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Kicking off in 1939, “Australia” begins as the prim and proper Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) arrives to the land down under from her home in England to see her husband, who has been gone for the last few months tending to Faraway Downs, the sprawling cattle ranch that he owns in the city of Darwin. At least, that is what he claims to be doing--Sarah is convinced that he is having an affair and is coming down to retrieve him and force him to sell of the cattle and come home. To get there, she is taken across the outback to the ranch by a two-fisted, hard-living man known only as The Drover (Hugh Jackman), an independent cattle driver who is only shuttling Sarah about so that he can have the job of leading the drive to take her husband’s livestock to market. When they arrive at Faraway Downs, Sarah discovers that her husband has been killed--supposedly at the hands of a local aboriginal chief known as King George (David Gulpilil)--and that her chief ranch hand, Neil Fletcher (David Wenham), is a key member of a plot devised by sleazy cattle baron King Carney (Bryan Brown) to force the sale of the ranch, the only one in the area that he doesn’t own, so that he can pick it up for a song and eliminate his only competition. Sarah’s only hope of keeping the ranch is to fulfill a contract her husband signed with the Australian Army to deliver 1500 head of cattle. With no ranch hands of her own, Sarah convinces The Drover to lead the drive with an ad-hoc group that includes Nullah (Brandon Walters), a recently orphaned Aboriginal boy (and the grandson of King George) that Sarah has taken a shine to. Along the way, the group is set upon by Fletcher and his men but against all odds, they get the cattle to the docks in time and the ranch is not only saved but reborn. Even more amazingly, Sarah and The Drover have fallen in love and decide to make a go of the ranch with Nullah.

For a while, everything seems blissful but by 1942, things begin to turn dark. Fletcher, who is now the man behind King Carney’s beef empire following the old man’s untimely passing (if you know what I mean) is still trying to induce Sarah to sell Faraway Downs by fair means or foul. Meanwhile, The Drover has begun getting restless and after a fight with Sarah, he goes off into the night and vows never to return. As for Nullah, he decides, over Sarah’s objection, to set off on a “walkabout,” an important Aboriginal rite of passage. Unfortunately, he is immediately caught by the local police and since he is half-white and half-Aboriginal, he is to be taken away to a nearby island with other children of a similar background as part of Australia’s official policy to take such kids away from their homes in order to train them to serve as domestic servants and to, as one person puts it, “breed the black out of them.” Crestfallen, Sarah is about to turn the ranch over to Fletcher in exchange for his assistance in getting Nullah returned to her but just before all the formalities can be observed, both the island and Darwin are bombed in an air strike staged by the Japanese in the wake of their similar attack on Pearl Harbor a few months earlier. At about this time, The Drover returns to town and is naturally convinced that Sarah was killed in the attack. When he learns that Nullah was sent off to the island and that it was bombed first, he commandeers a boat with a couple of trusted friends to set off for the island in the hopes of rescuing the boy and any other survivors before the Japanese can get a hold of them. Amazingly, things get even more melodramatic at this point but I shall leave those details for you to discover on your own.

Those who assumed that the completion of his so-called “Red Curtain Trilogy” (consisting of “Strictly Ballroom,” “William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge” meant that Baz Luhrmann would begin making films in a less stylized and over-the-top manner will be either delighted or horrified to discover that “Australia” is, if anything, even more flamboyantly overstuffed than anything he has done before. Even at 165 minutes, it is so jam-packed with action, romance, heartbreak, comedy, danger, melodrama, social commentary and homages to any number of classic American films that even the hardiest viewer is likely to feel more than a little exhausted from the sheer amount of stuff that he is throwing at you. The trouble is that while one can easily applaud Luhrmann for the Herculean effort that he has gone through in order to keep viewers entertained, the result is a little bit like watching a guy spinning a number of plates on rods for a similarly extended period of time--it can be a wonder to behold but once it ends, you aren’t left with much to take away from it other than the experience of having sat through it.. This is mostly because Luhrmann and his screenwriters were so busy trying to think of new ingredients to toss into the mix that they forgot to come up with a basic narrative that would be strong and compelling enough to drive things along while allowing for the various diversions and distractions.

