Australia: Not The Country, The Movie

Baz Luhrman’s film Australia is visually stunning and the lead romantic actors, Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, have great on screen chemistry, which actually surprised me. The story is moving, if occasionally told in an overly sentimental way – and by that I mean that I personally could have dealt with more story and less “let’s milk the emotional moment for as long as humanly tolerable, and then add a second” type of shooting.

Australia is worth watching, but it has its flaws. For example, a film which only covers a few very specific events between a limited number of years – 1939-1942 – probably does not account for the whole of an entire nation’s history, so the title itself feels a bit odd to me. Of course, that is just personal opinion.

The story itself involves historical events, such as the bombing of Darwin during World War II, and government policy about children born of aboriginal and white European descent. Those issues are sort of like spices in the complicated soup of plot. Lady Ashley, a British aristocrat sails to Australia to try to get her husband to sell their cattle farm only to find him dead, and the main employee of the ranch is trying to bamboozle Lady Ashley into handing it over to another cattle rancher. Once this employee, Fletcher, is discovered for his treachery, she enlists the help of Hugh Jackman’s character, Drover, to take on Fletcher’s role and set things right. In the meantime, they have their sort of predictable, yet fun and sweet uptown girl meets working class guy relationship and Lady Ashley bonds with a boy on her ranch named Nulluh, who must hide out because the English will force him to go to an orphanage to be assimilated into white culture. Indeed, it is Nulluh’s story that is the most compelling in all of this, and it is he who provides the voice over, his perspective through which the tale is told. While Nullah is infinitely likable, and the story promising, if a bit cluttered, Luhrman’s penchant for sentimentality and nods to cinematic conventions of bygone eras makes the film overall feel slightly awkward.

That said, the movie is still gorgeous and there are some great performances. In conclusion, this was not the best film I have ever seen, but it didn’t make me feel like I’d wasted time watching it either.