Theatrical Review of Australia

" Every single scene plays out exactly the way you expect it to, and leads into exactly the next scene you anticipate.

Theatrical review

By Christopher Long
First published Nov 25, 2008

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Part melodrama, part live-action cartoon, and entirely awful, Baz Luhrmann´s "Australia" is a failure on almost every possible level.

It has become a cliché for film critics to complain about film clichés, but "Australia" telegraphs every groan-inducing move so far in advance it becomes its own parody. The story, set in 1939, is simple enough. Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) travels from England to Australia to visit her husband where she is guided to their ranch by a hunky frontiersman known only as The Drover (Hugh Jackman.) Surprise of all surprises, the very proper British lady and the very crude outdoorsman despise each other at first. If you have never seen a movie before you may be wondering if the two of them eventually get together. The rest of you know the answer.

Arriving at Faraway Downs (the Ashley ranch), Sarah discovers that her husband has been speared to death by an aborigine (played, as apparently required by Australian law, by David Gulpilil) who also happens to be the grandfather of the terminally cute "half-caste" boy Nullah (Brandon Walters) who is also hiding on the ranch to avoid being handed over to Catholic priests to be "civilized." Soon the villain of the piece is introduced. Ranch-hand Neil Fletcher (David Wenham) is both an ambition man and a virulent racist who hates "creamies" like Nullah. Sarah fires Fletcher, and he vows revenge, determined to prevent her from selling the ranch´s cattle and forcing her to sell the Downs at a bargain basement price.

As standard a template as this is, the devilish clichés are in the details. Kidman, Jackman, and even poor young Walters try to wrap their tongues around ham-fisted dialogue which exists only to be repeated at a later date for maximum heartstring-tugging effect ("I will sing you to me.") Every single scene plays out exactly the way you expect it to, and leads into exactly the next scene you anticipate. This crowd-pleasing predictability wins some cheap applause, but renders "Australia" into more of a drinking game than an actual film. Did a snarling Fletcher just bitch about "the creamies" again? That´s a shot. Does yet another character who was reported dead turn up alive? That´s a shot. Did Nullah just play "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" again as a painfully contrived device to propel this awkward, half-assed plot? That´s a double. (And fair warning: Your fond memories of "Wizard of Oz" may be ruined forever by this movie.)

The shambling screenplay has no discernible sense of rhythm or form. The 165-minute ersatz epic could easily end at the 90 minute mark, or the 120 minute mark and nobody would notice the difference. Just as soon as the film´s primary cattle-driving plot is wrapped up, it suddenly transforms into a war film. This distended final act feels tacked on and irrelevant, and grinds on so mercilessly long it can only be described as an act of sadism against an innocent paying audience.

The film does not feature characters so much as figures who constantly pose against artfully crafted backdrops, or who are barely visible in the heavily-mulched editing that most scenes (not just action sequences) are built around. One change of pace from the hyper-cutting is the frequent (and frequently laughable) use of slow motion that all by itself adds another 10 or 15 minutes of running time to the movie.

Perhaps the only interesting aspect of the film is the way that Jackman´s body is featured prominently while Kidman, seldom shy about stripping down, remains largely ignored. "People" Magazine´s Sexiest Man Alive gets several beefcake shots including a (slow-motion, of course) soak-down when he bathes his bare chest in the moonlight in front of an unnerved Kidman. And when the bad-boy cleans himself up for a high-society ball, he is given the Hollywood glamour shot of a lifetime.

This cringe-worthy exercise in banality may pack in audiences over the Thanksgiving holiday based solely on its star power, but whispers of Oscar nominations should be silenced.

To paraphrase Monty Python´s skit about Australian wines, "Australia" is not a film for viewing. It is a film for laying down and avoiding. Truly, truly terrible.

A 2/10 on the DVDTown scale.

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