Australia
Time Out Sydney editor-in-chief Angus Fontaine passes judgement on the year's most hyped extravaganza.
Dir Baz Luhrmann feat Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman
Twenty minutes into Australia, Time Out thought it was watching a $200 million turkey flapping into the desert sunset. An hour on we found ourselves musing on Best Film Oscar contention. And 165 minutes later, we were applauding a family film as big, brave and as blighted by excess as the nation itself.
Loaded under the weight of expectation, Australia rattles off the runway - warning lights flashing, alarm bells ringing - as, bizarrely, a vaudeville comedy populated by bumbling caricatures invoking the phrase 'Crikey!' a tad too often.
Was this really the film that director Baz Luhrmann had spent seven years waxing lyrical about and another year filming? Could this truly be the "epic" to get Australia back on the must-visit global map and resurrect our ailing film industry all in one fell swoop?
Australia, it turns out, is a four-genre smorgasbord of comedy, drama and romance played out in the film-land flux between black and white, good and evil, rich and poor, hero and villain. Our yin-yang talisman through these opposing worlds is Brandon Walters' Nullah, a mixed blood cutie whose world is a long way from that of 1939 and a nation cusping a World War II in which eastern hordes threaten to invade to the very ends of the earth and us.
The two worlds collide in a billabong on the fringe of the Never-Never where Nullah is spearing barramundi with his witchdoctor grandfather King George (David Gulpilil) and where his underwater invisibility is shattered when a white man crashes into the water with a glass-tipped spear in his chest.
The die is cast. A half-caste kid on a white man's bloody black steed races us off into Baz's awfully big cinematic adventure.
But after this set-up, things get weird fast. Under the wondrous narration of the boy, we criss-cross the globe via cartoon plane to find Nicole Kidman's Lady Sarah Ashton tottering about her mansion in England clearing hedges on a pony while stamping her feet at Ray Barrett and vowing to fly to this mystical place called Australia to fetch up her philandering husband and sort out a financial crisis called Faraway Downs once and for all.
Arriving in Oz, having had her buttocks chivalrously groped by Bill Hunter (practically a rite of passage in Baz films), Lady Ashton strides into a bloodhouse pub in Darwin called The Territory, oblivious to the fact a big burly rooster is busy defending the honour of his blackfella brothers in a brawl with far too few sight-gags (not a single chair broken across a bonce!). It's The Drover, Hugh Jackman's hyper-hunky wild colonial boy with shoulders wide as a Massey Ferguson tractor and the mega-strine accent of a bloke in a beer ad.
Here, amidst the heat, flies and flagons of Poor Fella rum, and with the elegant lingerie of our English rose scattered in the red dirt beneath the biffing boys, Our Hugh and Our Nicole lock eyes. "Welcome ta Awstraya!" he grins through bloodied gums. Alas, even the furnace heat of HJ's abs can't unfurl the frosty petals of this cold rose just yet. Like two old queens of the desert, they ramble off on the rocky road to true blue romance.
Where Australia's early revelry ends is at Faraway Downs. Spitting chips at Jackman's Chips Rafferty misogyny, Lady Ashton bolts into the dilapidated manor to find hubby dead as the dining table he's laid out on. The film's comedy gears now shift into drama, a move heightened by the young boy Nullah's spooky home invasion of Nicole's bedroom and the morning call of a copper wanting to collect the half-caste "creamy" and deliver him into the service of the Lord via a dusty mission miles away.
When she defends Nullah against first the cop and then the villainous jackaroo (a deliciously slimy David Wenham), their bond is a surety. When she sacks Wenham and uncovers the fiendish greed of Bryan Brown's bullish cattle baron King Carney the battle lines are drawn and with it The Big Plan that forms Australia's epicentre - a drove across the Dead Heart to Darwin by the Beautiful White Witch, the Knight in Shining Moleskins and a motley crew made up of a kid, a drunk, a Chinese cook and a couple of loyal first Australians. No Toto!
Free of set-pieces and rigid scenery, Baz now unfurls the full weight of his vision in all its vast, fantastic, corny excess - rippling fetlocks, sweating bodices, sweeping red dunes, crackling campsites and CGI paintbox sunsets. As the drover heads briskly overland things get even more overblown, outrageous and camp. Luhrmann does the unthinkable and peppers the screen with an arsenal of special effects and old cinema influences (shards of Gone with the Wind, Blazing Saddles, Wizard of Oz and African Queen are everywhere) as if defying the surreal natural beauty of the land itself to out-flounce him. It's eye-candy deluxe and glorious to watch.
To add fizz to the mix he lobs a few cinematic molotovs - male porn (a lingering shot of the Drover showering under a tin can actually drew gasps and applause in our screening), Disney musical (Jack Thompson blowing harp to 'Over the Rainbow'), insane blockbuster action (a cliff-hanging cattle stampede through flame), a bloody death scene (no spoiler here) and some old fashioned black magic in the form of Gulpilil's feral wizard, a friendly spectre guarding them from afar.
By the time the mob hits Darwin, Australia is moving at rollicking pace, and ready to unleash its big guns, together in quick time. The Big Wet descends and the heavens open. The Japs bomb Darwin. And Nic and Hugh drop their own bombs, big wets and heavenly openings by finally going a'drovin' betwixt the sheets. Australia is, after an extended foreplay of feints, sticky fingers and fumbles, finally entering climax.
When it comes, Australia's big bang is as apocalyptic, sickly sweet and curiously empty as its heavy prelude has promised. But, as Baz bids us adieu via an Elton John-themed cast-and-cattle call almost as long as the film, the verdict hits home.
The cinematic fuck-of-the-century was in fact a very loud, crazily colourful and delightfully strings-free romp - fun while it lasted and fondly recalled, but not, alas, the big love we yearned for.
