- This is what the trailer would have you believe, at the very least. Problem is, Baz Luhrmann desperately wants the movie to be about something else entirely in order to give the film a more serious moral centre. At the start of the film we’re given information about the Stolen Generations, who were children of Aboriginal descent taken from their families to live in missions and government agencies (a.k.a. what all white governments like to do to all indigenous peoples, no matter what country they’re in) and again at the end we’re given more info on the ultimate plight of these kids and the government of Australia’s formal apology to these people in 2008. This is some intense, heavy stuff and although I don’t know very much about this story at all, I know that it’s one that needs to be told due to its own inherent importance. Instead, it’s used as a springboard for a sloppy, sappy romance. I’m sure (hoping?) that Lurhmann’s intent was to draw people in with the romance in order to tell them a more meaningful story but instead he manages to co-opt a people’s history so we can watch Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman moon at each other. Crikey.
- This movie is all sprawling end epic and trying its hardest to be Gone With The Wind 2: Y’all Are Down Under Now! Nicole Kidman is a prissy woman who thinks she’s the hottest thing going and won’t get her hands dirty until the outbreak of war gives her a much needed dose of reality and she becomes moderately likeable (in theory). Hugh Jackman is a man who takes orders from just one person: himself. He ain’t in it for your revolution, sister. I felt like at some point he should have said “I believe in Rhett Butler, he’s the only cause I know.”
- Luhrmann has really toned down the PoMo freneticism that colours Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet. He still keeps a highly stylized visual approach to the film that manages to create a world you’d never be able to see in real life, but now it’s done to pay homage to old movies rather than to create a unique world for his characters to inhabit. It looks beautiful but feels empty.
- The first ten or twenty minutes of this movie are the only parts where it feels like the Luhrmann you’ve loved (or hated) from past films. The acting is purposely over the top and silly, and you know it’s very tongue in cheek in places. I cannot believe that the scene with Hugh Jackman bathing himself is meant to be anything but intensely, intensely ironic. There’s just no way. But Luhrmann drops that schtick pretty early on and is pretty friggin earnest for the rest of the movie. The pinnacle of this is when Nicole Kidman’s character goes to a ball and Hugh Jackman, who is reviled by the locals because he hangs out with the aborigines, shows up because he loves her and because he doesn’t care if he society won’t accept him (etc.). This scene is absolutely hysterical because the way their expressions are shot, especially Hugh Jackman’s, are so, so epically melodramatic and over the top that you’d think Luhrmann was being cheesy on purpose. But he’s not! Oh how he’s not. I think he means it. I think we’re meant to understand their Love Is Real™.
I think we’re also meant to understand that I’m way, way too cynical for a movie that unfolds its story like this.
- Normally I would totally do Hugh Jackman, but I can’t when he’s being this silly. (Also: he doesn’t know I exist.) Wolverine needs to come out, like, yesterday.
- I’m glad Faramir ended up growing a mustache by the end of the movie because he really was the quintessential stereotypical mustachioed villain. He did not die nearly early enough in the movie nor fast enough.
- The good thing about this movie is that it understands that in creating an epic, you have to do everything on an epic scale. That means if you’re going to completely fail, you’re going to go all out and flame out like a Viking funeral. Everything that is bad about this movie is exaggeratedly bad, which means it’s that much easier to laugh at it as your only way to cope with it being nearly three hours long. I had a laughing fit in the parking lot afterwards, it was uncontrollable.
Australia
Spectacular failure in epic proportions.
IMDB Plot Synopsis Set in northern Australia before World War II, an English aristocrat who inherits a sprawling ranch reluctantly pacts with a stock-man in order to protect her new property from a takeover plot. As the pair drive 2,000 head of cattle over unforgiving landscape, they experience the bombing of Darwin, Australia, by Japanese forces firsthand.