Pure Country

Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman star in Baz Luhrmann's epic tale of adventure, romance, war and racial reconciliation Down Under
Director Baz Luhrmann rose to prominence with the 'Red Curtain Trilogy' - Strictly Ballroom (1992), William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001) - all colourful, defiantly cheesy pastiches where genre was a mere plaything and almost anything went. Australia is the first in a new projected trilogy, a patriotic epic that pleads for reconciliation between the country's indigenous and alien populations. But Luhrmann has not abandoned his commitment to kitsch. Australia is not just riddled with treacly sentiments and risible lines, but revels in the archetypal power of cinematic cliche - which is all very well, except that so postmodern an approach undermines the serious manner in which Luhrmann attempts to tackle the man-made tragedy of Australia's 'Stolen Generation' and the nation's recent moves towards reconciliation. It is 1939, and childless Lady Sarah Ashton (Nicole Kidman) heads from the gentility of her English estate to the wilds of Australia's Northern Territory, hoping to secure the return of her husband by selling off the ranch that has been keeping him Down Under for so long. In fact Lord Ashton has been speared in the back shortly before she arrives, and Sarah soon finds herself embroiled in a vicious land struggle with cattle baron King Carney (Bryan Brown) and his ruthless station manager Neil Fletcher (David Wenham). Fortunately she has help from the rough-edged Drover (Hugh Jackman), a local mixed-race boy named Nullah (excellent newcomer Brandon Walters) and a small team of loyal employees, who must all race across the desert to Darwin to break Carney's monopoly on the armed forces' meat supply. Soon Sarah, Drover and the recently orphaned Nullah have formed a loving, if not quite legitimate, family unit, but there are further troubles brooding on the endless horizon. Sarah struggles to cope with both boys' desire to go walkabout. There is the constant threat that Nullah will be taken off to a Christian mission (to be 'dislocated' from his 'full-black aborigine'), and with World War II now in full swing, the Japanese air force is about to bomb Darwin. Still, in this wide brown land, there can always be hope for change. Australia is a fantastic spectacle, using the country's vast and varied outback terrains as a natural (or occasionally CG-tweaked) canvas on which to set the different characters' emotional journeys. And if that is not grand enough, Luhrmann also paints his film with a whole palette of genres: there is the sweeping romance of Gone With The Wind and The African Queen, the nostalgic fantasy of The Wizard Of Oz, the warfilm melodrama of Pearl Harbor, the mythic aboriginal mysticism of Ten Canoes (or Crocodile Dundee), and the cattle-driving adventure of countless westerns (complete with a band of seven riders and an evil rancher). Just as well, too, for without all this razzmatazz, the plotting and characterisation are far too thin to carry the film through its epic duration. The film's intermixing of wilful preposterousness and deadly earnest is far harder to swallow. Although Luhrmann's heart is in the right place, there is something rather patronising about the way that Aborigines tend to be depicted here as magical, mystical wizards of Oz, rather than as ordinary human beings with their own rich cultural heritage. Luhrmann prefigures change and reconciliation by depicting a traditional Darwin bar that admits, under rather special circumstances, first a woman and then a 'black fella' to drink. Here we see a colonial institution breaking with its long-held conventions and opening its doors for the first time to those it has long excluded as inferiors. Such moments of unprecedented inclusivity may be touching, but they have the unfortunate side-effect of recalling the terrible destruction wrought on native communities - and still felt in them today - by the white man's poison. Luhrmann may prefer to focus on Australia's inhuman 'assimilation policy' that saw bi-racial children torn from their families and institutionalised to 'breed the black out of them', but the European introduction of alcohol to the Great Southern Land has proved no less ruinous in unsticking the glue of Aboriginal identity and society. Rolf De Heer's Ten Canoes (2006) engaged with pre-colonial Aboriginal culture, the same director's The Tracker (2002) addressed the early settlers' oppression of the indigenous population, and Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) exposed the horrors of the 'Stolen Generation'. Australia tries to do all these things, while also being a larger-than-life romance that will put a spring in the viewer's step, and a hymn to a country where nationalism and racism have tended to go hand in hand. The result is an endurance test of good intentions and tangled ideas, exploited facts and fuzzy fictions, where the performances, like the plot, are slapped onto the beautiful backgrounds with the broadest - and clumsiest - of strokes.
Verdict Australia is a sight to see, but not one to cherish, or to think about too hard - an overlong touchy-feely phantasmagoria of pure cinema and uncomfortable history.