An epic and a mea culpa

As a director, Baz Luhrmann has ambitions and appetites as large as his native Australia. But he's toned things down for his homage to the country. Though well supplied with virtuoso sequences and vivid characters, Australia leaves a less intense impression than the director's stylistically baroque, occasionally indigestible Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Moulin Rouge. If Australia is less memorable than Luhrmann's "red curtain trilogy" (which began with Strictly Ballroom), it's also easier to take.

The film is partly a cornucopia of homages. Many of the story elements are familiar, with twists added for the period, 1939-42, and the location, the Northern Territories and the port of Darwin. There's the outback ranch, the adorable waif, the well-born lady drawn to the handsome man of the people, the greedy usurper. There are classic movie influences--with Duel in the Sun, The African Queen, Gone With the Wind, Red River, Lawrence of Arabia, The Searchers, Out of Africa, and Giant obvious titles that have been cited, not to mention the overt references throughout to The Wizard of Oz.

Yes, there are all sorts of elements here. There's a Western, a WWII movie, a family saga. There's sweeping imagery, vast overhead tracking shots, fires and explosions, skies full of planes, herds of cattle barely kept from running off a cliff. But there's intimacy, homey-ness and humor. Wisely, because this is a movie about Australia, there is also Luhrmann's "mea culpa"--his acknowledgment of white Australians' wrongdoing toward the Aboriginal people, and particularly the great injustice of the "Stolen Generations."

This refers to the period from 1869 to 1969 when Aborigine children were forcibly taken away from their parents and "educated' in camps--to save them from being "black" and train them to be domestic servants. The situation was dramatized in Phillip Noyce's 2002 film Rabbit-Proof Fence. It's a running theme here, with historical facts underlined in end titles.

The romance involves two of the country's biggest movie stars, the diamond-bright and fearless Nicole Kidman as Lady Sarah Ashley, and the handsome, reassuringly macho Hugh Jackman ("Sexiest Man Alive" by People Magazine's 2008 decision) as the free-spirited Drover, essentially a super-cowboy, and also a renegade and outcast, looked down on by the bigots in the story for living with Aborigines as equals. But the movie's highlight is a new discovery, eleven-year-old Brannon Walters, an Australian boy of mixed race who plays Nullah, a "creamy" or half-breed Aborigine who wins the love of Sarah and awakens Drover's fatherly instincts. In the background, a symbol of the ancient indigenous secrets of the land, hovers on one leg Nullah's spindly grandfather and magical protector, King George. He is played by the great David Gulpilil, who began his acting career with Walkabout and has appeared in almost every important movie with Aborigines in it, including the recent multi-layered aboriginal tale, Ten Canoes. Nullah is the film's unifying observer and narrator. Meanwhile Sarah, Drover, and King George all must protect Nullah from being "stolen" and detained at Mission Island with other half-breeds. It's hard to exaggerate young Walters' energy, wit, and glow. He keeps the film from becoming too full of itself.

The plot isn't really very complicated. Lady Ashley comes from England to straighten things out with her husband and deal with his ranch, Faraway Downs, and she gets drawn into remaining in the country and running the place--while resisting the evil predations of King Carney (Bryan Brown) and Neil Fletcher (David Wenham), the two arch-meanies and predators who try to thwart a drive of a herd of cattle to Darwin to save the ranch. This is the film's epic sequence--but a charity ball, a post-Pearl Harbor bombing, and a breathtaking rescue, are also grand events. Not everything is up to the highest standards of film epics--Luhrmann faced some limitations of budget and time--but Jackman and Kidman both look their best in every beautifully lit scene, the music never stops soaring or whispering, and Nullah charms us as well as the stars. Sadly, perhaps, this is likely to be for non-Australians a forgettable movie. But it's a warm and entertaining and watchable one nonetheless whose pace never flags and whose allusiveness allows us to re-experience some of the old glories of classic Hollywood movies while being transported to a new Down Under Oz.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.