Film: Under Done

HOW much enjoyment you can milk out of the 155 minutes required to sit through Baz Luhrmann’s sprawling, teeming, and extremely silly epic Australia will depend on what you think about its most important character. Here I do not mean Nicole Kidman or Hugh Jackman, who technically headline the film-Kidman as the English noblewoman who inherits a cattle ranch in the late-1930s Outback, Jackman as the rugged Aussie known only as “the Drover” who becomes her business partner and then, inevitably, her lover. Nor do I mean the Land Down Under itself, whose picturesque topography is captured with swooping, soaring, God’s-eye camerawork throughout. (The Australian tourism industry has a $26 million ad campaign riding on the hope that the film becomes a hit.) No, the character I have in mind is Nullah (Brandon Walters), the half-caste part-Aborigine boy who becomes a surrogate son to Kidman’s Lady Ashley, and whose uneasy racial status provides the jumping-off point for the movie’s political ambitions.

Such ambitions are new to Luhrmann, whose past successes-his Shakespeareas-teen-soap Romeo+Juliet and the garish pop musical Moulin Rouge-lacked any high purpose save a fierce zeal to entertain. After a seven-year hiatus, though (spent staging La Bohème and failing to stage an Alexander the Great epic when Oliver Stone’s got off the ground first), he has more serious things in mind. The result is an epic that seeks to marry Old Hollywood grandeur to New Hollywood revisionism: Imagine Gone with the Wind refashioned as anti-slavery polemic, and you have roughly the idea of what Luhrmann’s going for.

About the Author

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat is a former National Review contributing editor.

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HOW much enjoyment you can milk out of the 155 minutes required to sit through Baz Luhrmann’s sprawling, teeming, and extremely silly epic Australia will depend on what you think about its most important character. Here I do not mean Nicole Kidman or Hugh Jackman, who technically headline the film-Kidman as the English noblewoman who inherits a cattle ranch in the late-1930s Outback, Jackman as the rugged Aussie known only as “the Drover” who becomes her business partner and then, inevitably, her lover. Nor do I mean the Land Down Under itself, whose picturesque topography is captured with swooping, soaring, God’s-eye camerawork throughout. (The Australian tourism industry has a $26 million ad campaign riding on the hope that the film becomes a hit.) No, the character I have in mind is Nullah (Brandon Walters), the half-caste part-Aborigine boy who becomes a surrogate son to Kidman’s Lady Ashley, and whose uneasy racial status provides the jumping-off point for the movie’s political ambitions.

Such ambitions are new to Luhrmann, whose past successes-his Shakespeareas-teen-soap Romeo+Juliet and the garish pop musical Moulin Rouge-lacked any high purpose save a fierce zeal to entertain. After a seven-year hiatus, though (spent staging La Bohème and failing to stage an Alexander the Great epic when Oliver Stone’s got off the ground first), he has more serious things in mind. The result is an epic that seeks to marry Old Hollywood grandeur to New Hollywood revisionism: Imagine Gone with the Wind refashioned as anti-slavery polemic, and you have roughly the idea of what Luhrmann’s going for.