Down-Under Epic 'Australia': Grandly Over TopAustralian aboriginals believe that everyday reality co-exists with an infinite state of being called the Dreamtime. Baz Luhrmann does his own version of that dualism in "Australia," an epic adventure, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, with outsize ambitions and a 165-minute run time. The film's reality is far from everyday, what with romance, murder, a cattle drive, a stampede, the outbreak of World War II and a Japanese air raid on the city of Darwin. Yet it's almost naturalistic in comparison to the magic realism reserved for Nullah, a mixed-race aboriginal boy, and for the ancient culture that claims him. Sometimes Luhrmann seems to be living in a Dreamtime of his own; his movie is all over the map. But what a gorgeous map it is. The too-muchness, like the too-longness, befits the Northern Territory's vastness. In its heart of hearts "Australia" is an old-fashioned Western -- a Northern, if you will -- and all the more enjoyable for it.
The action begins as a cross between a spaghetti Western and a comedy of manners. Nicole Kidman's ultra-twee Lady Sarah Ashley flies from England to Australia, where her husband has been running a remote cattle station; her purpose is to sell the property, which has been hemorrhaging cash, and bring her husband home. Hugh Jackman is the raffish Aussie cattle drover who meets her on her arrival, then joins forces with her against his better judgment. (He's a drover named Drover. If that isn't movie-mythic, what is?) Soon Sarah finds herself repurposed into an apprentice drover, English-saddled and constantly addled by Drover's rough-hewn ways. The mismatched lovers-to-be drive 2,000 head of cattle through lunar landscapes (imagine a desiccated "Red River" with red dirt) accompanied by Nullah, the story's narrator, sawed-off shaman and, in a very real -- i.e., magical -- sense, its soul. (Mandy Walker did the spectacular cinematography.)
Nullah calls Sarah Mrs. Boss, "the strangest woman I ever seen." She is definitely strange, insisting on good manners as if etiquette were the key to Outback survival. Kidman also makes her very funny: I particularly enjoyed Sarah's scrambled retelling, for Nullah's benefit, of "The Wizard of Oz," and her halting rendition of "Over the Rainbow." (Both the story and the song figure as importantly as "Pinocchio" did in Steven Spielberg's "A.I.") Hugh Jackman can be amusing, too: Drover displays his impressive musculature for Sarah's benefit while rinsing himself off on the trail. Mostly, though, he's manly, attractive and not terrifically interesting. Russell Crowe famously had first dibs on the role, so it's tempting to wonder how he might have played it, but I would have settled for some of the extravagance of Jackman's work as Wolverine in the "X-Men" series. Or, come to think of it, the lustiness of Robert Mitchum's sheep drover in Fred Zinnemann's grand Australian opus "The Sundowners."
In "Australia's" scheme of things, young Nullah, descended from a tribal elder called King George, becomes the child that neither Sarah nor Drover ever had; Brandon Walters, in his film debut, plays him with an eerie proficiency that made me wonder if Jackie Coogan had aboriginal blood. (King George is played by David Gulpilil, the aboriginal star of Nicolas Roeg's 1971 classic "Walkabout.") But Nullah can be a problem child, endearing and insufferable in equal measure. He narrates in a studiously picturesque pidgin English that may reflect the period accurately but still sounds ghastly to modern ears: "Grandfather teach me most important lesson of all -- tellem story." (Nullah is a passionate advocate of story in a film beset by severe storytelling lapses; four credited writers, including Baz Luhrmann, haven't created a coherent script.) He has superpowers when they're needed -- this kid could have been the greatest cowboy of all time -- but they are so sweeping that you're surprised he has problems at all.
The film's treatment of aboriginal culture is reverential, or earnest to the point of self-parody. No Stone Age cliché goes unturned -- walkabout, boomerangs, doodlings on the didgeridoo. No mountain or promontory -- no water tower, for that matter -- goes unsurmounted by a silent, stork-legged aboriginal warrior wielding a spear. Yet earnestness triumphs in the end, for "Australia" has serious things on its mind and, like "Hawaii" long before it, gets serious things said. Nullah belongs to Australia's "stolen generation," mixed-race aboriginal children who became victims of state-sanctioned kidnappings when they were torn from their outback families to be trained as domestic servants. If there was ever a seamless way to combine that somber theme with the entertaining -- and equally earnest -- exploits of Sarah and Drover, Luhrmann and his colleagues didn't find it. What they did find was a symbolic way for the heroine and her reluctant hero to expiate the racist sins of a nation's past.
Gus Van Sant's "Milk," with Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, opens on the late gay activist and San Francisco supervisor dictating into a tape recorder. The year is 1978, and the words are taken from a tape, full of foreboding, that Milk did in fact dictate shortly before he, and the city's mayor, George Moscone, were shot to death by a former supervisor, Dan White. The sequence is an enthralling example of minimalist acting -- we're pulled in by a voice hardly raised above a murmur, and by barely varied tones that somehow convey deep feeling. And we stay in through the all-too-brief span of Milk's career, from his start as a community organizer to his victory as the nation's first openly gay candidate to win a major political office. More than acting, though, Penn's performance is a marvelous act of empathy in a movie that, for all its surprisingly conventional style, measures up to its stirring subject.
It's a performance that made me think, surprisingly enough, of Forest Whitaker's brilliant work as the mad Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland." Not that Milk was mad, any more than he was African; the salient quality in his public life was his bountiful humanity, coupled with a canny instinct for finding or creating political opportunities. But Amin had previously been the subject of a superb documentary, just as Milk's life and career had been celebrated in Rob Epstein's "The Times of Harvey Milk," which won the Oscar it deserved in 1984. In Sean Penn's case, as in Forest Whitaker's, inspired acting both complements and transcends a filmed record of real life.
ნიქოლ ქიდმანი / Nicole Kidman, ვისაუბროთ მსახიობზე
