Baz Luhrmann's Australia - Epic or Turkey?
A Review of Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman's New Blockbuster Movie
Dec 19, 2008
Australia, the recently released epic starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, is a remarkable disappointment which fails to capitalise on Australia's great natural beauty and multi-faceted story providing a movie populated largely by caricatures and a distorted history of the Northern Territories.
Heavily supported by the Australian government, the price for which is the inclusion of a plot-line referencing the 'stolen generation', the film must surely have disappointed its paymasters, being unlikely to draw visitors down-under.
The Plot of Australia
The film begins with the death of Lord Ashley and the concurrent arrival from England of a rather po-faced Lady Ashley (played by Nicole Kidman) who plans to sell-up the vast cattle station in which her husband has invested. Hugh Jackman's character, known enigmatically as 'Drover' or sometimes more formally as 'The Drover', has been hired to transport Lady Ashley from the port of Darwin to the cattle station. As they travel in a typical pre-war outback wagon overloaded with luggage and people, we discover that Drover has two main characteristics. First, he is an independent contractor who works directly for no man (or woman) and, second, he was previously married to an Aboriginal woman who died and whose brother he now works with. For this second characteristic, he is largely shunned by mainstream white society.
The journey to the cattle station is where the caricatures first become firmly established, although they have already been suggested in the movie's earlier moments. Kidman in particular seems to run the gamut of two emotions, straight-faced lack of humour and open-eyed astonishment, and seems incapable of producing a more rounded character. Sitting on top of the truck is Drover's wife's brother and inside, alongside Drover and Lady Ashley, is an amiable drunk who will eventually find salvation from the bottle on a long cattle drive that would not have been out of place in 1960’s TV’s Rawhide, which dealt with these matters in a much more realistic manner.
The story of Kidman and Jackman's inevitable blossoming romance is set against the backdrop of the beginning of Australia's war with Japan during the Second World War, and alongside the story of Nullah (played by 13 year old Brandon Walters). Nullah is a mixed race Aboriginal boy who lives with his mother on the cattle ranch and who regularly resorts to hiding in the station's water tower to escape the attentions of the local police who want to remove him under the hated policy of Aboriginal removal.
Other characters who meander through this disappointing film include King George (played by David Gulpilil), grandfather to the ever-so-cute Nullah, who appears from time to time to cast his magic spell (seemingly inherited by Nullah) on cattle or other elements of nature, and the inevitable evil 'cattle baron', eventually murdered by his even more evil son. Once again, the caricatured nature of these parts must have been written into the script and direction because all the actors cannot be that bad.
Australia the film comes to its climax in an event which didn't actually happen, the invasion of an island just north of Darwin following the Japanese bombing of the city (which did happen). This has the added benefit of allowing one character to die an heroic death and of bringing the movie to one of those tidy conclusions much loved by directors.
Will Australia Do Well at the Box Office?
Australia will doubtless do quite well at the box office. Australians will watch it out of curiosity. Americans and audiences in the UK will be drawn by Kidman and Jackman, and Jackman's recent appointment as host of the 2009 Oscars will do the film no harm.
Provided those watching accept it as a piece of gung-ho hokum which is not to taken seriously, and enjoy the magnificent Australian scenery which could have been exploited much more in a film that is an official part of the Australian tourism promotion effort, they will come to no harm. It whiles away a little less than 3 hours in a relatively harmless way. The danger in Australia (as in other historically-set films such as Braveheart) is that audiences will take its myth-making as history and its flaws will enter the public consciousness as fact. The discerning viewer will come to no harm. The less-discerning is in rather more danger.
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