Australia

Director Baz Luhrmann’s new film “Australia” features all the elements of a classic Hollywood adventure and romance. It has the sweeping landscapes of “Lawrence of Arabia,” the dramatic cultural overtures of “Gone With the Wind,” the beautiful bantering leads of “The African Queen,” and the vaguely amusing stock background characters of “Casablanca.” Although “Australia” eventually succeeds in constructing itself as an epic film, it just isn’t a very good one.

The story of “Australia” is essentially a series of clichés. Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman), an upper-class Brit, gets wrapped up in a caper when she treks to her husband’s cattle ranch Down Under on the eve of World War II only to find him dead. Powerful cattle mogul King Carney (Bryan Brown) and his villainous lackey Fletcher (David Wenham) have consolidated a monopoly on the Australian beef industry just in time to win exclusive rights to feed Australian troops.

Luckily for Lady Ashley, she’s got Wolverine—uh, I mean Hugh Jackman—on her side. He plays a rough-and-tumble Australian cattle drover who works for no man but himself and shirks responsibility. Jackman’s drover is such a one-dimensional character that his name is simply “Drover.” Along with a young, half-Aboriginal, half-white boy named Nullah (Brandon Walters), Lady Ashley puts together a ragtag team to drive a thousand cattle from her ranch to the city of Darwin to outmaneuver King Carney.

Sound like fun? Well, there’s even more to this nearly three-hour-long movie. Obviously Drover and Lady Ashley fall in love and then get torn apart, only to end up together again, but there’s also an overarching plot involving efforts to “assimilate” mixed children of Aboriginals and whites as well as a climactic raid on Darwin by the Japanese.

Clearly, “Australia” is an ambitious movie, and it soars and stirs when operating on a grand scale. Luhrmann, whose past credits include “Moulin Rouge” and “Romeo + Juliet,” delivers beautiful, jaw-dropping imagery that seems to spill forth from the screen. A stampede of a thousand cattle rushing towards the edge of a cliff, a desert transformed into a paradise, a city torn apart by bombing—all are vibrant, powerful images crackling with energy and excitement.

Where the movie falters, though, is when it forgets what makes classics like “Casablanca” and “The African Queen” so good: they don’t forsake characterization and emotional investment for big-screen ambition. They’re movies with heart and soul; they don’t just play connect-the-dots. While Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine is a psychologically complex leading man, Jackman’s Drover just repeats the phrase “No man hires me, no man fires me,” over and over again.

Perhaps the problems with “Australia” wouldn’t be so noticeable if the movie weren’t so self-aware. Just as “Moulin Rouge” was a musical about musicals, “Australia” starts out as a sort of meta-epic, with tons of fast shots, wacky henchmen in bar fights, and an overly precious voice-over from Nullah. The opening moves fast and humorously; Luhrmann knows he is crafting an epic and wants the audience to know it too. As Lady Ashley herself comments, “It’s all very Outback adventure.”

The first half of the movie is therefore quite entertaining: it’s a joyful romp across the Outback with lots of humor and action, and plenty of minor characters. But when the droving team reaches Darwin and things take a more serious turn, whatever fun the movie once had quickly vanishes, and we suddenly get 40 minutes of Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman making out in the rain. Normally that wouldn’t be a bad thing, but the chemistry between Drover and Lady Ashley is bland and superficial. The tough guy/high-society girl romance is a contrived and overplayed one, and Jackman and Kidman aren’t stretching their acting skills in the slightest.

This tired romance also overshadows the more worthwhile story of assimilation in Australia, where Aboriginal children were removed from their families to be blended into white culture and purged of their heritage (a story more effectively depicted in the 2002 drama “Rabbit-Proof Fence”). Nullah, though, with a speaking pattern and attitude resembling Short Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” is mostly ineffective as a face of the tragedy. Instead he’s just another participant in a long parade of stereotypes.

“The only thing you ever own is your story,” says Drover at one point. The importance of storytelling is stated throughout “Australia,” but Luhrmann’s goal of creating his own epic yarn falls short. When “Australia” aims to entertain, it does just that. But when it finally asks us to care about its pair of stick-figure characters, it disappoints. “Australia” may be part “Casablanca,” part “African Queen,” and part “Gone With the Wind,” but the whole is worth awfully less than the sum of its parts.