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Australia
Bad movies come in all shapes and sizes. This one is a doozy, a big, sweeping national epic that cost Rupert Murdoch’s Twentieth Century Fox an arm and a leg ($130 million) and which has been hobbled by its weak US showing. Of course it’s doing nicely down under, but the real question is: what will the rest of the world make of it? And that’s a bit of a head-scratcher. Writer-director Baz Luhrmann has enjoyed a Midas touch up to now, tapping popular acclaim with his so-called “Red Curtain Trilogy”: Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Moulin Rouge. These are romantic, even sentimental love stories, packaged in day-glo camp, but told with such verve and machine gun editing they don’t register as ironic. Luhrmann is straight, and all these films are heterosexual love stories, but it’s a gay sensibility: bigger, brighter and louder than life, playful but emotional. It’s been seven years since Moulin Rouge and in theory Luhrmann has put the post-modern kitsch on mothballs and turned to a different mode, although quite which mode that would be isn’t clear, either to us or, I suspect, to him. Australia is a rum business: an old fashioned melodrama that’s part romance, part Western, part war movie, served up with broad comedy and a self-conscious nod and a wink. Yet at the same time, it wears its heart on its sleeve, and you better believe it’s purple. The year is… confusing: 1939, or thereabouts. Nicole Kidman plays English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley, a character as caricatured as that name suggests. She’s a snob, instinctively racist, and certainly not used to getting her gloves dirty – but she journeys halfway around the world to track down her husband who has gone native, cattle farming in Western Australia. Trouble is, she arrives at “Faraway Downs” to find the Lord has already departed - with a spear in his back.
If Luhrmann has proved adept at mashing genres in the past, this time he’s come off second (or third) best. His screenplay was co-written over the years with Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan, which may be why it feels like at least three movies laid on top of each other. The structure is an awful mess. A voice over narration by Nullah (Brandon Walters) is an obvious gesture towards political reparation, but a dubious device in storytelling terms, not least because Nullah is prone to sentences like this one: “Miss Boss! We gotta get those fat cheeky bulls in that big bloody metal ship!” As it happens, that line sets up the plot of the first two hours or so, which is basically a Red River style cattle drive across the outback to the port at Darwin, where the herd will go to feed the war effort. “Miss Boss”, meanwhile has to contend with rustlers and wreckers, heat and dust, and a particularly distracting paragon of Aussie beefcake – the drover called “Drover” (Hugh Jackman). 1939 was the year of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard Of Oz, and Luhrmann seeks inspiration from both of them. Lady Sarah is a little bit Scarlett O’Hara, and maybe a smidgeon or two of Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen; Drover is quite a lot Rhett Butler, rugged and distant, while the reliably repellent David Wenham might as well be basing his portrait of an ambitious rival on the Wicked Witch of the West. Give or take a CGI stampede and a telegraphed kangaroo killing, Luhrmann shoots the movie in the corny stylings of the Hollywood studio era. That’s a mistake. Victor Fleming and David O Selznick didn’t intend to be corny, and in fact their movies hold up extremely well 70 years on. In contract, Luhrmann’s self-conscious and condescending concoction doesn’t hold up for 7 minutes (let alone 165 of them). His ethnic caricatures are knowing, but they’re not funny (a Chinese cook called Sing Song?).
Luhrmann means to apologize for the burden of racial guilt that comes with being Australian (recommended further viewing: Rabbit Proof Fence) but at the same time he indulges in all manner of mystic mumbo-jumbo where Nullah is concerned. And in any case, this theme is clumsily integrated with the main romance. Neither Kidman nor Jackman seems at ease, but it’s easier for Jackman, he’s allowed heroics – saving abandoned aboriginal kids from the Japanese army, for instance. Lady Sarah is invariably sidelined when the action hots up, and when she is called upon to stand up she usually does the wrong thing. It’s as if Scarlett kept trying to sell Tara to the nearest carpetbagger. Kidman can be a terrific actress, but she’s not well served by her collaborators here. A scene in which she tries to comfort Nullah with a rendition of “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz is just plain embarrassing. It’s a more grievous miscalculation that the movie reaches a climax about two hours in, only to dig in for another hour of wartime drama. As it happens, this last hour is an improvement on the first, but it certainly feels like a long haul – and it’s not like the movie is going anywhere unexpected. Australia is too bombastic to deserve a free pass. It’s awful tosh, but if you go with it you might enjoy the ride – at least, more than I did. I’m giving it two stars out of five: one for ambition, one for effort, and zero for the rest. I couldn’t wait for it to be over. Tom Charity 
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