Australia
It seems so rare today that we get the super-budgeted, sumptuous epics of the David Lean / Cecil B. DeMille style that when one comes along finally audiences almost seem to take it for granted, as with this 2008 release by director Baz Luhrmann, which certainly paints a romanticized vision of its title country in the late thirties and early forties, but couples that with a luminous eye for detail and expansive cinematography. Nicole Kidman plays a British aristocrat who travels Down Under to join her husband in his cattle business, only to find he has been murdered and comes under pressure from the cattle king of the country (Bryan Brown) to sell out her land to him and return home. To this end, she employs a salt of the earth type known as the Drover (Hugh Jackman) to help her drive the cattle across the Australian wilderness so that she may outbid Brown on a government beef contract. Kidman, long criticized for her continued aristocratic roles (which may have led to her being nearly considered box office poison in the U.S.), nonetheless plays her part with aplomb, as a woman out of her element and uncomfortable with her surroundings who learns to adapt and embark on a romance with Jackman (complete with old-fashioned chemistry), who likewise comes through with an entertaining performance that refrains from the usual tough Aussie clichés, as we learn that he has been mostly ostracized by his fellow whites for having once been married to a black Aboriginal woman. Shockingly, the film is actually anchored by 12 year old Brandon Walters, discovered out of nowhere by Luhrmann, who plays a half-breed youth that helps Kidman discover her motherly side while bringing her and Jackman together for the cattle drive (which he rides along with). Walters is actually a pretty likable kid that never crosses the line into cloying cuteness or irritability, and the fact that he carries this big budget movie from beginning to end (and has the most screen time) is especially impressive given his internationally renowned co-stars. Also part of the cast is real-life legendary Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil (best known in America as Crocodile Dundee’s humorous sidekick-“Mick, you frighten shit out of me”) as the boy’s mystic grandfather who watches over the main characters and saves their bacon on more than one occasion; while Brown (best known for F/X and Cocktail) brings some authority to a role sadly cut short in the story. The big drawback acting-wise is LOTR star David Wenham as the cookie-cutter villain, basically your typical he-man asshole who wears out his welcome quickly but hangs around as the main antagonist for the whole movie when this viewer would have liked nothing more than to see him get taken out a half hour in, though the script does deserve credit for fully exploiting the one interesting dynamic about the character (that he is the half-breed boy’s biological father). Of course, the whole story does lead up to World War II, and the Japanese attack on the shores of Australia, in order to give the film some historical meaning, along with the government’s predilection at the time of taking half-breed children away from their families and placing them in mission camps in order to “civilize” them, which sets up the lead characters’ attempts to reunite their family despite the turmoil around them. As previously stated, the gorgeous cinematography with its sweeping panoramas allows the viewer to marvel at the beautiful, untamed place that the land of Oz remains today (even throwing in several references to The Wizard Of Oz for effect), but about 2/3rd of the way through the film Luhrmann gets a bit carried away with the pulling into a long shot technique, which in turn gives the film a series of “false finishes”, i.e. leading the viewer to think that the movie is ending by the style of music and camerawork only to jarringly cut to something else instead. Still, the film can be seen as a rather painless experience with a near 3-hour running time that overall, definitely deserved a number of Oscars for its wonderful technical achievements…
8/10