Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
11/30/08
Confession: trying
to prepare for the 2002 Oscar ceremony, I rented Baz Luhrmann's widely
praised box office hit Moulin Rouge!. I shut off the tape
after roughly 20 minutes, so tortured by the movie's utter self-amusement
and seeming intent to trigger an epileptic seizure in all susceptible viewers
that I could bear no more (it ranks alongside the 1994 bomb Radioland
Murders as the only two films I've ever rented but been unable to bring
myself to finish). I had no interest in checking out Luhrmann's two
earlier films (William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and Strictly
Ballroom, also both well regarded) and on the basis of his long-gestating
Moulin follow-up Australia, I feel safe in concluding the
the Australian auteur is very, very far from my cup of tea. A stylistically
ambitious but seemingly pointless and definitely painful attempt to create
a late-30's-style Hollywood epic about his home country's shameful racial
past and entry into World War 2, Australia manages to capture all
the weaknesses of Gone With the Wind-era Hollywood filmmaking and
none of its' strengths. The next time someone tells me they don't
make 'em like they used to, I'll point to Australia and say there
are some pretty good reasons for that.
British Lady Sarah Ashley
(Nicole Kidman) has tired of her husband's dispatches about his plans to
establish a cattle ranch in faraway Australia and flies there herself to
get a first-hand look. But upon her arrival, she finds him dead,
said to have been murdered by an Aborigine called King George (David Gulpilil).
She also finds that the ranch, called Faraway Downs, has been utterly sabotaged
by sinister hand Neil Fletcher (David Wenham), who's really a double agent
for King Carney (Bryan Brown). If he could purchase Faraway Downs,
Carney would control all of Australia's cattle trade and be able to force
sky-high prices upon a military that's been holding out hope Lord Ashley
could drive his cattle to Perth in time to win the contract instead.
So it falls to Lady Ashley to try to make that drive (excuse me, we're
in Australia, where it's called a Drove), and she needs an experienced
Drover to lead it. Who better than The Drover (Hugh Jackman), the
ever so manly Drover who had originally planned to drove this Drove before
Fletcher and his men left him with no men. But, hey, anybody can
drove cattle as long as they've got The Drover in charge, and so he, two
experienced hands he trusts, Lady Ashley, a drunken old accountant (Jack
Thompson) and some of the local Aborigines who work at Faraway Downs join
together to drove those cattle to market. Among them is Nullah (Brandon
Walters), whose mother was an Aborigine, whose father is Fletcher and whose
Grandfather is King George. He'll need Lady Ashley's protection,
because he's part of Australia's Stolen Generations, the Aborigine children
taken from their parents so they could be raised by white missionaries.
The story of the Stolen Generations,
previously spotlighted by 2002's Rabbit-Proof Fence, is a shocking
tale of that special brand of colonialism that Europeans tended to spread
to all their outposts, made all the more stunning by the fact that it continued
well into the 70's. I just spent about an hour reading up on it online
and I have to say that while Australia trots out most of the arguments
of the time, it does a staggeringly poor job of summoning any of the emotion.
In keeping with its' loving recreation of the style of late 30's Hollywood,
the ethnic characters are irritatingly one-dimensional and cutesy, and
Nullah comes across more like those cinematic Korean and Vietnamese orphans
who learned all their English from John Wayne movies. A thread that
has him marveling at The Wizard of Oz means well, and produces the
movie's one and only scene that feels genuinely heartfelt (Lady Ashley
tries to cheer the kid up by singing him "Over The Rainbow" but can't remember
all the words, a momentary flash of humanity in a movie where everyone
is an automaton), but man oh man does Luhrmann really expect me to be moved
when he dons blackface to be allowed into a theater showing it? Yeah,
Australia does feel like it emerged from 1939, but if it had been
made then and we watched it today, we'd deem it hopelessly stilted and
naïve and wonder what the audiences of the time saw in it. Granted,
I don't know any Aborigines personally, but I have to cling to the hope
that they're as interesting as individuals as anybody else and not a uni-mind
catalog of a half-dozen cultural traits (OK, so when an Aborigine dies,
you're never supposed to speak their name again, but does the movie have
to turn that fact into a joke through relentless melodramatic repetition?)
and wacky broken English.
Nullah's narration is utterly
painful, with its' horrible “he-ums got him to Miss Boss quick!” rhythm
and failure to ever do anything but carry us over the holes in the plot
(the movie feels like it wants to be at least twice as long as its' already
endless 155 minutes). But he's hardly alone: Jackman's Drover
cries out “Crikey!” with the regularity and conviction of a Talking Steve
Irwin doll, and Lady Ashley (who does spend most of the movie being called
“Miss Boss”) shrieks and wails at every aspect of Australian society like
every late 30's actress and no human being. And, my, does Luhrman
ever love the word “Drove” in all its' forms! I declared back in
January that In the Name of the King:
A Dungeon Siege Tale contained what would stand as the year's worst
dialog exchange when “Farmer's” son wondered aloud why his own father's
name was Farmer and, like, doesn't he have a last name or something?
Well, I thought back over that often as The Drover becomes a more and more
important part of Lady Ashley's life but she never once seems to even wonder
what his friggin name is. I guess Jason Statham was right when he
said a man should be called what he does, although that would probably
lead to lots of confusion around the office.
I have mentioned that the
movie's utterly endless, right? It actually seems to contain TWO
movies, with Australia 1 wrapping itself up in a neat, tidy bow
around the 90 minute mark only to have a whole new series of dilemmas pop
up as the projectionist seems to switch reels to Australia 2 and
World War 2 breaks out. Granted, the opening crawl informs us that
World War 2 has already reached Australia, but the movie doesn't catch
up to the events of its' own opening crawl until well into its' 2nd hour.
Australia 2 is even worse than Australia 1: the cattle
drive is diverting enough even though I couldn't invest in it emotionally,
but the WWII stuff is like all the worst parts of Pearl Harbor distilled
into the most stilted, melodramatic package possible (How will The Drover
get those kids out of Japanese clutches? Why, he'll Drove them, of
course!).
Australia looks great,
it shines and glows with color and the scale of the cattle drive (including
as effectively filmed a stampede as I've ever seen) and the aftermath of
the Japanese attack are quite impressive. But the movie is an empty,
heartless exercise in stilted re-enactment, not of historical events, but
of bygone filmmaking and acting styles. To judge the work of saintly
Kidman, manly yet sensitive Jackman, campy Brown and oily Wenham more or
less misses the point: they've been tasked to deliver what by the
standards of our day are bad performances (well, maybe not Brown, he's
doing the Claude Raines thing, and the supporting players in old Hollywood
movies always got the most recognizably human characters) and they have
done so admirably (well, maybe not Wenham, who didn't make enough of an
impression to stop me from asking myself, “He's the evil ranch hand guy,
right?” each time he appeared onscreen). But they do not surmount
the pre-Method acting style with huge star turns the way the finest pre-50's
stars did, instead content to simply shut off their emotions in favor of
“acting”.
Filmmakers and performers
often complain that critics don't point out when the audience members around
them were having a good time, and I don't feel like my Australia
review would be complete without pointing out that it went over quite well
in the theater full of mostly older moviegoers with whom I saw it.
There's clearly an audience for this sort of thing, I'm just not part of
it. If you are, bon appetite, Mate. |
