FILM REVIEW
Wizard of Oz
Australia: Baz Luhrmann's exuberant, exhausting love letter to home
Last Updated: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 | 9:35 AM ET
By Greig Dymond, CBC News
Hugh Jackman, left, and Nicole Kidman star in Baz Luhrmann's epic period film Australia. (James Fisher/Twentieth Century Fox) Baz Luhrmann isn’t a subtle filmmaker, nor does he subscribe to the minimalist tenet “less is more.” In his latest movie, Australia, he throws everything but the proverbial kitchen sink at the screen.
It’s what we’ve come to expect from the Aussie director, whose previous film was the frenetic Moulin Rouge! (2001). That picture was set in 1899 Paris, but contained an array of influences — Italian grand opera, Bollywood cinema, Busby Berkeley musicals, even late-20th-century pop tunes by Elton John, Paul McCartney and Nirvana — that had nothing to do with its time frame or locale.
Baz Luhrmann is a true mash-up artist, a synthesizer of cinematic and pop-culture styles who has a driving compulsion to entertain.
Luhrmann’s movies are brimming with ornate design, theatricality and larger-than-life melodrama. The maker of Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet is a true mash-up artist, a synthesizer of cinematic and pop-culture styles who has a driving compulsion to entertain. It’s a singular vision, one that polarizes both audiences and critics.
Now, with Australia, we have Luhrmann’s biggest film yet, and one that could only have sprung from his unique mind. Clocking in at almost three hours, it’s several epics in one: part romance, part western, part war flick, with large helpings of music and aboriginal-inspired magic realism thrown in for good measure. The different elements don’t always cohere, and once again, the camp quotient is extremely high. Ultra-broad acting abounds, and the tonal shifts can be jarring. Add impeccable art direction and period costumes, and you have a stew that contains all of Luhrmann’s standard ingredients. It’s a mammoth, visually stunning project that will no doubt please the large constituency of fans who love his films precisely because of those collage-like qualities.
The director’s outsized ambitions are dramatized on a suitably immense canvas: the Australian landscape. Nicole Kidman – looking paler than ever – plays Lady Sarah Ashley, an English aristocrat who arrives in Australia as the Second World War is about to start. After inheriting a ranch that’s in danger of being overtaken by evil cattle barons, she enlists “The Drover” – played by a buff Hugh Jackman as a kind of Crocodile Dundee on steroids – to help her herd thousands of cattle across the outback to the naval port of Darwin. Their subsequent love story bumps up against a Japanese war plane attack and a concurrent plot about the shameful treatment of Aborigines.
If that sounds like an expansive storyline, it is. Luhrmann is clearly aiming high, trying to fashion a modern-day epic along the lines of classics like Stagecoach, The African Queen and Gone with the Wind. He definitely gets the sweeping visuals right: a CGI-enhanced stampede scene at the edge of a cliff and some of the wartime sets are particularly breathtaking.
Brandon Walters portrays Nullah, a half-Aboriginal, half-Caucasian boy in Australia. (James Fisher/Twentieth Century Fox) But the romance at the heart of the tale veers in and out of focus, which is perhaps inevitable given all the plot and genre elements Luhrmann insists on juggling. Jackman is believable as the rough-hewn herder, even when he says lines like, “I mix with dingoes, not duchesses.” Kidman is convincing at the start, when her character arrives in rural Australia, dripping with comic condescension; she has less success when she is required to drop her reserve and fall unabashedly for The Drover.
The real acting discovery here is 12-year-old Brandon Walters as Nullah – a half-Aboriginal, half-Caucasian child who falls under the maternal wing of Lady Ashley when things start to fall apart at her ranch. He gets almost as much screen time as Jackman and Kidman, and has to alternate between spiritual and playful, courageous and terrified. His role is essentially a single-character metaphor for the tragedy of Australia’s Stolen Generations: Aboriginal kids who were taken away from their families. Walters delivers the most naturalistic performance in the film.
Conversely, the one-dimensional baddies who try to take over Lady Ashley’s ranch could have stepped right out of The Perils of Pauline. One almost expects Bryan Brown (who plays the mean “King” Carney) and David Wenham (as the even meaner Neil Fletcher) to have handlebar moustaches to twirl while they glower at Kidman. Wenham in particular has great fun chewing the scenery.
Speaking of retro showbiz values, the show-stopping weepie Over the Rainbow is a musical motif throughout Australia. Clearly, Luhrmann is inspired by the fantastical world of that song’s source, The Wizard of Oz. (And surely the “Oz” pun is intentional.) The main characters here go on a journey, and come to the realization that “there’s no place like home.” Australia is the director’s heartfelt – if slightly wobbly – love letter to his homeland, warts and all.
Australia is a sprawling but likable mess. Even those of us who aren’t Luhrmann fans have to admire his let’s-put-on-a-show enthusiasm, and his belief that “motion pictures” should actually move. So many films drag along with a slacker-like lack of visual ambition (that means you, Zack and Miri Make a Porno). It’s nice to see a story that oozes with passion and imagination, despite the excessive length.
Australia opens on Nov. 26.
Greig Dymond writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
