February 2, 2009: Australia
Uh oh. Here’s another review which threatens to keep me stalled for weeks even as I push to bring myself back up to date so that I can review movies within a month or so of actually watching them. I had mixed expectations going into Australia, being generally a fan of director Baz Lurhmann and Hugh Jackman, but not so much a fan of Nicole Kidman and historical epics. In the end, despite being overlong, Australia was loopy enough for me to be impressed after I saw it, although I can’t say that I’m keen to sit through it again. This is one of those movies that makes me wonder how a director and editor can possibly go into the “office” every day in post-production, needing to watch and recut scenes over and over and over again.
I think one of the key points was that I warmed up to Nicole Kidman. She was a bit tough to take in the first hour, but “lucky” for me, there was plenty more movie left after that. I lost count of the near-endings, which to be fair, almost did make sense in the flow of the story. However, some of the major subplots could have been cut, which would have conveniently removed one or two near-endings, and it would have been a half-hour earlier when the major villain finally met his end by being impaled on a fencepost or whatever horribly overdramatic thing it was that happened in order to emphasize how very evil he really was. This pacing is the core weakness of Australia, since the first 2 hours breezed by for me (although again, not in a way that makes me want to rush out and see it again), and the way things wrap up at the first fake ending much more closely match the way I expect the real world works. In the real world, the evil rich powerful guy usually ends up either ahead of the game or at the very least not negatively affected by his bad karma. Why can’t movies depict something resembling reality?
I had been under the impression that Australia was an ambitious chronicling of the history of Australia. It was decidedly not that, but rather an ambitious chronicling of some fictional characters over a few years leading up to and into World War 2 in Australia. Kidman plays an English woman whose husband owns the only cattle ranching land in Australia which is not owned by a dastardly big-business bully played beautifully by Bryan Brown. When her husband is killed, Kidman moves down under to try and take over the ranch, hiring a ledgendary rancher (Hugh Jackman) to help. They try to assert themselves in the cattle business in order to bring some competition to the market (British military ships re-provisioning with beef are the customers). All of this is set against the backdrop of the story of a half-aboriginal boy who lives on the ranch and whose grandfather, an aboriginal witch-doctor-type living off the land, watches silently from afar and helps them out when needed during their long cattle drive through the desert and up to the coast.
This film has plenty going for it. Hugh Jackman is in a meaty dramatic role, something he doesn’t often get to do. Exposure to the changing Australian seasons, where the dry desert comes alive after the annual rains, is something to behold. References to and direct mentions of The Wizard of Oz (1939), contemporary to the setting, is maybe overly cutesy but mostly fits. But the film is hamstrung by some serious problems. There’s a romantic interlude 2/3 of the way through the running time which is believable to a point but overdone. The visual effects are very distracting, with lots of obviously fake stuff in a lot of the wide-angle shots. There’s the common cinematic device of different characters repeating a phrase as they come to believe in its true meaning, which is valid here but not smoothly integrated (in this case, the phrase is something along the lines of “[Person #1]: That’s the way it is. [Person #2]: Just because that’s the way it is, it doesn’t mean that’s how it should be”). The score is manipulative and there’s manufactured dramatic tension, although I can be a sucker for that. Does it sound like the negative is overtaking the positive?
So why did I bother to watch this? Well, as I mentioned earlier I consider myself a fan of Baz Lurhmann, although I can’t really figure out why. I haven’t seen Strictly Ballroom (1992), although I know it’s well-liked. William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) didn’t really do it for me, although I totally respect what it was trying to do. And Moulin Rouge! (2001), the movie that set Hollywood into musical mode again after a merciful three-decade break, was actually pretty good for what it was, although I think I blame it for Best Picture winner Chicago (2002) the following year. Maybe what I respect is that Baz Lurhmann can make a living by putting together only 4 modestly-grossing films in a span of 16 years. The specific reason I saw the film was because of the Oscar nomination for Best Costume Design.
Costumes OK, movie kind of sucked.
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