"Australia"

No one could possibly conceive what Baz Luhrmann would possibly do with a war movie. Turns out he was making the antipodal version of "Pearl Harbor," complete with a pointless series of mini-plots that fritter away two hours of time before a sudden ruthless attack by phantom-like Japanese airplanes attempts in vain to add a sense of depth and historical sweep to what is actually a one-note soap opera shot like a pop art propaganda poster. "Australia," like "Pearl Harbor," centers on an emotional triangle of people whose mutual love is so heavily remarked upon but so little in evidence that after awhile you begin to suspect everyone onscreen suffered partial lobotomies immediately before the film started.

In "Pearl Harbor," the triangle is romantic, which is lame, but involves Kate Beckinsale, which is nice; in "Australia," the triangle is more familial, and centers on the multicultural cross-strata family dynamic which develops between Nicole Kidman (who acts the shit out of her ridiculous role and is awesome but underutilized), Hugh Jackman (who scarcely seems to act but exhudes enough charisma that you almost believe it when his character regularly shifts from Clint Eastwood to Crocodile Dundee to Cary Grant), and Brandon Walters, who carries the whole dramatic weight of the movie's larger themes - institutional racism and the conflict of civilization against the wild are but two college-level topics that get chatted about once or twice - on his tiny shoulders, playing a young half-Aboriginal, half-white kid who occasionally narrates the film but mostly hangs about waiting to find out if the evil white people or the good white people will decide his fate.

The anti-racist message of the film is handled so obliquely, with such a weird blend of naivete and political correctness, that it actually emerges feeling weirdly colonialist, if not, well, racist. Jackman's character is careful to loudly honor aboriginal culture throughout the movie, but the film's vision of aboriginal culture is basically personified by an elder named King George, who, it pains me to inform you, spends the first hour of the movie standing on a hillside dancing by a fire and singing songs with Yoda lyrics which seem to telepathically speak to characters sleeping miles away. (The other primary black character in the film is Jackman's sidekick, who only speaks when spoken to and might as well walk around with a target on his head.)

We can argue back and forth about Luhrmann's treatment of aboriginal culture - certainly, the film critiques the shallowness of white civilization, and anyone who dares utter a racist remark gets their eventual comeuppance - but the King George character is never allowed to interact with anyone, and seems to float above the fray like a halfway Messiah figure (example: in an eye-popping shot which looks unfortunately like something out of a Michael Bay film, King George stands in the middle of a missile run without being hurt.)

Armchair sociology aside, more than half of "Australia" is much worse than anything you thought Luhrmann was capable of. This is one of those movies, like Wes Anderson's "Life Aquatic" or Michael Mann's "Miami Vice," where a great director's imprint is unmistakable but somehow everything that works so well in their great films works impossibly, terribly, simply not at all. Like those other misfires, this was a film conceived by a director in the throes of passion - Wes Anderson first doodled "Life Aquatic" as sketches in a middle-school notebook, Michael Mann created the original "Miami Vice" and wanted to update and correct its glammy glitz, and Baz Luhrmann seems set on filming THE definitive historical epic of Australia, both the real continent and some fantasyland Oz that exists our dreams, or the dreams of all Australians, or the dreams of Baz Luhrmann.

It took the guy 8 years after "Moulin Rouge!" to make this movie, and in that time, two other films have been made which way stole his thunder. "Rabbit-Proof Fence" was a far more realistic depiction of the Stolen Generation (half-white, half-Aboriginal kids who were taken from their parents and forcibly injected into white society); it was also far more exciting, and its vision of the Outback seemed genuinely frightening, and expansive, and demanding adventure (in "Australia," the Outback plays itself, unconvincingly.) "The Proposition" was a fierce anti-western about order and chaos waging war at the dawn of Australian civilization. It was a totally ludicrous film - like "Australia," it boiled the myriad forces of history down to a few characters prone to speechifying. But unlike "Australia," "The Proposition" seemed to view each of its characters with equal measures of belief and suspicion - there truly was no one in the right.

Here, Kidman and Jackman must represent old-Hollywood romance, contemporary post-feminist love, and politically correct multiculturalist do-goodery. They play nice people falling in nice love, and so the movie is really an epic ode to niceness. Bored my fucking eyes out.