Australia (2008)
Grade:B+
Australia has epic vistas to spare. It has ambition to spare. Hell, it has practically a whole feature-length other movie to spare. At 165 minutes, the film is a sprawling epic that tries to encapsulate the very essence of director Baz Luhrmann’s home country of Australia into Australia. It’s close to successful, and while the film has its flaws, to be sure, it’s still immensely enjoyable.
But first, a caveat. It’s immensely enjoyable, yes, but I wonder how the film plays to someone who didn’t study film in college, to someone who isn’t familiar with genre tropes of the classic Western or with old sweeping melodramas of the golden age of Hollywood. Because these are clearly modes in which Luhrmann is operating here. I mean, if this film were made in the early forties and edited down a bit, we’d be calling it a masterpiece today, but as it is, an epic of 2008, it’s simply a throwback.
As an exercise in stylistic conventions, the film is certainly successful, capturing the sweeping vistas of old Westerns and the heightened emotion of old melodramas and epic romances (comparisons to Gone With the Wind have been thrown around, and the film even invites parallels to The Wizard of Oz). The film opens as Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) arrives in Australia from her native England to sell her family’s ranch, Faraway Downs. When she arrives, her husband lies dead on the table in the dining room, murdered ostensibly by an Aborginal native. Pressured to sell the land to cattle driver King Carney, Lady Ashley instead hires The Drover (Hugh Jackman) to assist with the herding of her 1,500 cattle to town to sell, putting the profits into the farm and falling in love in the process.
This first half of the film, chronicling The Drover and Lady Ashley’s developing relationship as they drive the cattle to town, is far too long, but it allows for Luhrmann to shoot as many sweeping vistas of the Australian landscape as his budget allows – and he has a big budget. Added into this mix is some attempt at showing Australia’s history with the country’s native Aboriginals, notably through a young “creamy” half-white, half-Aborigine Nullah (Brandon Walters) that Lady Ashley and The Drover pseudo-adopt and then must fight to protect for the second half of the film.
After the cattle drive, the film is pretty much over, but Luhrmann is only getting started, now heading towards Epic War Film territory after a quick night’s rest in Epic Romance following a long journey through Epic Western. This is all while continuing to wear his History Teacher outfit, continuing to dramatize the tensions between natives and foreigners in the country.
Basically, there’s a lot of material here, and the major lack in this film is focus. For my money, the Western and Romance aspects work best and work best together, the war stuff tacked on just for jollies. A few more months in editing might have been helpful to try and find a more consistent tone throughout, too. Some early scenes, especially, feel like they’re straight out of Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! handbook in terms of broad and stylized comedy, and it just doesn’t mesh with the lush epic he’s making. The CGI is also questionable at times, with some backgrounds clearly added in post and a lot of horse-riding digitally-created.
A director’s cut might play better than the cut in theaters. As it stands, the film is all over the place, but there’s no questioning the passion behind the project. As an homage to the classic epics of the past, the film is certainly successful. A little more editing time would’ve made the film work equally as well in a modern context, though.
Bottom Line:
It’s an ungainly beast of a movie, but it’s never boring, and Baz is clearly passionate about the finished product. Give him some more editing time, and we may have a great finished product on our hands.
© 2004-2009 Ben Waldorf. Posted December 21, 2008. IMDB