Grab a glass of Poor Fella Rum, push play, and prepare to go down under and over the rainbow to 1940’s Australia. Was it worth the trip? Well, halfway. There are some great scenes of Oz and some fine acting, but the second half of the film (and there was enough for two films) worked better for me than the first.
It’s 1939 and Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) is going down under to force her husband to sell his cattle concern at Faraway Downs, Australia. She has imaginings of her husband cheating in the bush and wants him back in England.
She arrives at Darwin and her husband has sent his most valued man, simply called “Drover” (Hugh Jackman), an independent mover of livestock, to escort her back to the ranch… as soon as he finishes with a hellacious bar fight.
It’s dislike at first sight for the two (so you know that romance will blossom, if only Lady Ashley wasn’t married). Faraway Downs is the only bit of cattle land that “King” Carney (Bryan Brown) doesn’t own and he watches Lady Ashley’s arrival with the hopes that she’ll force her husband to sell out to him.
Lady Ashley and Drover arrive at the ranch to discover that her husband has been murdered, supposedly by the aboriginal King George (David Gulpilil). The manager of the ranch, Neil Fletcher (David Wenham), expresses encouragement to Lady Ashley to sell but we know that he’s in cahoots with Carney. The ranch appears to be in ruins with drunkard accountant Kipling Flynn (Jack Thompson), a Chinese cook, and two aboriginal servants manning the post.
A young aboriginal boy, Nullah (Brandon Walters), is half white and is on the run from the authorities who want to send him away to an isolated island run by the church to try and drive the “black” out of them. When he exposes Fletcher for the scoundrel that he is, Lady Ashley takes a shine to the boy. She also fires Fletcher and to secure the future of Faraway Downs has to drive their cattle across the outback and back to Darwin to get an expensive contract from the military, who is preparing for war.
She tempts Drover into helping her by saying she’ll help him realize his dream of breeding an expensive English breed of horse with a wild outback stud (and that won’t be the only breeding going on…).
So the ragtag group sets off to drive the cattle to Darwin and beat the “King” at his own game and that’s just the first part of the film as war enters into the picture and the rise of the scoundrel Fletcher threaten to tear Lady Ashley, Nullah, and Drover asunder.
Australia is director Baz Luhrmann’s valentine to the land of his birth. It’s also a valentine, in my opinion, to the films that graced the silver screen in the time period in which the film is set, the 1940s.
Baz does many things right, but there are a few missteps in my humble opinion. All in all, I did greatly enjoy the film and Hugh Jackman has a charm about his as if they’d cloned some of the great movies stars of the age (Cary Grant, Clark Gable, “The Man with No Name,” and the like) and put them into one being that just happens to have an adamantium skeleton and claws.
The film is easily divided in two with the cattle drive possibly encompassing part one and the war story serving as part two. In 1940s cinema I could see part two being a sequel to the first part.
Young Brandon Walters is a discovery and he was the beating heart of the film. If you’re going to make a film about Australia, you just have to have the Man from Snowy River himself – Jack Thompson. His character is the kind that I always root for, the one that is drowning in the bottle until he decides to saddle up and make better of himself.
David Gulpilil and the other aboriginal cast have quiet nobility that speaks highly of their people, David Ngoobujarra as Drover’s pal also gives a fine performance. You may have noticed by now that I’ve talked about most everyone but Nicole Kidman. It’s because I found her character a bit shrill and not served well by some goofball comedy at the beginning of the film that I never thought her character recovered from entirely.
That would be the reason that I thought the first part of the film didn’t jell with the second part as well. The comedy felt very Hollywood, putting two characters together who we just know are going to be the romantic leads. It was a hair bothersome, but I think Kidman recovered a bit with the more dramatic war scenes.
David Wenham plays Fletcher as a moustache twirling villain. Bryan Brown also cameos, but I found his “King” a bit more human than Fletcher and liked how he was somewhat amused when Drover and Lady Ashley got the better of him. There are some wonderful views of Australia in the film and it makes you want to pack your bags and go to your travel agent. However, it’s also tempered with some very obvious CGI.
In the end, I liked the film and appreciated the 40s feel. It was probably those “old fashioned” elements that turned some people off, but felt the “Gone with the Wind” second half of the film outweighed the first. I just wish that Nicole hadn’t been so shrill at the outset.
Australia is presented in anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1) and is enhanced for 16x9 televisions. You can just smell the double dip coming someday since the only special feature is 3 minutes of deleted scenes. Luhrmann’s other films have been given better treatment on DVD and I imagine that Australia will get that treatment… but somewhere down the road.
I did like Australia and it reminded me of those grand films of yesterday. Unfortunately, Nicole Kidman didn’t do it for me. I always got the impression that she was acting and sometimes overacting. Jackman is just himself, a star. He has a certain old Hollywood chic that just oozes out of him. Young Brandon Walters is a delight and a discovery. I would’ve liked more special features and expect that we’ll see them do a more expansive set in the future.
Australia is now available at Amazon . It is available for pre-order at AmazonUK for an April 27th release. Visit the DVD database for more information.
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