At the Movies: Australia
Oh crikey, Australia’s big.
The film gives us 2 hours and 40 minutes of Nicole Kidman deep-breathing her way through murder, racism, greed, skulduggery, war, snobbery, love and the deep spiritual connection between Aboriginal people and the land. Then director and co-screenwriter Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom, Romeo and Juliet, Moulin Rouge) throws in a fair bit of horseflesh - including Hugh Jackman as the imaginatively named Drover – and a cute-as-a-button kid. You would think he had all the ingredients for an absolute blockbuster. Well, maybe.
Kidman plays Lady Sarah Ashley, an English aristocrat who goes to Australia in the late 1930s, just as the world descends into war. Lady Sarah’s no-good husband turns up dead and she decides to stay on at Faraway Downs, the outback station he has been running. The Aboriginal people attached to the place carry the cultural weight of the story. Among them is the half-caste boy Nullah (Brandon Walters) who wins Lady Sarah’s heart even before Drover gets started. The little boy is caught between his mystical Aboriginal grandfather who wants to take him walkabout and the heartless colonial authorities who want make him one of the lost generation. Faraway Downs has been targeted for takeover by a dastardly cattle baron and his horrible henchmen so our plucky heroine and her ragtag bunch of helpers certainly have their work cut out. Enough clichés. I’m getting too much like Baz.
Australia doesn’t seem to be able to make up its mind what it is. While Drover is stage-managing the heroic delivery of 1500 head of beef to Darwin, it feels, looks and sounds like a classic western. It has stock characters—and stock, of course—and stirring orchestral music, lots of red scenery, and a fair amount of slow-motion horse-riding.
While Lady Sarah is being broken in to the quaintly alien ways of the outback it feels like a period piece: all silly hats, cultural misunderstandings and old-fashioned manners. That impression is amplified by the action that takes place in Darwin, that is, until the sky fills up with Japanese aircraft. Then Australia becomes a ‘war-is-Hell’ movie. We are even treated to the spectacle of Lady Sarah sifting through the burnt-out wreckage of a building to find a precious photograph.
Luhrmann seems to want the movie to earn the label “epic” and he leaves no cliché unturned in the process. He even manages to weld the Aboriginal custom of songlines to (wait for it) Somewhere Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz. Or should that be The Wizard of Aus?
When Luhrmann told the Romeo and Juliet story in that lush and luscious way he did, we loved it. Here, the story doesn’t have the spine to hold up the treatment it gets. The sets, the photography and some of the music are impressive but they are not enough. I went to the movie with an Australian and he was huffing and puffing his disapproval quite early on. I’ll admit that the tear-jerking sequences worked their magic on me later on, but I once cried while watching The Waltons, so that’s no great achievement.
Australia is melodramatic and cinematic and frothy. Check your disbelief in at the door, get plenty of popcorn and count the clichés.
Neil Wilson
AUSTRALIA (M) Aust drama. Next screening at the Village Theatre, Saturday 21 February, 8pm.