For example, once the importance of the cattle drive is established, about an hour or so into the film, it would seem that the actual drive would go on for a while and serve as the film’s centerpiece. Instead, the whole thing is done in about 20 minutes or so and when it does come to an end, it is so anticlimactic that I was almost convinced that the projectionist had skipped a reel somewhere along the line. Instead, we get several interludes in which nothing much of interest happens before the Japanese invasion that takes up roughly the last 40-odd minutes and seems to have come in from an entirely different movie altogether. (Actually, it does--I understand some of the footage was apparently lifted straight from “Tora Tora Tora”) At times, it feels as if Luhrmann is trying to give us two different movies for the price of one and while I can’t argue with the fact that viewers will certainly get more than their money’s worth here, I can’t help but think that things might have been more effective if he had just gone longer with both halves of the story and split it into two equal parts. Then there is Luhrmann’s idea of using his frankly melodramatic storyline as a way of addressing the cruel and racist policies that the Australian government inflicted upon half-caste children for decades before and after the period covered in the film. This is strong and stirring material for a film (as anyone who saw “Rabbit-Proof Fence”) can attest, but its deeply serious nature clashes uneasily with the frankly florid nature of the rest of the proceedings. As I said, I stand in awe at the effort he has put into the film but while Luhrmann is, as always, clearly swinging for the fences, he never quite manages to connect in the way that he did during the best parts of “Romeo and Juliet” and “Moulin Rouge.”

At the same time, however, watching Luhrmann swinging and missing is a hell of a lot more entertaining than watching a lot of other contemporary filmmakers hitting their usual singles and doubles. Even though “Australia” is pretty much a mess as a complete film--how could it be anything else?--I have to admit that there were enough bits and pieces strewn throughout the wreckage to keep me more or less entertained for most of the proceedings. I liked the deliberately caricatured performances from Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman in the lead roles--both play their parts as broadly as possible, especially in the early going, and their lack of restraint is a good fit with Luhrmann’s no-holds-barred approach. (That said, while Jackman is perfectly fine here, one wonders what might have resulted if original choice Russell Crowe had played the part.) I liked the boldly stylistic look that cinematographer Mandy Walker brings to the material that gives it the grandly artificial feel of a cherished childhood story that has evolved and grown more elaborate in the mind over time (and in a way, that is exactly what it is since the entire saga is related to us through Nuallah). I liked how, unlike most current stabs at epic-style filmmaking, the pace never quite flags--it may be nearly three hours long but unless you aren’t a Baz Luhrmann fan, it certainly doesn’t feel like it runs that long. Hell, I even liked the incredibly shameless nature of the grand finale that Luhrmann has cooked up for us--few filmmakers would have the nerve to go to the melodramatic extremes that he does here and fewer still would have the skill to somehow pull it off as well as he does.

When I reviewed “Moulin Rouge” when it came out, I claimed that while it was essentially an unholy mess, it was the kind of mess that would assuredly be given a prominent place in the annals of film history--the only question was whether it would be listed under the heading of all-time classic, cult oddity or Golden Turkey. While I don’t think that the same can quite be said for “Australia”--it just meanders off in too many directions for its own good and it never seems clear what kind of story Luhrmann wanted to tell in the first place--I can’t deny the fact that I found myself vaguely riveted by the thing despite its sheer silliness (and sometimes because of it). Many level-headed moviegoers will likely reject it as an overblown mess and I can’t really argue with that assessment. However, if you are in the mood for a jumbo-sized slice of go-for-broke filmmaking that seems to have come from someone’s imagination instead of a screenwriting manual, then “Australia” may well be right up your alley. At the very least, whether you love it or hate it, you won’t come away from it thinking that you’ve seen it all before.

link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=17209&reviewer=389
originally posted: 11/26/08 17:27:31
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