directed by Baz Lurhmann
starring: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman
Australia/USA 2008; screened 29 November 2008 at AMC Theatres

originally published 11 January 2009 on Jandy’s Meanderings

I admit that I haven’t read many reviews of Australia in toto, but the snippets I have read and the general critical feeling indicates that most critics didn’t think it was very good. At all. And in fact, in many ways, they’re right. Australia is a mess. But it’s a gorgeous, sloppy, enjoyable mess.

Australia is not the great epic of the Australian people, or indeed, a great epic at all. It is not a particularly innovative piece of filmmaking. It is not indicative of a specifically Australian filmmaking sensibility, nor a very strong example of Baz Lurhmann’s own flamboyant filmmaking style. There’s a bit of a sense of failed ambition hanging about the film, because you can tell Lurhmann wanted at least some of those things to be true, especially the first one.

An English noblewoman travels to Australia to get her husband to sell his plantation there and return to England. Instead, her husband is killed and she stays on to run the plantation with the help of an Australian cowboy known only as Drover (because that’s what he is, a cattle drover). Meanwhile, she takes a young aboriginal boy under her protection. Lurhmann’s attempt to bring together a uniquely Australian family pulled from each of Australia’s roots (English, aboriginal, and outback drifters) is obvious to an extreme, which is part of why it fails as a national epic – it’s too calculated.

In addition to the overdetermined theme, the film suffers from tonal inconsistency. It can’t decide whether it’s a farce (the first half-hour is full of Luhrmann-esque quick close-ups and exaggerated facial expressions, as if he wanted to remind us that he’s the one who directed Moulin Rouge before settling into a much more staid style for the rest of the film), western, romance, war, family drama, elegy, social rights message picture, travel brochure or national epic. The western and war sections, especially, are so divisively separated that Lurhmann might have been better off making two films instead of one.

But even after that laundry list of defects, and I could think of more if I wanted to, I can’t get past how much I plain enjoyed watching the film, and I would go see it again in a heartbeat. It’s old-fashioned classic filmmaking in the Hollywood tradition. I hate to keep bringing up David Bordwell’s The Way Hollywood Tells It all the time as if it’s the only film theory book I’ve ever read, but it’s applicable here again – elements in the narrative are carefully placed so as to lead the audience to expect certain things to happen, and they do. So yes, it’s predictable, but satisfyingly so. Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman play their characters as larger-than-life mythic figures rather than real people, because that’s what they are. Kidman especially works in her role not because she turns in an outstanding acting performance (she’s done that far better in other films), but because she channels old Hollywood star quality so well when she lets herself.

I’ll grant you I’m a sucker for westerns, and I definitely loved that part the best – there’s nothing revisionist about it, and the first half of the film could easily have been made during the golden age of westerns, full of gorgeous vistas, sweeping music and laconic hero figures. Then, suddenly, World War II starts, and it’s almost a whole different movie, which I didn’t like quite as much as the western, though it’s not particularly bad.

So Australia is a mess, yes, trying to pack too many varied things into one film that never quite meshed into a cohesive whole. But it was a very comfortable-feeling mess, and I unabashedly loved watching it. As a compromise between knowing it’s nowhere near objectively good and my subjective love for it, I give it an Above Average.

[Weird side note - according to IMDb, the aspect ratio is 2.35:1, but I would've sworn I saw it in 1.85:1. Anyone else see it in the narrower ratio, or was I just on crack? I even made a note about it in my notebook at the time, that it seemed odd to shoot an epic in 1.85:1.]

All this is revealed in the first five minutes via voice-over narration, a device you’ll probably have a love-hate relationship with. In the beginning, I wished Woody would show more and tell less, but as the film progressed, the narration took on a very dry, ironic tone that I found delightful. Anyway, when painter Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) turns up and invites both girls for a weekend in his home town, the setup is fairly obvious – stability vs. passion. Complicating his attraction to Vicky and Cristina is the fact that he’s still completely in love with his ex-wife Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz), even though their relationship ended by her stabbing him. Or did it?

Let me get my few negatives out of the way first. Juan Antonio is a dog – he propositions everybody within five minutes of talking to them. Once he’s in a steady relationship, he’s a great guy, but I wish Allen had come up with a better way to say “hey, this guy is passionate” than having him try to get everyone into bed immediately. Patricia Clarkson is wasted in her role of an older woman unsatisfied in her stable marriage whose job basically is to try to get Vicky to leave her fiance Doug (Chris Messina) to pursue Juan Antonio. And the ending leaves us not very much different from the beginning, unsure how the Barcelona experience has changed our characters. I’m not wholly inclined to see the last thing as a negative, though. Often such experiences don’t immediately make their effects known, and leaving it to each audience member to decide how Vicky, Cristina, Juan Antonio, Maria Elena, and Doug will ultimately be affected may be a shrewd move on Woody’s part. And nitpicky thing – hold the dang camera still! There’s barely a shot that isn’t panning or pushing or pulling or tracking. This complaint was perhaps intensified by my recent reading of David Bordwell’s The Way Hollywood Tells It, which talks a lot about the growing use of the “roving camera,” which made me notice it a lot more than I probably otherwise would’ve.

Okay, back to the good parts. Woody’s most solid script in years balances drama and comedy very well, keeping away from extremes of silliness (cf. Scoop or Broadway Danny Rose) and seriousness (cf. Match Point or Interiors). That’s not to say he doesn’t do the extremes well, but I tend to find him most enjoyable and memorable when he does dramatic stories tinged with wit throughout, as in my favorites, Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters. While I wouldn’t raise Vicky Cristina Barcelona to those dizzying heights, it’s back on track.

In addition, the cast handles the script with perfect timing, both verbally and physically. When Rebecca Hall appeared in The Prestige as Christian Bale’s long-suffering wife, I found her far more compelling than Scarlett Johansson, who had the larger role of mistress to both Bale and Hugh Jackman. Reteamed here, Hall again outshines her flashier costar. She’s one to watch for in the future; I’ve yet to be unimpressed with her. Johansson can be uneven, but here she matches her performance to the ensemble nicely. You’ll forget all about Bardem’s menacing Anton Chigurh as he infuses Juan Antonio with warmth and humor. And Penélope Cruz owns the screen every second she’s on it (and many that she’s not). The many explosions of laughter from the audience were all deserved equally by the script, the actors, and even the editing at one particular point.

Finally, a word about the relationships, which all end up better in threes than twos – couples needing a third person to balance out. This goes to extremes with Cristina, Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, but the same concept appears with Juan Antonio-Cristina-Vicky, Cristina-Vicky-Doug, abortively with Maria Elena-Juan Antonio-Vicky, and even perhaps with the titular Vicky-Cristina-Barcelona. At one level, the threesome activity seems like Woody’s own fantasies playing out (admittedly, in a rather tame fashion – there’s a lot of sex going on in this PG-13 film, but it’s pretty much all offscreen and termed “going to bed together”). But the shifting relationship triangle is not an uncommon literary device, particularly noticable in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, in which virtually all the relationships form shifting triangles. I’m not sure how far to take Allen’s use of the theme, but the idea seems to be that each person needs two people in their lives – one more passionate/emotional and one more stable/rational than themselves. But the film expounds no such obvious message, which is a plus for me.

Juan Antonio’s father is a poet who refuses to publish his work as a way of getting back at a world he doesn’t like – denying the world the things of beauty he creates. It’s impossible to apply that maxim to Allen, who has compulsively shared his work, beautiful and not, with the world nearly every year since 1972. The good is well worth putting up with the less-good, and hopefully Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a sign of more future beautifully-made films from him. Also, Barcelona? Gorgeous. I want to go now.