Now Showing at Sawtell Cinema

Australia
Rating: M Running Time: 2 hrs 45 mins

Session Times: Wed 26-Nov 10:00 am, Wed 26-Nov 3:45 pm, Wed 26-Nov 7:30 pm

Synopsis:

In northern Australia prior to World War II, an English aristocrat inherits a cattle station the size of Maryland. When English cattle barons plot to take her land, she reluctantly joins forces with a rough-hewn stock-man to drive 2,000 head of cattle across hundreds of miles of the country's most unforgiving land, only to still face the bombing of Darwin, Australia, by the Japanese forces that had attacked Pearl Harbor only months earlier.

Review by Andrew L. Urban:
It’s not the size that matters most in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, it’s the many details, the intimate, personal moments, the connection with and respect for the Aboriginal culture in the context of human interaction, and the evil that greed makes men callously do. But that’s not to dismiss the gloriously dramatic landscape that Mandy Walker captures with great finesse, nor the sweep of the story over three important years, up to the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese.

And as we would expect from Baz, he makes maximum use of music; and I’m not just referring to David Hirschfelder’s marvellous score. What a leap of cinematic faith it is to weave into this rich story the best known song from The Wizard of Oz, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, making it an iconic and symbolic glue for the cultures and the dreams of the characters. This is for me the film’s most sophisticated and complex element, a piece of creative brio. A whole essay could be written on this – and probably will be.

Also as you would expect from a cast made up of the most experienced and well known Australian actors, the performances are excellent – especially once the film’s dramatic engine is switched on. Like David Wenham doing venom as Neil Fletcher . . . But the performances of the lesser known actors, like Lillian Crombie, David Ngoombujurra as one of The Drover’s team, and especially young Brandon Walters as Nullah, the storyteller through whose eyes we see it and by whose narration we hear it, are wonderful revelations.

There are a couple of quibbles; one to do with the detail of the ending (not the ending itself), another to do with poor continuity in the same scene; and perhaps some of the performances at the beginning of the film are a little brittle and see-through. The other quibble is with the scene of a dozen Big Red kangaroos bouncing alongside a truck in the desert, as if taken from (or intended for) a Tourism Australia commercial.

But these things don’t stop us engaging with the film, and some of the big moments, like the cattle stampede towards a precipice, or the bombing of Darwin and subsequent rescues, deliver their payload of tension and carry us to the next chapter.

The romance between The Drover (Hugh Jackman - solid in every sense) and Sarah (Nicole Kidman – nicely judged character arc) is carefully calibrated and well judged – and executed, albeit the one bedroom scene, while tasteful and stylish, is oblique and short. It’s a family film ...

Perhaps above all, credit to the storytelling, so frequently and sincerely celebrated throughout the screenplay in the context of its importance to all human beings. This film was always going to sink or swim on its ability to deliver a story that lives up to the extraordinary expectation (unfairly) placed on Baz and Catherine and the entire team.