Movie Review: Australia (2008)
A major miscalculation if there ever was one
Photo: 20th Century Fox
Australia is a film that is a drastic miscalculation on the part of director/co-writer Baz Luhrmann. This much stalled project once starred Russell Crowe, then Heath Ledger and ultimately Hugh Jackman and has taken forever to get to the screen, and once you it you will know why. This is a daunting effort as Luhrmann hopes to make a film as grand as the likes of Gone With the Wind and Lawrence of Arabia all while telling a love story mixed in with the tragic racial policies imposed on half-white/half-Aboriginal children as they are stripped from their families in an effort to "breed the black out of them". The idea is as offensive as it sounds, but in Australia's attempts to make sure the film is as much a love story as it is (more, actually) a tale of a "stolen generation" it loses its focus and turns into a boring trip through the Outback that seemed to pass by at a snail's pace.
The film begins in 1939 as the voice of a young boy begins introducing us to the story in broken English. The violence against the Aboriginal people is quickly realized as well as early introductions to our two main characters Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) and a man simply known as The Drover (Hugh Jackman). Why's he called The Drover? Because he is what he does… plain and simple. Sarah Ashley, however, is more than she initially appears to be as this stuffy aristocrat comes from London to Australia to confront her presumed-to-be-cheating husband at Faraway Downs, a remote outpost in Darwin, Australia.
Things change once Sarah arrives to find her husband has been murdered and the outpost is in ruin and damn near worthless as Aussie cattle baron King Carney (Bryan Brown) and his crony, the film's primary villain, Neil Fletcher (David Wenham) have run the land ragged and have been stealing their cattle. Sarah can either sell the land at a loss or try and work it herself; an option most would laugh at considering her refined nature and the dusty prerequisite for working such a savage land. The twist in the story arrives in the form of Nullah (Brandon Walters) a young half-white/half-Aboriginal child Sarah takes to mothering and with the help of The Drover believes the land is salvageable.
From this point, the film becomes a story of the love between Sarah, The Drover and Nullah as they form a strange family unit. Their story combines with the territorial war against Fletcher as he hungers for power and Carney's place as king of the land all while the battle of race relations and search for one's inner self acts as the film's thread line. All this plays while the threat of World War II is in the background and ultimately serving as the film's climax. Epic is an understatement, but with so many hats in the air none of them are able to be caught as the story gets caught up in the middle ground and only to try and find its legs in its multiple climactic moments when I was already too weary to care.
Scenes between Lady Ashley and The Drover are never interesting until the final moments when a problem is either reconciled or expanded upon. Their love is realized in the smaller more personal aspects of the film, once the grand scope of Baz's vision is stripped away and he remembers this is a story and not a visual exercise. Luhrmann got a lot out of both Kidman and Jackman when the script asked for it, but unfortunately it doesn't ask often enough as the majority of the film is so uninteresting you can almost feel the seconds tick away.
A lot of praise has been shouldered onto young Brandon Walters and I am not sure why exactly. As a first time actor he does just fine, but nothing to warrant anything more than a pat on the back and a "Good job" at the end of the day. The Nullah character is so cliché and contrived there is no heart left. The only emotion comes when the downright laughable villain, Fletcher, continues to refer to Nullah as a "Creamy" over, and over, and over, and over again with a snarl in his voice as he mimics the character he played in Zack Snyder's 300 with deft efficiency. Fletcher is a character so empty and so sickly laughable it hurts to watch him on screen. I kept hoping a stray boomerang would end his involvement in the film as each scene he is in only gets worse and worse. Meanwhile you have Nullah running around screaming at Sarah Ashley yelling, "Ms. Boss, Ms. Boss, Ms. Boss!" If Luhrmann had a point here I wish he would have included it in subtitles as he explains the film's true intentions just before the credits roll because the non-stop pandering was insufferable.
The only place to find any enjoyment in this film is to take in its beauty, but that is to be expected with anything involving Luhrmann. However, if you are to do that it will take you even further out of the film as CG set pieces and attention to detail make the film feel as artificial as it actually is. Beautiful? Yes, but not without distraction.
I can't help but feel bad not liking this film knowing how important it is to Luhrmann and how much he loves his native land, but to take any pity on the film for those reasons would be a lie. Australia is a mess of a picture with hardly a handful of entertaining scenes. It's billed as a love story, but you will soon realize the love story isn't even really the film's true intention and on top of that it isn't even all that romantic as much as it is obvious. In the end I took nothing away from this film, but I am sure it would make a decent picture book.
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