Wednesday
26Nov2008
Movie Review - 'Australia'
Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 12:21AM | Australia
Starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh
Jackman, and Brandon Walters  |
What
should we do when someone tries so hard and fails? Should we applaud the
endeavor - in this case a massive production in scope and budget - for being so
audacious in the first place, or should we wonder why it's not any better?
I'm going with the latter, because there are quite a few
exceptional epics that you could compare to
Baz Luhrmann's homeland homily,
Australia. This one is simply not in that league. Luhrmann has spent years
developing his $120 million film, none of which matters if what's on the page
never comes to life. Curiously enough, it's a story Luhrmann correctly identifies as being worth telling, but the characters that walk us through this world don't seem to fully belong there, or belong together. Ultimately, it's not knowing which characters should be the caretakers of our experience that undo Luhrmann's film.
Around the time of European escalation into World War II, Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) travels to Australia from her posh country estate in England to help her husband conclude a land deal. A local cattle farmer, King Carney (Bryan Brown), wants to buy the Ashley's Faraway Downs for much less than it's worth, and Lady Ashley feels unloading the property is more important than the money they get in return.
Upon arriving in Australia, she is to meet The Drover (Hugh Jackman), who is kind of the Han Solo of cattle driving: He works for the highest bidder, picks the jobs he wants, and as he says, "No man hires me, no man fires me." Their relationship is reminiscent of Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, almost so much so that you're wondering where the point of differentiation is. OK: They're from different worlds. We get it.
The whole "different worlds" thing is supposed to help grease the wheels for unlikely love stories in movies, whether it's Romeo and Juliet or Memoirs of a Geisha or Twilight. The problem is that, unlike those stories, Australia doesn't need an unlikely love story, because we eventually learn that the love story is not a key to any of the film's success. It's window dressing, and when you've got a movie that runs nearly three hours, you don't want a lot of window dressing.
Twelve-year-old Walters plays Nullah, who tries to avoid the local police at every turn, since they're charged with rounding up aboriginal boys and girls and handing them over to the missionaries in nearby Darwin. Nullah is the heart of this story, a boy who sees his nation divided, who sees the love between The Drover and Lady Ashley grow (albeit seemingly overnight), and who looks both to his past and his future with a heavy heart. His performance is the highlight of the film.
Of the other two actors, Gulpilil embodies those aborigines who have remained true to their culture and beliefs, while Kurddal, without ever saying a word, displays a haunted quality of a man who had his identity stripped away, forced into button-down shirts and taking orders from the local constabulary.
But Luhrmann only deals with these two sides of a thorny issue from time to time. He has built up a rather formulaic story about these two attractive but glaringly different new lovers rounding up cattle to stop the evil King Carney from establishing a monopoly on beef, which runs its course in a fashion you'd probably expect.
But Australia doesn't end there, oh no. Luhrmann hasn't given us enough bang for our buck, so he has the Japanese bomb the hell out of Darwin (you remember, the place where the government deprograms aborigine children?). The bombings actually happened in February 1942, killing around 250 people. But again, it functions as window dressing rather than the logical climactic event in the film, which is really not the way you should handle something like that.
I'm a big admirer of Luhrmann's previous work, especially Moulin Rouge! That film gets by on its style but Australia feels burdened by it. The director, who co-wrote the script with Stuart Beattie, has so many ideas that he thinks are important that he serves none of them adequately by sharing the ball. If it's the love story he wants us to remember, then he should have made it more compelling, or compelling at all. If it's the World War II angle, it shouldn't have been dropped on us over two hours into the film. If it's the less familiar story of the assimilation of the aborigines (handled much more effectively in Philip Noyce's Rabbit Proof Fence), then it should dominate the action.
There's not as much to criticize in Luhrmann's approach as a visual director as there is his storytelling. The photography is wonderful, the colors rich and alive. I do question, if this is indeed an ode in some ways to Australia, why several key exterior scenes were clearly shot on a sound stage and some others have clearly been enhanced by sub-par digital effects. That seems to undercut the inspiration a little bit.
Australia could be worse. It could have bad performances or it could not look as spectacular as it does. The actors are clearly invested and do a capable job all the way around. It sounds tremendous. Nicole Kidman's costumes are elegant and exquisite. Indeed, certain elements of this production would be difficult for any other director to top or even emulate. But it could be and deserves to be much better.
