I love Luhrmann.
I do. I think he is one of those directors who has incredibly good taste, loves to walk on the tightrope without a net (his logo at the top of Australia includes the line – paraphrased – “A Life Live Without Risk Is A Life Only Half Lived”), delivers images and conceits that no one else can manage to imitate effectively, and entertains the crap out of me pretty much every time out.
But Australia, sad to say, is a major malfunction.
I see two major problems with the film. Time, as in “he didn’t really have enough time to figure out what this thing really was” and Hubris, as in “I can’t believe he didn’t realize that he couldn’t deliver on every idea he wanted incorporated in this film without it being 3.5 hours and being much better designed around its tonal shifts.”
The Australia you are seeing in television commercials and the trailer… it’s in there… but that is not the movie, for the most part. It is the third act of the film, essentially. Just yesterday, I was writing about how wild first acts often make third act recoveries indefensible in film critics’ minds. In this case, unlike something like Fight Club, the third act isn’t just a logical extension of the first act or the second act. It is, to some extent, a different film.
Of course, the first act may or may not turn off critics and/or audiences. We’ll see. In the nation of Australia, I suspect that audiences will love it. Why? As it turned out, seeing the great Toronto documentary, Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (which pretty much ends with the Max Max series and doesn’t get to Priscilla: Queen of the Desert or Simply Ballroom), was a good prep for the first act of Australia… because classic Aussie comedic exploitation writ HUGE is mostly what the third act is. And in that context, it makes a beautiful stench.
The “creamy” half-aboriginal/half-white child who is the center of the movie – let’s see him in some ads! – starts to tell us the story of himself, the Lady from EngLAND (Ms. Kidman) and The Drover (Mr. Jackman, as a cattle driver, called by the Aussie colloquialism). And every beat is caricature. Kidman is comedically uptight. Jackman is impossibly rugged and beautiful. The heroic Aboriginal Grandpa is right our of Weir, but lit light a Chanel spokestribesman. And the beautiful little kid is spunky and insightful and ready to live his story.
We see Kidman walk into her outback house, surrounded by dirt, with a tense walk that seems out of the silents. You’re just waiting for the muted “wah wahs” on the trumpet. Jackman enters in the full Eastwood, taking on (and besting, as you know it must be) an entire bar of rude rowdies. The villain is without mustache… but twirling goes on anyway. It’s all played at outback farce speed. The great Jack Thompson plays one of his classic drunks… but he is so rheumy that even his rummy feels way over the top and lacking intimacy until his next –to-last scene. The only thing missing is Bruce Spence (who shows up later), Barry Crocker (who isn’t on the imdb cast list, but could well have turned up in some scene as an aging snoot), and Barry Humphries, in drag or out.
And right then, within 20 minutes, I knew that this film was 90% unlikely to be an Oscar nominee. No, that is not all that counts. But this expensive movie could use the support of a nomination, at least for the U.S. Box office in Australia should be more forgiving, I expect. But the biggest problem in this regard is misleading expectations. I knew, right then, that if the film didn’t snap out of it in a huge way, many audiences – especially the Academy audience, seeing the film in a stampede of other hopefuls - would reject it right then. “We were sold a period drama and we got a wacky Capra-on-acid thing with a kid we didn’t even know was in the movie at the center of it all.”
The tone shifts significantly at about the 80 minutes mark. But for me, while it was not too late for redemption – regardless of many wonderful and wondrous images and ideas up until then – there was a big problem at the heart of this thing. As I write, the child, Brandon Walters, a small 10 when the film was made, is really the center of the film. And more significantly, the issue of half-breed children and The Lost Generation really is the heart of the film. But it’s a romance. But it’s a cattle drive action film. But it’s really a political film about racial tolerance.
Luhrmann might have been able to pull this off with another six months before release. It is a brutal task. Very few directors have the talent to keep all of those diverse balls in the air. It takes a gift for shortcuts and distractions, which Luhrmann has. But it just doesn’t come together here. But unlike any of his other films, you can sense ideas jumping in and out without much support. Hell, in the third act, a MAJOR transition involving the villain of the film is done is a montage. Huh?
Is it a movie about this great romance of discovery… the classic Out of Africa deal with more comedy? Or is it this Weir/Noyce thing about enlightenment? I would say it feels like “too much vermouth” or “not enough vermouth,” but what it really feels like is “why are 20 maraschino cherries in my martini” or “Mommy, my Shirley Temple tastes like he put gasoline in it!” And that, I am afraid, is the kind of thing that a great filmmaker can work out in post. But Baz did not. Not this time.
The film was cut by Dody Dorn and Michael McClusker, both Fox veterans, both Oscar guys, both know their way in and out of fixes. (Dorn, I believe, cut both versions of Kingdom of Heaven for Fox… the much superior original version released on DVD.) But they didn’t have the time this time.
There are many delights to be found amidst the wreckage. Luhrmann is a master of the visual and there are magical images, even when they seem to make little sense in the film. There is a scene, for instance, where a contraction becomes very, very dangerous. But the audience has no way of knowing this… unless they know how the contraction works in real life. Now, the threat to life is beautiful in its way. But as storytelling, it fails to let the audience in on the danger and doesn’t get the benefit of surprising us when it takes the step. While you are gazing at some great visual work (shot by Mandy Walker, working a feature with Luhrmann for the first time), you’re also scratching your head about how and why it is happening the way it is.
If you have any attraction to either Ms Kidman or Mr Jackman, Catherine Martin dressed them to within an air bubble of their skins. You will never see Ms. Kidman look more like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, in spite of a wardrobe that doesn’t uncover much. It is like Ms Martin took body casts of the two, took the fashions of the time, and made sure that the audience was, either consciously or unconsciously, aware of the exact shape of the butts, the chests, and the lines in between in a way that was as close to naked as clothes can be (sans naughty bits).
Ms. Martin’s production design is also first rate, with an intriguing blend of reality and hyper-reality in the bigger picture period sections.
The ending, much rumored about, is a non-issue. It works fine. It could have been something else and worked fine. But by the time you get there, the emotional swivel headedness of the film will have worn out most people. Every time it states its intentions and delivers upon them, it hits it out of the park. But it just doesn’t happen often enough. And when it does, far too often, it feels like a karaoke of great films that did these scenes better, whether the work of John Ford, Lawrence Kasden or Jim Cameron, amongst many. Pastiche is a key element in Luhrmann’s toolbox, so normally, I would overlook this as an issue. But I couldn’t overlook it… I wasn’t getting nourishment enough from what I was being fed to be in the reverie that great work – especially Luhrmann’s – creates.
I would LOVE to see what Luhrmann could come up with given another six months in the cutting room. I think it might be the odd, but truly powerful film he had in his head after that work. This is not a matter of slicing up something that already works to make it work less well in the name of running time, as was Kingdom of Heaven or the edit of Almost Famous. This is a movie that is not yet well defined, however accomplished. And man, that is frustrating… like Godfather 3 frustrating.
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2008/11/review_the_trou.html