They just don’t come any bigger than this continent-size epic from director Baz Luhrmann, best known for Moulin Rouge. Set in the early part of World War II, the film offers two leads who exude old Hollywood star quality, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. The clear antecedent for Kidman would seem to be Kate Hepburn in The African Queen; she is, in this case, a posh Englishwoman, Lady Ashley, alarmed by the rough-and-tumble Aussie town of Darwin, which offers up every cliché of old westerns (fightin’, cussin’, drinkin’, etc.) in the first ten minutes. Luhrmann, a master of style, makes it all look smashing (sometimes literally). Later on, he fills the screen with expensive-looking aerial shots as the lady predictably learns to embrace the Outback. She is plucky, it seems. Jackman’s character is a cattle drover; helpfully, he is called Mr. Drover. He helps Lady Ashley round up the cattle she’s trying to sell. They bicker like Hepburn and Humprey Bogart in African Queen; much more quickly, they follow the cinematic law requiring that the two most attractive-seeming characters must eventually stop bickering and hook up.
However, this does not purport to be what the movie is about. Nor is it about Australia’s role in World War II, though as it happens Darwin was bombed by the Japanese, the attack faithfully re-created in the second half of the feature. But the story the movie claims to tell is that of Australia’s “stolen generations” of mixed-race children subjected to a kind of forced assimilation that only ended in 1973. The narrator is a small boy (Brandon Walters) who, as the son of a white man and an aborigine, is subject to being captured and sent to be re-educated by missionaries. The boy’s grandfather, steeped in the old ways, is a recurring “magical black man.”
Luhrman, though an Aussie, tells this story in the way Hollywood always tells this kind of story, by framing it in the glow of a grand love affair between forward-thinking white folks. It’s not apparent that either Drover or Lady Ashley has ever entertained a racist thought. More interesting might be seeing a character overcome racism, but this is not that sort of a movie, obvious racism being, in this context, a proxy to identify the villain, who wants to acquire Lady Ashley’s land for a fraction of cost.
Superficially, one can level a similar criticism at most any movie with rich/noble white main characters and poor/discriminated-against natives. The similarly epic (and continentally titled) Out of Africa comes to mind. But that romantic drama is, simply put, much better. It’s a movie for grown-ups, with characters exceeding the minimum requirements for complexity and shades of subtlety in the plotting. The music score is better, too. Here, on the other hand, is mere spectacle. The dialogue is typically spouted out as if the script is written in ALL CAPS, though memorable lines are in short supply. Jackman is a perfect combination of Bogart and Robert Redford—a ruffian who cleans up extremely well. (Kidman makes less of an impression, and the chemistry between the two is lacking.) The cattle stampede in the first half can’t help but sweep you up in the excitement. There is action, there is romance, there is drama, there is—crikey!—a dash of comedy. But any real depth of feeling is missing. Australia borrows its sentiment overtly, from The Wizard of Oz. The brief Judy Garland clip is more touching than any of the new footage. (The characters watch the movie in 1939, though as it happens the film did not open Down Under until the next year.) The climactic, presumably cathartic, moment, after two and a half hours, begat titters of laughter from the audience I saw this with, such is the magnitude of the cliché.
I might yet recommend Australia but for this: It is a nearly three-hour movie in which not one truly surprising thing happens. The closest might be when a crocodile bite becomes a major plot point, which is hardly a recommendation. In the end, whether you like this one depends on what you look for in a movie. To me, whereas a film such as Moulin Rouge could succeed on little more than panache, set design, and catchy tunes, the epic requires more substance. Australia recalls great adventure movies of the past, like the ones mentioned above (even the credits font is like that of Casablanca), but the comparison does not flatter. The film to which it truly invites comparison is the formulaic Pearl Harbor, although, blessedly, that film’s corpulent third act is without analogue here. At the very least, this movie doesn’t seem any longer than it is.
There is, as it happens, a movie that more directly tackles the subject of “stolen generations,” and that is Rabbit-Proof Fence. It’s far superior to this exercise in schmaltz.
IMDB link
viewed 11/24/08 (screening at Ritz East) and reviewed 11/25/08
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