Australia

On Tuesday, with two days to spare, I finally got around to doing my Christmas shopping, which meant a trip to New Hampshire. Around this part of Massachusetts, everyone heads up to the Granite State for a simple reason: there is no sales tax. Just across the state line, the outskirts of Nashua are slathered with a huge shopping mall and string of big box retailers that include every national chain that you can imagine. Not surprisingly, on Tuesday it was an utter madhouse.

The mid-afternoon traffic was a nightmare, and it was all I could do to get into the parking lot of my destination. But I managed to get things done quicker than I expected, and with energy to spare, I decided to reward myself by crossing another movie off my holiday wish list.

The choice seemed obvious: with the Christmas rush of releases only a few days away, I needed to cross off the last lingering November releases. That meant finally braving the theaters to see one I had put off for nearly a month: the big-budget epic romance Australia, which had had a good run, but which would surely not survive in multiplexes after this week.

My putting it off was not because I objected to the movie itself, only its running time. At two hours and forty-eight minutes, it would tax my woeful attention span, unless I was in the right mood. But today I was in the right mood. No excuses.

The AMC multiplex was actually a half mile south, on the Massachusetts side of the line in the town of Tyngsboro (map). Waiting through multiple rounds at each stop light, I fought my way back into the Bay State until, after twenty minutes of frustration, I slipped into the ample parking lot and came to a rest. At this point, spending three hours in a darkened auditorium seemed like a very appealing option. A few minutes later, the snarling chaos on Middlesex Road seemed like a faraway nightmare.

Twenty minutes into the movie I was completely ashamed of myself. I was loving every minute of it.

This is definitely one of the most classical stories of the entire year---not surprisingly it was written, directed, and produced outside of the United States. There are two major storylines: the first hour and half is largely in the format of a classic cattle drive Hollywood western such as Red River (1948). The last hour is largely a wartime drama. There are several unifying themes that cover both parts, including the romance between Lady Ashley (Nicole Kidman) and her drover (Hugh Jackman). Brian Brown plays a very suitable villain. It all went by very quickly.

Unlike many period pieces of late, the 1940s actually felt like, well, the 1940s. One of the principal reasons was that not only did Jackman turn in a sturdy Clark Gable-type performance worthy of the outback, but Kidman declined to play the heroine as a contemporary supercharged version of Katherine Hepburn (i.e., the way women "should have been" back then, dammit) but with a soft vulnerability in the vernacular of leading ladies from that era. There was plenty of Hepburn in Kidman, to be sure, but of all the actresses of that era, she reminded most of Rita Hayworth, who had her own brand of sturdy brashness mixed with at-times-fragile beauty.

If the movie felt classical, it was for a reason: to tell a story based on theme that was out-of-bounds in the 1940s, namely the theft of aboriginal children from their families by the Australian government, and by extension, the issue of race in Australian society.

In that respect, the movie has a nice, healthy postmodern consciousness of its own purpose. Storytelling is explictly presented as a core feature of aboriginal culture, and the aboriginal child must be with his own people so as to "live his story." That story is, of course, the very movie we are watching. That the movie is explicitly aware of its own power and duty to do this is beautifully spelled out in another layer, namely the repeated references to, and the explicit watching of, The Wizard of Oz (1939), which furthermore exploits the homophonic use of "Oz" to mean Australia itself.

That the movie can pull all of this off without being too clever is a testimony not only to the strength of the underlying classical paradigm itself, but the masterful art of writer and director Baz Luhrmann.

If you enjoyed Luhrmann's previous work in Moulin Rouge (2001) and Strictly Ballroomn (1992), you won't be at all disappointed by this movie. I think it's his best work yet. If you didn't, you still might like it. But if big-scale romantic epics set in the 1940s with touches of sentimentality and nostalgia aren't your thing, then none of this will matter.

The movie is probably not artistically daring enough to reap major award nominations, but if it does, I won't be objecting.