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Outback Fakehouse | Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman share a clinch in Australia

AUSTRALIA
Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Starring Nicole Kidman, David Gulpilil, Brandon Walters, David Wenham. Now playing.
*1/2

I can’t think of many end-of-the-year, Oscar-season Hollywood epics that have gotten off to a worse start than Baz Luhrmann’s Australia. Where to begin? The title crawl that calls 1939 Northern Australia a land where “romance and adventure were a way of life” before blithely going onto describe the Australian government’s practice of removing mixed-race Australian children (so-called “creamies”) from their homes? The voiceover narration by a young “creamie” named Nullah (Brandon Walters), delivered in Jar Jar-esque pidgin English that may well be linguistically accurate but whose eager-to-please cheerfulness sounds uncomfortably close to minstrelsy to modern ears? Or the scenes of uptight British aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) screaming and grimacing at every rough-and-tumble aspect of life Down Under — scenes Kidman overplays so grotesquely she makes Kate Capshaw in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom seem like Jack Benny by comparison?

Ah, but Lady Sarah quickly has her hoity-toity airs kicked out of her when she arrives at her husband’s ranch in Faraway Downs and learns that not only has he been killed (supposedly by an older Aborigine named King Edward, but actually by “King” Carney, the scheming cattle baron across the river) but that the only way for her to hang onto her property is to drove her cattle — Aussies say “drove,” not “drive” — across the outback to the port city of Darwin. And if she wants to do that, she’s going to need the help of The Drover (Hugh Jackman), a free-spirited horseman who once married a black woman and has been an outcast from white society ever since.

The first (and more entertaining) half of Australia is devoted to the cattle drive, which Carney’s minions do everything in their power to sabotage, and to the budding romance between Lady Sarah and The Drover. Luhrmann provides some nice shots of the rugged Australian landscape and there’s a stampede sequence during which you get to see some cows run off the edge of a cliff. Good times — assuming you can put up with the film’s condescending handling of Nullah, who has magical Aborigine powers that enable him to stop cattle from stampeding just by singing to them.

Things really bog down in the shamelessly melodramatic second half, during which Nullah is hauled off to a school on a nearby island, Lady Sarah and The Drover split up, the Japanese bomb Darwin into rubble, and “Over the Rainbow” plays on the soundtrack approximately three dozen times. Lady Sarah is falsely reported to be dead for the second time in the film, a black man nobly sacrifices himself so that Hugh Jackman can survive, Nullah learns to play “Over the Rainbow” on his boomerang-shaped harmonica, and King Edward gets thrown in jail, only to escape just in time to throw a spear through the bad guy’s chest. (It should be said that King Edward is played by the great Aborigine actor David Gulpilil, star of Walkabout, The Last Wave, Rabbit-Proof Fence, and Ten Canoes, and who brings an unmistakable authenticity to the film, even when his character is standing in the middle of a completely computer-generated battle scene.)

The script’s attempt to be a period picture, a romance, a Western, and a war movie all at once — combined with the use of The Wizard of Oz as a touchstone of “movie magic” — suggest that Luhrmann started out trying to make Australia into some kind of self-consciously synthetic, cliché-embracing superepic, a movie that would do for David Lean-style widescreen filmmaking what Moulin Rouge did for musicals. But when he also decided to make the Aboriginal “stolen generations” part of Australia’s storyline, something went tonally haywire with the project — when you write your romantic leads as one-dimensional, that can come across as intentional camp, but when you write your Aborigine characters with the same lack of depth, it has a way of coming across as insensitive at best, racist at worst.

Hugh Jackman caricatures his virility just enough to get through the picture without embarrassing himself, but Nicole Kidman is not so lucky; her strangely frozen features are a constant distraction (especially in a movie set in the 1930s), at odds with her character’s supposed embrace of her spartan new surroundings.

And the whole thing is nearly three hours! It’s enough to drove any reasonable moviegoer crazy.