They come from the Land Down Under

Australia
Review by Nathan Weinbender

Baz Luhrmann’s “Australia” wants very much to be a great film, which may be the reason it never attains greatness. But it is a good film, one that sets out to be an everlasting love story and ends up being an old-fashioned diversion with ambitions that exceed its grasp.

The movie fondly remembers a time when Hollywood specialized in grand, sweeping epics, when Cecil B. DeMille and David Lean were kings, when a movie’s budget was just as important to an audience as its stars, when the best films were the ones that required an intermission.

“Australia” certainly has star power (Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman), it certainly has breadth (it lasts nearly three hours), and it certainly had no budgetary constraints (it cost $130 million to make). But it’s also certainly not a legitimate epic, nor is it a film that’s destined to be a classic, which is obviously what it strives to be.

The story begins in 1939 during World War II, as Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman), a haughty British aristocrat, travels to her late husband’s cattle ranch, called Faraway Downs, only to find him dead. The tract of land where the ranch is located in the only piece of Australia not owned by the deviant King Carney (Bryan Brown), who is stealing herds of cattle off of the Ashley’s property.

Jackman plays a hunky cattle drover who agrees to help Lady Ashley lead cattle across the desert to Carney’s territory. They bring along a precocious Aboriginal boy (Brandon Walters), whose grandfather is a mysterious magic man (David Gulpilil) who has been accused of killing Ashley’s husband. He’s also a convenient deus ex machina whenever the script hits a dead end.

It’s obligatory that Kidman and Jackman will fall in love, which is fine in theory. But the romance in “Australia” feels phony, especially considering how quickly the Lady Ashley character recovers from her husband’s untimely death. The actors have chemistry, but their relationship is thinly written.

“Australia” could have ended there, as a pleasant little film about a cattle drive, but Luhrmann takes the script in another direction. The latter half of the film concerns the Japanese bombing of Darwin and the “Stolen Generation” of Aboriginal children, and the juxtaposition of serious historical melodrama with the gee-whiz charm of the movie’s beginning sequences is jarring.

Perhaps I’m being too stingy. I enjoyed the movie to a point, and I admired its intentions, no matter how conventional. And I was completely captivated by the look of the film—I sat in the very front row of the theater, the screen towering over me, and let the images wash over me. If nothing else, this is a gorgeous movie.

Yet Luhrmann, who hasn’t made a film since “Moulin Rouge” in 2001, wants “Australia” to be an epic, and it simply isn’t. It’s missing the humanity, the grandeur, the importance of a picture like “Gone with the Wind.”

With all of the fires, explosions, stampedes and daring escapes in this movie, do you know what the most captivating moment is? A character goes to see “The Wizard of Oz,” and we’re reminded of how magical a film can be. It’s unfortunate that “Australia” doesn’t reach the same levels of enchantment.

Grade: B-

Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Written by Stuart Beattie, Luhrmann, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan. Starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, Brandon Walters, Bryan Brown, David Gulpilil, Jack Thompson and Ben Mendelsohn. PG-13; 165m.