Baz Luhrmann (2008)
The title suggests a national epic; the visual scale and length of the film (165 minutes) endorse the sense of ambition; I decided that life was too short and left after an hour. Baz Luhrmann doesn’t have the temperament for this kind of storytelling. I loathed the overactive camera movement and editing of Moulin Rouge! but at least Luhrmann was able to communicate his passion for theatrical dazzle. Australia has been in gestation for several years and it’s a pity Luhrmann couldn’t develop a more imaginatively structured script that might have married with his hyperkinetic approach. He wrote the screenplay himself (although there are writing credits too for Stewart Beattie, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan) and the first hour anyway seems thoroughly conventional, not to say old-fashioned. From the word go, Luhrmann is impatient to cut to the chase. He spends the first ten minutes or so switching between different characters, in various locations, who spout explanatory, scene-setting dialogue that the director clearly wants out of the way as quickly as possible. I’ve no problem in principle with subverting the expected narrative rhythm of this sort of material (strange as it may seem to do this when it’s your own script) but the result is both deplorably scrappy as sentimental drama and visually incoherent. Some of the pirouetting camera movements and God’s-eye views have nothing to do with the emotional meaning of the action down below.
Luhrmann’s muse Nicole Kidman is the bossy English aristocrat, Lady Sarah Ashley, who travels to Australia in 1939 to Faraway Downs, a cattle station owned by her husband (I wasn’t sure when he’d been murdered but it was shortly after the action was underway, if not before). Faraway Downs is the only cattle station in the Northern Territory not owned by the cattle baron ‘King’ Carney (Bryan Brown). Lady Ashley reluctantly joins forces with an independent cattle drover (Hugh Jackman) – a new man with no name: he’s simply known as ‘Drover’ – to thwart a plot by Carney and his baddie henchmen to take the land. Eventually (in 1942 and after I’d left the cinema), they face the bombing of Darwin by Japanese forces. There’s also a strong Aboriginal element in the story. The opening credits tell us about the ‘stolen generations’ of Aborigine children (removed from their families by Australian national and state government agencies). The childless Lady Ashley’s relationship with a young Aborigine boy Nullah (Brandon Walters) is central to the story and David Gulpilil plays ‘King George’, an Aboriginal elder with magical powers.
Most of what I saw came across as a kind of rip-off of Out of Africa played at Keystone Cops speed (and with acting in the smaller parts to match). Nicole Kidman’s interpretation of Lady Ashley is, in the early stages, almost comically shallow and broad. I think I started to be more sympathetic towards her only because I felt sorry for the actress having to undergo obligatory scenes of a woman-who’s-too-smart-for-her-own-good fetching up in a man’s world and finding it quickly beyond her control. (When she arrives, Lady Ashley’s suitcases fly open and her lingerie is handed around among the brawling clientele of a desert bar. She indulges in overdone exclamations of enraptured delight at kangaroos jumping along beside Drover’s truck – until the Aborigines on board shoot one of the animals.) Perhaps because she seems to have approached the role as a caricature, Kidman actually has more characterisation than she had in, say, Cold Mountain or The Golden Compass but it’s still beyond me why she’s reckoned to be a major actress. She seems to be gathering a good deal of praise for the scene in which she awkwardly tries to sing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ to Nullah, which I found practised and false. Hugh Jackman (whom I’d not seen before) looks, with his comically overdeveloped musculature, a cartoon Aussie beaut, which fits all too obviously with the conception of Drover. Kidman’s doing a funny voice has a weirdly infectious effect so that, in the early stages, I had the sense that Jackman too was putting on an accent. I got to like him more as the hour wore on – narrowing his eyes to register emotion is a predictable device but there’s an intelligence behind the eyes. Having Jackman in this role is, nevertheless, unimaginative casting (particularly if Wikipedia is to be believed that Russell Crowe and Heath Ledger were being lined up for the part of Drover at earlier stages of the film’s development).
After the spectacle of the cattle stampede, which brings about the death of the alcohol-sodden station master Kipling Flynn (Jack Thompson), Lady Ashley, Drover and Nullah drink a toast in Flynn’s memory – with an Asian-looking man whose presence in the team I couldn’t fathom. Drover downs his rum effortlessly; Lady Ashley splutters on hers, as does the Asian (she’s a woman and he’s a foreigner, after all). They both then hold out their glasses for more. Cut to a kangaroo inspecting an empty rum bottle. Then an inebriated Lady Ashley asks Drover to dance; and, of course, because he’s a he-man, he’s embarrassed and has two left feet. It was at this point that I gave up and took my leave. It’s seven years since Moulin Rouge! was released. Baz Luhrmann has subsequently directed in the theatre but his only other work for the screen since 2001 seems to have been the famous commercial for Chanel No 5 (with Kidman). Australia is only his fourth cinema feature during the last 16 years. Although I thought it was overdone, I could see why Strictly Ballroom, his debut (in 1992), was such a hit. His Romeo + Juliet was a clever and inventive take not only on the original material but on elements of West Side Story. Moulin Rouge!, although its frenetic, fragmented style deprived the audience of some of the pleasures of a good screen musical, took the genre in a potentially new direction by using a virtually jukebox selection of songs for the score. Australia has clearly been a labour of love for Luhrmann. It’s to be hoped that he’s now got it out of his system and will return to making films which give him more scope for expressing himself.
29 December 2008
