Australia (**½)

Directed by: Baz Luhrmann
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, Brandon Walters, Bryan Brown
Seen: December 28th 2008

**½ Out of ****

In 1939 (incidentally, the release year for the film Gone with the Wind), the Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman) travels from her native England to Australia, where she intends to force her unfaithful husband to sell his cattle farm, Faraway Downs. Nicole Kidman gives a convincing performance of the British lady, but once she reaches Australia, the cracks start showing. She is overly dramatic and elaborate in her actions, whimpering herself into oblivion, especially when her clothes fall from her suitcase and when she witnesses a kangaroo hunt. This does however come on the right track again, as soon as the Lady simply becomes Sarah, a woman in the Australian outback, because she takes to horse-riding and cattle-droving quite quickly.

Hugh Jackman plays the Drover, and he as no other name for the entire run of the film. He is employed by Sarah’s Husband to transport Sarah from the harbour of Darwin to Faraway Downs. On the way the two start scraping up against each other, Drover advising Sarah to, for example, dress more comfortably, and Sarah berating Drover for almost everything he does. The landscape of Australia is beautiful, and Luhrmann does not forget to remind us of that, as we are presented with multiple soft-hued backdrops that almost make the film feel like it was made in a studio with pastel backdrops at some stages.

An overarching storyline of Australia deals with the same issues we saw in the film Rabbit Proof Fence, which was fantastic, and handled the issue much better. It is the issue of the Australian half-caste children, the stolen generations. The policy in Australia was to take children born of one white and one Aboriginal parent away from the parent, regardless the circumstance, and put them in what can only be described as concentration camps. This is a horrible blight upon Australia’s history, and the film makes that point clear, since one of the main characters, Nullah (Walters), is a young half-caste boy. Walters gives one of the top performances in the film, and every viewer comes to love the little boy at the end.

Another storyline running through the film is the selling of 1600 cattle. Upon arriving at Faraway Downs, Sarah finds her husband is dead, and upon seeing evidence of the racism raging through Australia, decides to not sell the farm to King Carney (Brown), but build it up to have an influence in Australia. But in order to do that, they have to sell cattle, and the cattle has to be driven across the Australian outback to Darwin – quite a mean feat. King Carnie is dead-set on seeing her fail, and sends a band of outlaws under the reign of Neil Fletcher (Wenham) to thwart their efforts in droving the cattle to Darwin. This brings forth the big scene of the movie, a massive cattle stampede towards an imposing cliff, where the viewer is suddenly meant to believe in Aborigine magic, a bit of a Deus Ex Machina device. It is very impressively done though. Wenham does a fantastic job as the villain, the viewer starts suspecting him almost fro his first appearance on screen, and hatred soon follows as Fletcher becomes more powerful as the film progresses.


To me the film never truly took hold of a plot point and ran with it, rather switching between ideas continually, and when the credits started rolling, I couldn’t help but be overcome by a sense of, not confusion, and also not satisfaction, but almost indifference. Australia; set-up as the Gone with the Wind of 2008, felt to me more like the Pearl Harbor of 2008. Not in all aspects, but there are striking similarities, the plodding plot points for one; the at time almost laughable melodrama being another. Amidst all this disappointment, Australia is still quite an entertaining movie, but it can be disappointing should you expect too much from it.