AUSTRALIA: BazLuhrmann's epic is a definitive example of style over substance, writes Michael Dwyer
Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Brandon Walters, David Wenham, Bryan Brown, Jack Thompson, David Gulpilil, Ben Mendelsohn
12A cert, gen release, 165 min **
A GIFTED film-maker steeped in cinema history and with a vibrant flair for the medium and no lack of ambition, Baz Luhrmann could have spent the rest of his career mounting further highly theatrical productions after his exhilarating "Red Curtain" trilogy of Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Julietand Moulin Rouge. Instead, he set himself the daunting new challenge of exploring his country's history in the modestly titled epic, Australia.
The saga begins in 1939, when a prim, uptight English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman) travels to join her husband at his cattle station in the Northern Territory. A stranger in a strange land, she arrives to find he has been murdered and that she has inherited his property and 1,500 head of cattle.
When her land is the subject of a takeover plot, she reluctantly teams up with a macho drover (Hugh Jackman). Together they embark on a hazardous cross-country cattle drive to Darwin, reaching the city when it is about to be bombed by the Japanese forces that attacked Pearl Harbour. And she finds a surrogate son in Nullah (Brandon Walters), an Aboriginal-Caucasian orphan.
That is the essence of the slender, conventional narrative - which somehow took the work of four writers - and Luhrmann unwisely stretches it across almost three hours of screen time. The movie is a definitive example of style over substance, and while style comes as naturally to Luhrmann as waking or sleeping, it cannot compensate for the ennui engendered by the tale's sheer predictability.
It's at its most unpromising at the outset as the mannered Kidman establishes her character with all the irritating exaggeration of a pantomime dame. A contrived bar-room brawl scene registers as a misguided homage to John Ford westerns. And the movie is saddled with young Nullah's voiceover commentary, which is entirely superfluous to anyone with the gift of sight.
In his liberal idealisation of the Aboriginals, their culture and alleged mystical powers, Luhrmann verges on patronising. In addressing the scandal of the "stolen generations" of mixed-race children, his film is less incisive than Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence.
And Australiais pointlessly laden with movie references, most archly and repetitively to The Wizard of Oz,that emphasise its aura of déjà vu.
It helps significantly that Jackman invests his salt-of-the-earth drover with an engaging personality and a rough-hewn credibility, and that newcomer Walters is such a charmer as Nullah. Meticulous attention to detail is evident throughout in the striking production design and costumes of Catherine Martin. Australia's vast natural landscapes are handsomely captured in often breathtaking compositions, which are gorgeously lit in burnished tones by cinematographer Mandy Walker.
