Australia
Baz Luhrmann's long-awaited follow-up to Moulin Rouge gets off to an almost unrepairable start by employing the same cartoonish hyperactivity which made that previous film so much fun to watch. It was a completely inappropriate beginning to a film aspiring to be the Australian version of Gone with the Wind. Once it settles down into a more conventionally directed Hollywood epic, Australia has plenty to commend it, but it's hard to recuperate from the jarring introductory sequence.
The cast is impeccable, and Luhrmann draws on the enormous talent and beauty of Nicole Kidman, his previous leading lady in Moulin Rouge, to carry the picture, as well he should. She plays a far more likable version of Scarlett O'Hara to Hugh Jackman's Rhett Butler, and the two have plenty of chemistry to carry the occasionally drab and clunky plot of multiple love stories to its conclusion.
Drover, who never gets a real name, only the one that describes what he does for a living (driving cattle to market), is an outback-smart man's man with a soft spot for the Aboriginal people and a hard heart for just about everyone else. Lady Sarah Ashley, on the other hand, who comes to Australia to resuscitate her late husband's floundering cattle ranch, has lots of preconceived notions of how ass-backward the whole continent is and a stubborn streak to boot. In order to drive her cattle to market, save the ranch and break the beef monopoly held by baron King Carney and his dastardly right-hand-man Fletcher, Drover and Sarah not only have to learn to get along but also reevaluate the biases that rule their lives and the status quo of Australian society.
In a way, that's mostly what Australia is about: It's a visual poem to the soul of the continent and its original inhabitants, whose culture British colonists tried to obliterate. It's a love story as grand as the country it dwells in, not to mention the love story between a man and a woman, a woman and a child, and a child and his grandfather. Throw in a murderous, conspiring cattle baron and the Japanese attack on Darwin, and this story has all it can handle.
Some scenes span several minutes in grand old Hollywood fashion, and others come and go in 30 seconds—a jarring inconsistency of style between the epic filmmaking of old and short-attention-span theater of today. It's a self-defeating combination of techniques that never allows Australia discover its true self, even if its characters ultimately do.