‘Australia’: Outback odyssey a chore to sit through
"Australia" is the best 1958 movie that is likely to be made and released in 2008. The trouble is that 1958 movies were better made and seen in 1958. I’m not talking about classics or about black and white “B” beauties that were made in 1958 and are still wonders to behold today. I’m talking about the epic, sentimental, late-’50s romantic slush like “Inn of the Sixth Happiness” or “The Nun’s Story,” which depended on a tightly constricted world of race and gender and not the racially reconfigured world we live in.
AUSTRALIA
Two and a half stars (Out of four)
Rated: PG-13
Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman star in Baz Luhrmann’s epic about an English widow who drives cattle across Australia, falls in love and adopts a long-haired aborigine boy. Opening today in area theaters.
I’m not saying you may not mist up at the end of “Australia,” but a good part of that is likely to be that you’re so happy to be out of there and no longer held prisoner by a badly written cinematic course in Australian history. (The other part of your mist will come from a comfortable resolution to a plot endangering small children. There’s nothing like dangling a little urchin over the pits of oblivion for 45 minutes to keep you attentive.)
When I say that 2008 “Australia” is like a big, dumb 1958 epic in bad goopy technicolor, what I’m saying is that it aspires to have the impact of the greatest movie of 1939, which is when “Australia” is set. And that movie, of course, was “Gone With The Wind,” a genuine epic full of female feistiness, socially unacceptable manliness (and ostentatious wealth) and racial stereotypes which are utterly nauseating to watch in our era (sorry, I just can’t sit through GWTW anymore. The minute slaves fan the slumbering white debutantes after lunch, I want to hear the sounds of revolution in the streets).
“Australia” is no “Gone With the Wind” from down under. In fact, it’s four movies smashed awkwardly together and called an “epic,” which requires two hours and 40 minutes to sit through. Think of the first movie as imitation “Giant” about an aristocratic woman in a rough-hewn society. Which is then smashed against a big Westernstyle cattle drive against hostile landscape (“Red River”) featuring a bunch of ragtag cowboys led by beauteous Lady Ashley (“not a bad-looking sheila” say the locals, with some understatement, about Nicole Kidman) and the mysterious Drover (“no man hires me, no man fires me.”)
Which is then smashed against a dusty love story and racial melodrama about the plight of half-caste and aborigine children in Australian social and wartime upheaval.
Which is then given a “Pearl Harbor” finale so that we don’t forget that the Japanese were out there waiting to bomb Darwin. To say that part is the most convincing in the movie is also to say that it’s still not up to the standard set by Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay’s “Pearl Harbor” (which at least had great special effects.)
How Australian is this thing? You don’t get more down under than this.
Lady Ashley is played by Kidman in an act of career chauvinism that’s of a piece with a lot of her cockamamie career decisions these days (remember her awful Diane Arbus movie “Fur” never even opened wide.) The Drover, who does a lot of shirtless soakings with the nearest water bucket, is played by Hugh “People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive” Jackman, the Aussie bloke of the moment.
It’s distributed by 20th Century Fox, which is owned by Aussie monster mega mogul Rupert Murdoch and the director/ co-writer is Baz Luhrmann, the Aussie who previously made the extraordinary “Moulin Rouge” with Kidman.
He also made “Strictly Ballroom.”
What, you ask, is a musical director doing making a nationalist action epic?
Heck of a good question, I say. Especially when the big plot point turns on that other Victor Fleming classic from 1939, “The Wizard of Oz,” whose most famous song “Over the Rainbow” is played dramatically and often on the harmonica. (An intrinsically hilarious idea for some outrageous camp theater troupe somewhere: mixing “Gone With the Wind” with “The Wizard of Oz.” How about Rhett and Scarlett flee Atlanta while Munchkins sing “We’re Off To See the Wizard?”)
Luhrmann co-wrote it and there really isn’t a decent uncliched line of dialogue in the entire movie. “I mix with dingos, not duchesses,” says the rough-hewn Drover to Lady Ashley — which ought to be followed by Hugh Jackman flinging his arms straight out at a 90-degree John Raitt angle and singing some truly godawful Oscar Hammerstein self-proclamation.
How about this for a song cue: “You don’t got love in your heart, you got nothing.”
The trouble is, sans songs, they’re just dramatic scenes of decidedly erratic effect. The action scenes are just as spotty.
Some of it is acceptable, much of it is, frankly, bad. For a movie that cost so much (“Australia’s most expensive” it’s said), it isn’t photographed well and it has so many big dramatic climaxes that you may want to vote after each one, “Dancing with the Stars” style, on which cast members should be allowed to continue.
Thirteen-year-old Brandon Walters couldn’t be cuter as half-caste boy Nullah, but the dialogue written for him is so full of cutesy Australian bush patois that you may want to vote him off the island in the first hour.
Or ditch the whole overblown, underwritten movie.
Here is one outlay of Thanksgiving cinema that cries out for the fast forward button.
Pass the stuffing. Turkey anyone?
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