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The birth of a nation's myth

Baz Luhrmann's epic journey is worth joining
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
December 17th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
From Red River to Pearl Harbor. Nicole Kidman is the center of Baz Luhrmann's epic, romantic national myth.
Australia


Directed by Baz Luhrmann
With Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, Bryan Brown, Brandon Walters and Jack Thompson
In interviews, Baz Luhrmann comes off as rather shy when comparisons are made with his latest film, Australia, and Gone with the Wind. He needn’t be. Luhrmann’s epic is perhaps the closest anyone has come to recapturing the spirit and scale of the 1939 classic.
While the overrated Wind remains the stronger film, there are many aspects of Australia that remind me of a different type of epic. For Luhrmann has created a cinematic equivalent of The Kalevala or Brut — a national saga for Australia. It also serves as a summation of Australian cinema to date.
It’s a sprawling film that, again like Gone with the Wind, is as much Western and war movie as it is a grand romance. Most vast canvasses will contain flaws, and this is no exception. But Luhrmann’s film is undeniably powerful.
It doesn’t start too promisingly. We are introduced to a little boy named Nullah (Brandon Walters), of mixed white and Aboriginal parentage. Such children are considered societal outcasts, and Nullah keenly feels misplaced in the Australia of the late 1930s.
He spends time with his maternal grandfather, King George (David Gulpilil), a shaman, who begins teaching his grandson the rights and songs of his people.
Nullah and his mother, are connected to an Outback cattle ranch, Faraway Downs, run by an English lord. There’s a territory war among the local cattlemen, initiated by the greedy King Carney (Bryan Brown). The lord of this sun-blasted manor, will be mysteriously murdered, just before his wife, Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) arrives from London on her first visit to Australia.
Arriving in Darwin, a town that appears both modern and violently backward, Lady Sarah is to be escorted to Faraway Downs by a herdsman who goes by the name Drover (Hugh Jackman). They arrive just as his lordship’s body has been laid out for burial.
Knowing that Australia’s running time is close to three hours, these first scenes prepare you for the worst, as they are filmed in the frenetic pitch that Luhrmann utilized for his lavishly bizarre musical Moulin Rouge. As in that film, Kidman hits the screen at her most caffeinated, treating us to a quickly tiresome cartoon of aristocracy. Jackman seems set to stalk the set like an overheated stud. Three hours of this would be torture.
Then the tone changes, not wholly believably, but thankfully. Kidman allows the land’s tempo to infect her, and her Lady Ashley begins to become a fully fleshed character, and those that might have feared for a lost night at the multiplex can settle back for this splendid, if at times overwrought, story.
Having discovered that one of her husband’s men, Neil Fletcher (David Wenham), was secretly working for the arch rival cattle baron Carney, Sarah orders him from her land. She soon finds that there was an outstanding order to supply the British navy with 1,500 head of cattle, which need to be driven to Darwin.
Fletcher having left with his men, Sarah drafts Drover to be the leader of the cattle drive, and they fill out the other driver positions with Sarah’s cook, maid, financial assistant, as well as herself and Nullah. They set off on this grand drive into land as starkly beautiful as Monument Valley, recalling an entire subgenre of Hollywood cattlemen Westerns, particularly Hawks’ Red River.
Fletcher and his henchmen attempt to thwart the drive, and create a frightening stampede that is breathtaking for the danger involved to both animal and man.
The sweep of Australia will go on to include the period’s political wrangling, the Japanese attack on the West Coast, and the uncomfortable racism that weighs not only on the Aboriginals and Chinese-Australians, but the whites who associate with them. Having first loathed this land, Lady Sarah will come to understand its spiritual pull upon the natives, making this certainly a more inclusive saga than the monumentally racist Gone with the Wind, and, again, creating a great new myth for the Australians of the 21st century.
Luhrmann’s own love for his native land saturates each frame of this beautifully shot film, and he mines the landscape for its associations with Australia’s history.
Once past the odd opening performances, the cast, which includes many of Australia’s best film actors, settles into a crack ensemble. Kidman goes from being almost unwatchable to captivating, while Jackman, too, breaks past the bonds of rugged leading man to create a multifaceted character capable of profound emotions.
Wenham is excellent as the devious Neil Fletcher. Interestingly, Wenham played a character named Eden Fletcher in that other fine and recent Down Under Western, Nick Cave’s The Proposition. Brown and actor Jack Thompson, veterans of Breaker Morant and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, are equally strong, as is Gulpilil, the songline wizard, who haunts the earth and dreams that constitute Australia.
The find is young Brandon Walters, the racially mixed narrator of the story. He’s a lad who lives as much for his walkabout initiation as he does for finally seeing The Wizard of Oz (Gone with the Wind’s 1939 rival, and another reference point for Luhrmann’s narrative).
Regardless of the odd, wrong note, Australia is worthy of all the singers traveling the continent’s song lines.    

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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