Review: Australia
SOFT CORN
Baz Luhrmann’s latest is a curiously subdued affair, but lovers of hokey Hollywood epics won’t be complaining.
JAN 4, 2008 - IN THE PRESENT DAY, AN ANACHRONISM LIKE AUSTRALIA
is the very definition of indefensible – except if, like me, you have a sweet tooth for all things past, especially gargantuan epics where the handsomeness of the production is surpassed only by the handsomeness of the protagonists. What Baz Luhrmann has attempted here is, at one level, wholly admirable. We’re at a slightly cynical age of the cinema where movie stars prefer to look like anything but movie stars. They mess up their perfect features with prosthetics – all for the sake of their craft (and perhaps an Oscar as well) – and this pursuit of imperfection often percolates down to the material itself.
The epics of today are weighted down by moral ambiguity, an unwholesome blurring of the lines between good and evil, along with deconstructionist impulses and an often novelistic approach to the interior worlds of the characters. Australia, on the other hand, harks back to pure cinema, pure spectacle. The point isn’t to delve deep but rather to smooth out the surface – there’s not a whiff of motivation here that’s not telegraphed miles of outback ahead.
The instant the dainty Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) sets foot in the rough-and-tumble continent of the film’s title, you know she will – with the assistance of the cattle-driving cowboy known only as the Drover (Hugh Jackman) – make the transition from delicate English rose to thorny frontierswoman. And you know she will return the favour by aiding his navigation from native savage to neutered family man. And you know she’s fooling no one – least of all herself (unless she’s never set eyes on a hokey Hollywood epic or ever read a steamy bodice ripper) – when she pretends to hate him at first. And you know he’s fooling no one when he pretends not to be attracted to this willowy creature who is, in every possible way, his antipode.
And you know how reptilian the villain truly is when he’s repeatedly identified by his crocodile-skin boots. He’s out to steal every square inch of Sarah’s sprawling ranch, which she’s inherited from a husband who’s murdered a few minutes into the film, and as if that weren’t evil enough, he’s – gasp! – a racist. The good Sarah, however, is catholic in her acceptance of all humankind, even the part-Aboriginal child she strikes up an unlikely maternal rapport with. (Brandon Walters skillfully imbues this youngster with the kind of saucer-eyed innocence that can wear down the defenses of the most hardened of moviegoers.)
And thus Australia plays out, as a deliciously campy pastiche of Giant (racism lessons amidst dry desert land) and Red River (cattle driving set against headstrong personal relationships) and Casablanca (the hero not wishing to be reminded of a tune he associates with a lost love) and all those scores of films that featured a grizzled old souse as comic sidekick. Even the farcical nature of the early sequences is reminiscent of the broad musical comedies of a certain vintage. (I’m thinking of the scene where Sarah bursts into raptures upon sighting, for the first time, a herd of kangaroos. The romantic vision is underscored by music that’s equally flighty, until a gunshot erupts. A second later, a horrified Sarah is treated to the sight of her first kangaroo carcass.)
The wonderful Jackman gives his scenes every molecule of his being, as if he believed every ridiculous minute of what he’s putting himself through, and Kidman is equally game, fluttery and frantic as though doing everything in her power to distract our attention from that heaving bosom. (Her highlight is a very funny moment, bordering on burlesque, where she attempts to sing Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz. Unable to recall either the words or the tune, she wings the rest of it most amusingly.)
But after a while, the tone changes. Australia becomes more serious and sentimental, in ways this cheerfully trashy material cannot hope to be shaped into. Where something like Gone With the Wind – a similar conflation of wartime hysteria and weepy romance – was truly resonant with emotion, thanks largely to the superbly written characters, the big epiphanies here don’t feel earned. They are mechanical contrivances, wound up like clockwork and left to detonate at precise intervals – and they don’t quite make the transition from screenplay to screen.
Part of the problem may be that Luhrmann’s telling of this story is disquietingly straight. There’s no nutty auteurist conceit behind it – as there was in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge – and his energies are uncharacteristically subdued. Late into the film, there’s the moment we’ve been waiting for, when Sarah is at a snooty ball and, after casually tossing aside her invitation, the Drover makes a dramatic entry. For the first time, we see them as movie stars – not the scruffy, artfully dusted up movie stars who were traipsing about the outback, but the cleaned-up kind who rightfully belong atop mile-high billboards. (He’s even had himself a shave, all the better to show off that dazzling smile.)
The crowd around them parts like the Red Sea in front of Moses, the orchestra strikes up Cole Porter’s sweepingly romantic Begin the Beguine, and they melt into one another’s arms and begin to dance. But Luhrmann isn’t interested in keeping them the sole focus of his attention, the way he was when he staged the marvellous sequence in Moulin Rouge where Ewan McGregor serenades Nicole Kidman with Elton John’s Your Song. There, Luhrmann had eyes for no one else; here his eyes are on everyone else, on the secondary dynamics of those milling around the leads. We’d expected the bodice to be ripped, and instead, we see it being undone cautiously, button by beady button.
A rescue operation towards the end, after the Japanese invade Australia, is similarly shorn of thrill and suspense. The sequence is so flat, you come dangerously close to not caring who lives and who dies. But the full-out final stretch atones for a lot of the earlier sins. The music soars without an iota of restraint or shame, and there are enough teary reunions to pad out the climaxes of three smaller films – and if you don’t have a lump in your throat by this point, it’s either because you’ve got a heart of stone or a great deal of gritty moral fibre. For the rest of us, as we leave the theatre, it’s with a smile and a fair amount of sheepishness at being seduced by some of the shallower blandishments of the cinema.
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