being three-dimensional and significant, especially when placed in the same space as a real event that has so much more implication.  Thankfully, Australia’s romantic melodrama is feels less force fed that that in Michael Bay’s film, which reduced its characters down to almost ridiculing soap opera stooges. 

What’s also somewhat sticky is Luhrmann’s attention to the deeply distressing story of Nullah’s attempts at eluding capture by the government.  On a positive, Luhrmann does shed light something to say about how dreadful his country’s national polices of forced integration and education led to a cultural genocide.  AUSTRALIA makes the right steps by painting these practices and principles in the correct intolerant light.  Yet, the somber tone of this theme sort of battles for supremacy with the friskiness of the romance within the film: the two never harmoniously co-exist.  Not only that, but Luhrmann ironically paints the Japanese perhaps a bit too broadly as blood-thirsty savages and brutes in a few of the latter scenes involving the attack on Darwin in the film, which comes across as a little disdainful.   Further grinding any level of discernable realism is the appearance of Nullah’s grandfather, King George (David Gulpili), who is one of those obligatory shaman-like mystics that can appear and disappear at will and be at just the right place whenever the script deems it necessary.