Australia

Australia is pure schmaltz, middlebrow entertainment, and as subtle as a jackhammer. But it's also effective, and as I watched the conclusion, which is as corny as Kansas in August, I hated myself for realizing that I kind of liked it.

Baz Luhrmann has made a film that is clearly an affectionate nod to those big-budget Cinemascope extravaganzas of the fifties. Australia is full of romance and adventure and rescues, it just lacks any kind of introspection or sophistication.

As with his Moulin Rouge, Luhrmann begins the film defying you to stay. It has quick choppy edits as it deals with some exposition: Nicole Kidman is a well-bred English gentlewoman who goes to Australia to urge her husband, who is breeding cattle on a ranch, to sell. When she gets there she meets a rough and tumble fellow known only as The Drover (Hugh Jackman), and then finds out that her husband has been murdered. She decides to try to make the ranch profitable, with the help of a drunken accountant and a mixed-race boy. Meanwhile, the local cattle baron and his henchman try to drive her out of business.

This is the stuff of many Hollywood Westerns, and the transplanted location, despite a few kangaroos, doesn't offer much new. The plight of aboriginal people, while certainly a sad story, is told in somewhat patronizing fashion (there have been better films about this, such as Rabbit-Proof Fence), and Luhrmann is shameless about going to the lowest common denominator to wring tears from his audience. He even stoops so low as to use The Wizard of Oz as a counterpoint, and make "Over the Rainbow" the dominant musical cue. Surely a place in director's Hell is waiting for him just for that.

But the film is lovely to look at. The cinematographer Mandy Walker has created some arresting images (in particular there is a lovely overhead shot after a tragedy), even if it at times veers into look of perfume commercials.

The acting follows Luhrmann's lead for the predictable and one-note. Kidman is pretty bad in the beginning, mostly overacting her shock at Australia's rustic conditions. Jackman pretty much sticks with the tall, dark and handsome hero with little shading. As the little boy, Brandon Walters is nicely unaffected, and his big dark eyes made me recall the old comic strip Dondi.

It seems kind of cheeky to make a film called Australia, for whatever follows can't possibly encapsulate a country of that size and diversity. What would a movie called United States of America be like?