Down Under disaster

Australia is an overblown misfire of an epic

GOOD LOOKS, BAD MOVIE:
Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman

by MATTHEW HAYS

One can feel what filmmaker Baz Luhrmann set out to do when he made the bluntly titled Australia. This is a love letter to his homeland, an up-with-Down-Under movie about people with feisty, independent spirits overcoming any and all manner of hardship.

Told to us as national myth, Australia is about a rather prim Englishwoman (Nicole Kidman) who arrives in pre-WWII, rough-and-tumble rural Australia to meet up with her husband on his estate. She arrives to find he’s dead. And the only way she can stave off the overtaking of her cattle ranch by her evil neighbour Fletcher (David Wenham) is to reluctantly join forces with a gritty Aussie (who, thankfully, is played by the photogenic Hugh Jackman, just anointed People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive).

The two must then herd 2,000 cattle over what seems like a gazillion miles to safety. Weave in a sub-plot about Australia’s horrific legacy of treatment of aboriginal people, and you’ve got a well-meaning lib-left movie, the kind that usually sells a whack of tickets and often even serves up some Oscar gold.

This self-conscious epic owes a great deal to the American Western, and while it tries to cover its colonial tracks, there’s something that just doesn’t work amid all of the screechy CGI visuals. Luhrmann’s style has always been one of excess, of an aesthetic so overdone, it draws attention to its glossy surface. But this film attempts to go deep with the social-issue theme of what happened to aboriginal people Down Under. And it just doesn’t mesh with the rest of the film, which is clearly just about looking good and crossing every box in the tired-screenplay checklist.

In fact, it doesn’t just gloss things over; at times, Australia goes terribly, terribly wrong. There’s way too much pumping up of the aboriginal characters into noble savages, and, um, I thought there was a moratorium on the dodgy screenwriting ploy of having native characters be capable of magic, somehow managing to turn things around at crucial moments.

In this respect, Australia seems a movie intended to make white audiences feel better about history, like an American film such as Mississippi Burning. And that’s not such a good comparison.

AUSTRALIA OPENS FRIDAY, NOV. 28