Bottom line: An expansive romantic epic of the Outback, ravishingly mounted in the style of classic Hollywood.
Grade (on a 1-10 scale): 8.5
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to have been thoroughly won over by Baz Luhrmann’s sweeping, three-hour romantic epic Australia, but the skepticism I took into the theater had solid reasons behind it.
First, how could anyone title a movie Australia? Wasn’t that an automatic promise of James Michener-style boring portentousness? Second, while I liked the cheeky ingenuity of Luhrmann’s breakthrough, Strictly Ballroom, I found the post-modern grandiosity of his Romeo & Juliet (with Leonardo DiCaprio) and Moulin Rouge brittle and uneven. Third, in the little universe I inhabit, advance word on the film was dismal. “Terrible” was one critic-friend’s blunt assessment.
Given all that, I was reflexively suspicious when the movie started out by announcing its concern with the “stolen generations” of aboriginal children taken from their parents by the Australian government for reeducation, then plunged straight into a lush, almost cartoonish romantic drama in which porcelain-skinned Nicole Kidman plays Lady Sarah Ashley, a tightly wound Brit who, as WWII approaches, comes to the Outback to force her husband to sell his ranch and return to England, but finds hubby dead and herself in the decidedly roughhewn care of one of his drovers, the aptly named Drover (Hugh Jackman).
Not only did the premise seemed contrived and clichéd, but Luhrmann’s style, as before, was spectacularly, insistently florid, the camera panning and swooping ceaselessly, the lighting unstintingly baroque, gorgeously scenic landscapes giving jarring against luminous close-ups of the stars, every impressive composition rushed toward the next by the film’s breathless editing rhythms.I began to get over my suspicions when the story’s power began to assert itself, and I realized something: Luhrmann wasn’t kidding. This wasn’t some giddy stylistic exercise or self-regarding stunt. The director (who’s also credited with the story) believes in what he’s doing, both in terms of creating a grand romantic myth about Australia and in using his own updated version of a classic cinematic vernacular to do so.
Given both the novelty and the expansiveness of all this, it’s no wonder it takes a while for its peculiar magic to take hold. But I remember when I knew I was hooked. Lady Sarah ends up on her husband’s desolate (or rather, gorgeously primeval) ranch and the chill between her and Drover begins to thaw when they have to pull together a ragtag set of aborigine and female cowhands to attempt driving her herd of cattle across the desert to the territorial port in order to foil the local cattle baron’s designs on her land.
Yes, it’s the stuff of a thousand old westerns, not to mention The African Queen and other chestnuts that involve a sparring couple facing seemingly insurmountable physical odds. But in this case, the conceit overpowers all objections due not so much to its inherent mythic power as to Lurhmann’s skill and deliberate emotional conviction in mounting it, and to the steadily growing chemistry of Kidman and Jackman, who are both in top form. (The story’s third main character is a half-caste boy, nicely played by newcomer Brandon Walters.)
It’s a fitting coincidence that the tale begins in 1939, the fabled annis mirabilis for Hollywood that saw the release of Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach and other legendary classics, including one that Australia repeatedly references: The Wizard of Oz. Like Pedro Almodovar in Spain, Aussie Luhrmann comes from a background of adoring classic Hollywood moviemaking yet simultaneously mistrusting it. His whole career seems to revolve around a question regarding its influence: Can he adapt its seductive thematic and stylistic tropes without surrendering to its frequent banality and evasiveness?
His earlier movies, in their different ways, deconstructed the old formulas yet kept them tightly bound by tethers of knowing irony. In Australia, he replaces the irony with a sincerity that’s no less knowing and, in my view, is even more daring and mature.
I found Australia entirely persuasive, at once stylistically ravishing and emotionally satisfying. It is, more than any film Luhrmann’s made, a mass-market not an art film, much like the Hollywood classics it emulates. No doubt, various folks who’ve followed the director till now won’t cotton to its unapologetic romantic effusiveness. But maybe some will. Coming out of the theater, I heard a middle-aged woman behind me say, “Well, it wasn’t horrible.” Among the hipster set, that equals high praise, I would say.
