Tuesday, Dec. 02, 2008

'Australia' insults, irritates

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

It's a pretty bold move to name a movie after a country.

What if, like Australia, the movie is terrible? Does it then represent the whole nation? Does it become OK to hate all Australians because they're at least indirectly linked to a film that made us suffer? Actually, forget hate. Is it okay to bomb them? Maybe just a little? Trust me, this movie was an unwarranted act of aggression, and someone needs to pay.

That's why, no matter what they're about, every book, movie, and Disney miniseries I ever write will be named after ex-girlfriends. So sure, Val: The True Story of the Biggest Liar Ever is actually about a boy and his dog, and Susan Is So Crazy She Thinks What She Does Is Normal is really about two robots on the run. At least if they turn out awful I'll only be insulting a single person rather than slandering an entire country, which is more than can be said for Australia.

Nicole Kidman, convinced her cattle baron husband is whoring around Australia rather than baroning cattle, flies out from England to confront him. After being escorted to the ranch by Hugh Jackman, she finds it rather difficult to do anything to her husband, as he's recently been speared to death.

To make things worse, it turns out the reason the ranch has been failing is because hired hand David Wenham has been stealing their cattle and giving them to Kidman's rival. When Kidman fires Wenham, he takes his crew with him -- leaving the ranch with no one to drive their herd to the port.

No one, that is, but Jackman, who's talked into leading Kidman and a motley crew on the cattle drive, dogged all the way by Wenham and the men who seek to destroy them.

Oh, right, and once all that is more or less wrapped up, there's still an entire other movie's worth of tedious shit to go.

Australia is long. I don't know how this is possible, but it's longer than the actual history of Australia. It's so long the world's longest hot dog watched it and thought it was too long. It's not the 165 minutes that are the problem, it's that they pass with that high schoolish feel of several years of your life being sacrificed and there's nothing you can do about it.

Chief culprit in Australia's massive draggitude is director Baz Luhrmann, whose main advice to his actors seems to be "More. More! MORE!!!" Kidman leads the movie's Turbo Ham Squad in being loud, obnoxious, and horrible, as if she's gunning for the blue ribbon in a Most Intolerable competition where we're all losers.

Or maybe Luhrmann, who clearly doesn't trust us to pick up on the subtleties of normal human behavior, always went with Kidman's biggest take. Perhaps he's looking to expand his audience to astronauts with binoculars.

More likely, he's simply bad at what he does, and doesn't understand that manipulating viewers, as he does in his nonstop scenes where we're supposed to believe someone's died when really they're not dead (in the biz, they call this "suspense"!), is more likely to make us feel resentful than whatever syrupy emotion he's actually gunning for.

Once Australia is done being breezy, cheesy, and generally insufferable -- and God help me, that part lasted a solid hour and a half -- it schizophrenically switches gears from rollicking action to a slightly less awful combo of revenge drama, family melodrama, and wince-worthily clumsy commentary on Australia's mistreatment of the Aborigines. If I had to judge, and boy am I going to, I'd cast fault on its four-man writing team.

Remember the Stripper Theory of Screenwriting: one or two can be great, three or more just leaves everyone frustrated, confused and bad-sweaty. In plot and tone, Australia has no idea what it's about. A couple decent action scenes can't rescue it from being insulting, dull and constantly misguided. It's not a good sign when a boring final hour is an improvement over everything that came before it.

Grade: D