Australia

Australia is epic only in length.  It has all the proper ingredients for an epic of the Gone With the Wind variety, including a romance between members of conflicting social classes, a ranch, cattle, grand sweeping vistas of an untarnished frontier, racial tension, and a war that just had to come along and ruin everything.  What it lacks is a sense of place, a sense of being in that place, and a sense of emotion for that place.  It feels like an ad campaign for itself, like the director cobbled together some actors and filmed them in front of a green screen acting out scenes from a movie he needed financing for.

Baz Lurhmann recently defended the film's $130 million budget, but I, for one, don't see where all the money went.  You have your two big stars, Jackman and Kidman, and that must have cost a pretty penny, but the rest must have went to the special effects houses, because it certainly didn't go into set pieces - they all seem computer generated.  I never felt like I was really there.  They could have shot this whole movie in California.  They didn't, but they could have.

The film is about a rich British woman (played by Kidman) whose husband owns a bunch of land and cattle out in Australia.  Her husband turns up dead, murdered, so she has to go out to this godforsaken dirty dusty sprawling country and take care of business.  It's a given that when she gets off the plane, she's dressed to the nines and carrying a parasol as if it were about to rain.  It's a given that by the time she gets to her land, she's covered in dirt.

Jackman plays a man they call the Drover.  He was hired by her husband to wrangle the cattle, and now he just wants to move on to his next job.  He gets in a bar fight in the first five minutes and beats up everyone just like Indiana Jones.  He takes his shirt off by the end of the first reel.

Any film with cattle in it has to have a cattle baron, and this film has two.  One is played by Bryan Brown (who I haven't seen since Cocktail), and the other is played by David Wenham (who is suitably creepy, and steals the show).  You can almost guess what happens next.  They try to kick her off the land, Jackman steps in, and then Kidman tries to learn how to run a ranch herself, and gets dirt all over her face all the time.  But if you have cattle and a man named Drover, then you must at some point have a cattle drive, and that is Australia's first big set piece. 

 

Oh yeah, I almost forgot!  There are aborigines in this movie just like there were in Crocodile Dundee II and Walkabout, and just like there were in The Proposition.  Aborigines are to Australian movies what Native Americans are to American movies.  They are always wise, they can teleport and come back from the dead, they always appear emaciated and with a thousand wrinkles on their faces, they have long hair and brooding eyes, they smoke from wooden pipes, they cast spells, they make campfires, and they always appear at the end silhouetted against the setting sun.

The film presents a subtle social message about how aborigines were treated as slaves and were not recognized with equal citizenship until just recently.  One of its main characters is an orphan boy of mixed aboriginal and white heritage who is cared for by Kidman and Jackman.  Of course, the boy is cute as a button, and of course he gets himself into all kinds of trouble and gets kidnapped and rescued and has things explode all around him so you and Kidman and Jackman can think he is dead before he pops up and smiles with his perfect white teeth and his big doll eyes, and you and Kidman and Jackman can cheer and wrap him up in your arms and know with a certainty that everything's going to be all right.

Now back to that set piece!

But first let me just say that I was really looking forward to this film.  It's not often I get to see a big three hour epic that is invested in all sorts of things like cattle and war and planes dropping bombs and two people of differing social distinction falling into each others' arms.  I eat this stuff up when it's done right, and when I sensed the presence of a cattle drive just over the next hill, I got all antsy in my seat.  I thought about that $130 million price tag, and I thought, you sure could get a lot of cattle for $130 million.  Then I thought, holy crikey, Lurhmann must have had all of Australia to shoot in - this is going to be something!

Alas, I was disappointed.  The cattle drive looks like it was shot on the back lot.  The cattle are mostly digital, and the actors are composited into the grand sweeping vistas.  Some of the effects are so fake, I thought it must be a parody.  You can see halos around the bodies of the actors and they're just sort of acting like they're riding horses.  Hell, they might as well be on those buck 'em broncos they've got in sports bars.

For $130 million, I wanted to see a thousand head of cattle roaming the outback and the two biggest Australian actors in the world at least trotting alongside them on real horses for more than five seconds.  They don't have to actually steer the cattle if they don't want to, but Lurhmann could have tried a little harder to convince me they were more than ten feet away from their cozy comfortable trailer with its air conditioning and bottled water.

The second big set piece is also a disappointment.  It doesn't come until about reel eight - that's about two hours into the movie.  It's when Japan bombs the northern section of Australia.  Just so happens that's where the little aboriginal boy is.  He's being held captive on an island with a bunch of other aboriginal boys where there's a big radio tower.  If I heard correctly, they were being held there because they knew the Japanese would bomb it, and then they would have less aboriginal orphans to worry about.

Anyway, of course Kidman volunteers to be a nurse, but it's not so much that she volunteered to be a nurse as Lurhmann has her in a nurse's uniform already when the bombs start to drop - there's no pretext for it, there's no set up for it, and there's nothing in Kidman's character to suggest she would do such a thing, but our epic heroine has to be an epic heroine, and that means she has to be a nurse!

Now, if our heroine is a nurse, that must mean our hero, Jackman, is running around as some sort of free agent soldier with a carbine rifle shooting the Japanese that have managed to land their planes and are stalking around shooting his mates.

All of this stuff belongs in this picture, and Lurhmann knows it.  What I'm surprised about is that this has been a passion project of his for so many years, and yet the screenplay seems forced and rushed and without any scholarship behind it.  It's as if his research stopped when he discovered the Japanese bombed Australia and that aborigines were mistreated.  Lurhmann does not seem invested in the history or the characters or the continent the picture is named after, and as a result, Kidman and Jackman come off rather flat and uninvolved, and entire sequences passed before my eyes without drawing me in.

Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor film is like a documentary compared to this.  And it's a hell of a lot more epic.  And it sucked.  Australia is one of the big disappointments of the year.