'Australia'
MOVIE REVIEW
Baz Luhrmann's epic is ambitious. Maybe overly so.
"Australia" is a double feature all by itself, a film that comes with its own built-in sequel. At 2 hours, 35 minutes, it has room for both a cattle drive movie and a war movie, with a romantic drama thrown into the mix to tie both parts together. With a story this expansive, it's no wonder they named it after a continent.
Yes, this is filmmaking in the old-fashioned epic style but only up to a point. When director and co-writer Baz Luhrmann says, "This film's DNA comes from the same stock as 'Gone With the Wind,' 'Lawrence of Arabia' and 'Giant,' but it has its own point of view," he's putting it mildly.
For, more than anything, "Australia" is a postmodern blockbuster filtered through the very particular sensibility of Luhrmann, whose last film was the dizzying "Moulin Rouge!" A lover of artifice and excess who has little use for the old-school naturalism of previous epics, Luhrmann brings an unapologetically over-the-top and operatic aesthetic to the table.
The director also wanted to make a deeply and self-consciously Australian film, to bend the norms of Hollywood filmmaking to the task of telling the story of his own country, his own way.
Luhrmann has not only cast Australian stars Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman as his leads, he's also used locally iconic actors Bryan Brown and Jack Thompson in key roles, and given one to Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil, who starred in Nicolas Roeg's "Walkabout" nearly 40 years ago and here plays a tribal wizard named King George who can manipulate time and space.
Nod to Aborigines adds integrity
"Australia," in fact, ends up paying major attention to Aboriginal rituals and culture in general and in particular to the plight of the Stolen Generations, the mixed-race and Aboriginal children who were removed from their families and raised in deracinated mission schools (as depicted in Phillip Noyce's "Rabbit-Proof Fence"). This adroit tipping of the hat to another culture may sound like politically correct window dressing, but it actually gives "Australia" much of its integrity.
Keeping all these balls in the air is not easy, and, working from a script he co-wrote with a tag-team of writers (Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan), director Luhrmann doesn't always succeed.
Too much is sometimes just too much, no matter what the philosophical underpinnings. But if you are willing to take the plunge and view things through Luhrmann's prism, "Australia" does deliver the classic dramatic and romantic satisfactions its ambitious advertising campaign promises.
