Baz Luhrmann uses up all of his available reserves of ambition to mount a movie epic on a scale never before attempted in his homeland. But while Australia has the girth of a great movie, it sadly lacks the carriage.
If never exactly bad, it’s also never better than pretty good, and faint praise is not what Luhrmann and his movie are after, especially not with a running time that nears three hours. No, they demand awe, though the only piece of scenery that’s likely to attract much of that is Hugh Jackman’s burly chest. Beefcake doesn’t come any beefier than Jackman does as Drover, an Aussie he-man who helps Nicole Kidman’s English aristo Sarah save her cattle ranch from financial ruin. In the film’s latter stages, the two endure the travails of WWII in order to protect Nullah (Brandon Walters), the mixed-race boy who’s become their surrogate son.
The stars strive hard to seem suitably iconic amid Luhrmann’s borrowings from classic westerns, melodramas and war films of yesteryear. They occasionally achieve it, too, but Luhrmann seems unsure whether he’s asking us to fully invest ourselves in his hokum or regard it at a remove. As a result, the film is better at telegraphing its characters’ emotions than compelling us to share them. Moreover, the director’s efforts to summarize all that is noble and painful in his country’s history inevitably seem facile — for instance, the decency of the white characters can be entirely summed up by how well they commune with the aboriginals. This is most definitely the kind of big, blustery, pop-mythic epic that Hollywood doesn’t make any more but maybe we should be thankful for that — they’re bloody exhausting.