It's never a good sign when the projectionist tells you to pack a lunch before watching a movie. This happened to me when I went to go see Australia, a big slice of epic pie from Moulin Rouge! director Baz Luhrmann. I took my friend's words with a grain of salt, since I dug Luhrmann's crazy revisionist musical and assumed the man would employ similarly stylistic flair to his latest project. Unfortunately, a rude awakening awaited me as Australia's beginning credits rolled. What begins as a plucky tribute to the sweeping epics of yore soon sours up and turns into a bloated example of melodramatic storytelling at its most taxing.
Australia starts off in the early days of World War II. Feisty socialite Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) has had enough of her absentee husband, making the lengthy trek from England to Darwin, Australia to check on the cattle ranch he's become so engrossed in. But not only has Sarah's husband bit the big one, but local baron King Carney (Bryan Brown) is hell-bent on claiming the ranch and completing his stranglehold on the Australian beef market. Of course, Sarah isn't going to take this sitting down, so after recruiting a rugged cattle driver known as Drover (Hugh Jackman), she makes the perilous journey to move her herd from the ranch to Darwin. Time, the elements, and Carney's lackeys are all working against Sarah, but she tries her hardest to persevere in spite of it all, even falling hopelessly in love with the dashing Drover in the process.
I understand perfectly what Australia is going for. It's a modern-day ode to classic Hollywood epics that focused on the indominability of the human spirit, even in the harshest of conditions. As it turns out, the indominability of the human spirit is about as interesting as watching cheese age, or at least that's how it is in this endeavor. It's not that Australia is without ambition, since it shoots for the moon and beyond, convinced of its own ability to lug a pretty hefty thematic load. The trouble is that the movie overestimates its own strength and depends way too much on the story's backdrop to carry it to the finish line. It's a romance at heart, presented as a love for the ages that endures all kinds of hardships, a la Gone with the Wind. But the relationship Luhrmann serves viewers is just a few shades more convincing than the anemic affair currently making teeny-boppers swoon in Twilight. Instead, Luhrmann focuses most of his energy on playing up the film's spectacle angle, which ends up making Australia look fantastic but ultimately feel emotionally hollow.
Article comments
1 - CB
Perhaps it's not possible to understand the movie unless you're Australian. It is full of in-jokes - almost every character is a caricature of an Australian stereotype. Heroes who turn up just in time, the unlikely crew, a drover called (Oh, God) Drover, the charity do with all the blokes swigging from bottles, the chocolate-box landscape - it's all satire. Even the mystical Grandfather deus ex machina satirizes a very white Australian image of Aborigines.
The audience of Australians I saw this movie with laughed their way through it, and not because it was so bad.
2 - STM
Even the scene where the kangaroo is shot - as Nicole Kidman marvels at the animal bounding along - is kind of dark satire, according to one Aussie movie reviewer (Australia is the only place that delights in putting the two animals in its national coat of arms on the BBQ).
Anyway, I'm one Aussie who won't be going to see it, mainly because I hate Aussie movies, which are usually characterised by wooden-Indian acting, poor scripts (and less than mediocre writing), clunky plot and a propensity among too many Australian actors to think all they have to do is drop the G off the end of everything to sound like a working-class Aussie. Problem is, they never get it right, and no one really speaks like that in this country unless they're wankers bunging it on in the pub after 10 beers.
Paul Hogan just spoke like he did when he was a painter on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and pulled it off in Crocodile Dundee (which was also full of in jokes). Must have had something to do with him never going to acting school.
I kind of get the reason now why Russell Crowe decided to pull out of the project, and in my view Luhrmann's real purpose was to present another story about the disgraceful treatment of indigenous Australians in this country, all dressed up in a fluffy, sterotyped epic love story.
We all know about that stuff now though, Baz ...
My 14-year-old daughter went to see it with her boyfriend at the local cinema last weekend. She couldn't tell me the story, so I suspect they picked the longest movie playing so they could neck for three hours.
So it'll be good for something. I expect she'll see it a few more times over the summer school holidays.
3 - Belle 2
Hmmmm...after reading all of this, I feel a bit naive because I thought it was the best movie I've watched in a very long time. I enjoyed the history woven into the story. I believe the little boy stole the show!! I walked out of the theater feeling hopeful. I thought the movie was moving and inspiring. I'm actually considering going to see it again.
4 - STM
Belle, if it's any consolation, my wife saw it a few weeks back in Gold Class at the local movies ... and thought it was really great, being attended to by waiters and what have you, and says she's planning to go and watch it again.
She'll be going with her girlfriends though, not her husband :)
5 - Robert M. Barga
I actually liked this movie
6 - Belle 2
Thanks STM! Unfortunately I tend to be somewhat enthnocentristic and was only vaguely aware that Australia was attacked at Darwin during WWII and I was completely unaware of the discrimination of the indigenous Australians. Sure the love story was interesting to me, but I left with an interest in learning more about the actual history of the country!!
I have to say, I think it would be a good idea for you to reconsider and see the movie with your wife!!
7 - STM
"the actual history of the country"
Not that much to learn Belle ... inhabited by the aborigines for 150,000 years, became a group of convict colonies (except for one state) in the late 1700s for 100 years from the time of white settlement, until the colonies became states and formed a federation (sound familiar??) and is now a modern, stable democracy founded on inherited English rule of law, much like the US.
It's probably the kind of place the US might have been had there been no American revolution ... and interestingly, at first glance, despite the many subtle differences, it's hardly any different. Perhaps like a cross between the US and Britain, with great weather, nice beaches and as you've seen in the movie, a beautiful but deadly and inhospitable interior.
Except you guys talk funny and drive on the wrong side of the road and eat very strange foods (what's so great about Oreo cookies?). There is strong American cultural influence: I grew up watching American shows like Leave it to Beaver, Batman, Bewitched, I love Lucy, Flipper, etc etc etc. My kids have grown up watching 1980s and '90s and 21st century equivalents of those.
When I'm in the US, especially walking around town, I often forget where I am ... until someone speaks :)
I still can't stand Aussie movies, though, as a rule. I've seen the odd good one, but they're very odd.
Not very patriotic of me I know but the acting's often bad and the scripts worse - no one does a consistently great movie the way Hollywood does, except maybe for the British.