Wildly Uneven Australia a Lushly Romantic Adventure
Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) has come to Australia to force her husband to get rid of his cattle ranch out in the middle of the Outback nowhere. It is 1939, war is on the horizon and this prim and proper woman of society doesn’t have time to waste on wondering whether or not the man she is supposed to love has managed to get his cattle across what she can only see as a worthless little piece of nondescript desert.
Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman get a little closer in 20th Century Fox's Australia
Unfortunately, her arrival culminates with the man’s unexpected death. On top of that she also learns the ranch’s head man Neil Fletcher (David Wenham) is stealing from her, there’s a mixed race aboriginal boy named Nullah (Brandon Walters) hiding from the authorities, the region’s top landowner King Carney (Bryan Brown) wants to buy her out for a fraction of what the land is apparently worth and the cowboy responsible for driving the cattle to the city of Darwin, the sensually rugged Drover (Hugh Jackman), isn’t going to lift a finger unless he's handsomely paid.
Reluctantly, Lady Sarah and the Drover manage to come to an understanding, the two joining forces to get the cattle across the Outback and thusly spoil Carney’s plans for a wartime beef monopoly. But events are rapidly doing their best to conspire against them, and with officials trying to steal Nullah out of their caring embrace, and with Fletcher going out of his way to kill off their livestock, these two have so many problems the last thing in the world they should probably be doing is falling in love.
That is, of course, exactly what they end up doing. Not that this should come as any sort of surprise, the trailers and commercials and posters and pictures for writer and director Baz Luhrmann’s Australia pretty much go out of their way to let people know this movie is a gigantic epic wartime romance. What is a surprise is just how chaotic, disorganized and absolutely freakishly disjointed the whole thing is, the filmmaker stuffing so many concepts and ideas into the thing his rather simple melodrama tends to get lost amidst all the pandemonium.
Be that as it may, this is still one of the more robustly entertaining and lushly romantic motion pictures I’ve seen all year. Kidman and Jackman ooze movie star chemistry, the latter in particular hefting this rather sluggish and ill-defined tale upon his rugged shoulders carrying it across the finish line with rather unanticipated ease. Even at a rambling 165 minutes, Luhrmann’s WWII baby becomes impossible to turn away from, each frame so visually arresting and emotionally enthralling even when it became laughably silly I was still so captivated by it all I just didn’t care.
And boy does it ever get silly. Wenham’s villain is so hissably one dimensional it’s almost as if he’d just stepped right out of a Dudley Do-Right cartoon. Brown’s cattle baron, meanwhile, is a virtual stick figure, his ultimate comeuppance so perfunctory you almost get the sneaky suspicion they made up his demise right there on the spot. The film is also filled with some of the most outlandishly surreal coincidences ever put to screen, some of them so insanely silly I couldn’t help but uncontrollably giggle in my seat trying not to choke on my popcorn.
I also don’t think the film does quite the job it wants to chronicling the country’s sad history of trying to, as one character matter-of-factly states, “breed the black out of the country.” While newcomer Walters is an expressive actor with stunning eyes just welling with visible emotional discourse, the story is so sprawling it just can’t get this subplot to resonate, Philip Noyce’s brilliant Rabbit-Proof Fence the definitive cinematic document showcasing these darkly disturbing all-too-recent events.
But Luhrmann, as he proved most brilliantly in both his debut Strictly Ballroom and in his Oscar-winning musical Moulin Rouge (and to a lesser extent in his revisionist take on Romeo & Juliet), is an artist of singular vision. You get the feeling that he threw every ounce of his obsessive enthusiasm into each and every frame. Few movies this year have showcased even an ounce of this one’s vitality or the slightest hint of its imagination. More, it is completely unafraid to wear its heart proudly on its dirt-covered work sleeve, the filmmaker’s fascination with both the country he loves and the characters he created visible in each and every frame.
Comparisons have been made to Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz and How the West Was Won, but even though there are subtle allusions to all three I kind of think only third is really all that accurate. That latter Western was a giant muddled mess, too, but it was made with such fascinating zest and zeal, and was filled with so many astounding moments and images, it managed to take on a life of its own well beyond the obvious banality of its flaws.
Luhrmann, like those great, legendary directors behind that 1962 Cinerama classic, has bitten off one heck of a lot more than he can chew, but he does it with such grandly eloquent gusto it’s incredibly difficult to give him too hard a time for attempting it. I was swept away by Australia, captivated by every giddily harebrained twist and turn, my ultimate rapture nearly as splendiferous as watching the two stars kiss for the very first time. I guess that means I loved it, and I can’t help but imagine the majority of viewers are going to feel wonderfully the same.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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