Baz
Luhrmann deserves credit for being daring—and for upping the dare with
each movie. After 1992's affable Strictly Ballroom, he made a version of Romeo
And Juliet
that the MTV generation had been unwittingly conditioned to embrace, then
returned with Moulin Rouge!, which put 19th-century melodrama, 20th-century
music, broad comedy, and high tragedy into a supercollider that could just as
easily have produced a black hole as the resulting transcendent fusion.
Luhrmann traffics in theatrical artifice but still finds room for overwhelming
emotion, a delicate balancing act that never finds footing in the historical
epic Australia.
It might be the genre itself that defeated him: Epics demand a you-are-there
immediacy, but Luhrmann's at his best when working one step away from reality.
And while there are gestures in that direction here, he mostly lets the sweep
of history drag his characters behind it, kicking up a lot of sand without
moving the earth.
Still,
points for daring: Set in the years leading up to Japan's bombing of the
Northern Territory city of Darwin, Luhrmann's film attempts to squeeze issues
at the core of Australian identity into a storybook framework. A boy named
Nullah (Brandon Walters), whose mixed racial heritage makes him vulnerable to
forcible government removal under the Aboriginal Protection Act, serves as the
narrator, recounting the tale of Faraway Downs, a cattle ranch that's the lone
holdout against the area's resident baron (Bryan Brown). After Faraway Downs'
owner dies under mysterious circumstances, his regal English wife (Nicole
Kidman) arrives to assume control, receiving a crash course in the ways of the
country courtesy of a man known only as Drover (Hugh Jackman).
With
the title acting as an imperative to tell a story that helps defines his home,
Luhrmann possesses ambition as huge as the film's open country, but after a
rough-and-tumble comedic opening, little directorial vision beyond his
trademark frenetic pace remains. Even that feels out of place. Australia hurries to get nowhere,
finding and losing momentum amidst the jutting cliffs and endless plains. Only
one sequence, a long cattle drive through harsh terrain, works on its own
terms. The rest alternates earnest grappling with Australia's troubled racial
history, half-earned mysticism, and a surprisingly perfunctory romance between
Jackman—charming as an Outback-sculpted man in his element—and
Kidman, who never quite loses the cartoon Katharine Hepburn veneer of her
character's first appearance. It almost goes without saying that the film looks
gorgeous, but the filmmaking behind it feels unsure how to work on this grand a
scale. Australia is
big. But it never fills the screen.