Baz Luhrmann’s Australia – A Shared Experience

 

Hugh Jackman & Nicole Kidman in 'Australia'

I recently had the misfortune of viewing Baz Luhrmann’s Australia. I say, misfortune for two reasons; the first, like every one else apparently, I felt the film was probably Luhrmann’s worst yet, and possibly one of the greatest epic film failures of all time. The second reason is far more concerning; in amongst Nicole Kidman’s terrible performance and over-sized forehead, Hugh Jackman’s posturing and ‘crickey’-ing and an unmentionable treatment of the Indigenous characters, a portrait so fundamentally true of my country appears, and I’ve been embarrassed to think that other people in other countries might actually have seen it.

Many would be disappointed after Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet. Australia is really two films, held together by a middle section something akin to a damp fold running down the middle of a single sheet of a paper. The dialogue is shockingly bad, and Kidman and Jackman oscillate between periods of dreadful slapstick and extended forehead to chest hair posturing. There are brief moments of triumph in the cinematography, but you needn’t watch the film to appreciate it. It really is at it’s best in the promotional stills.

The highlight is Brendan Walters as Nullah, the half-aboriginal, half-white boy, who somehow makes a completely undeveloped and poorly scripted character work, possibly because he’s absolutely adorable and manages to demonstrate a greater range and depth of emotion than his ‘seasoned’ counter-parts. Lurhmann seems to be almost making fun of this character’s (and arguably the entire Stolen Generation, which Nalluh represents in it’s entirety) complete cultural isolation. There are scenes in which the young actor is forced into singsong, magical, jazz-hands moments that you feeling as if you should look away! Whilst these moments are given the ‘slow motion to make people realize I’m serious’ effect, truly tragic moments in the child’s life, like the death of his mother are washed over, notably by Kidman, and her awful rendition of ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’.

Brendan Walters as Nullah in 'Australia'

That the 1939 masterpiece The Wizard of Oz should feature at all in the film is mind-boggling! Until of course Nullah verbalizes the connection between the Wizard of Oz and his grandfather, King George, a totem full blooded aboriginal elder (played by David Gulpilil) who, like a good totem, speaks little, does less and assumes the stereotypical position, literally. In fact all the minority characters of the film are so hopelessly stereotypical it is embarrassing, and so indicative of an entire generation for which Asian equals food and Eastern European equals ‘shifty’ but not servant, mostly because they too are white.  

The ‘magic’ of the indigenous Australian culture is entirely lost on the viewer. In fact, it is fair to say that it isn’t at all depicted beyond a few songs and the aforementioned jazz-hands moments. Lurhmann has said the film is a “mythologized Australia“. But he has failed to provide one of the most important characters required in all good myth, that being the landscape. Certainly, it is there, but in the hybrid, make believe place he’s created there is nothing more than an implied connection between King George’s/Nullah’s ‘magic’ and a knowledge of the land. The viewer doesn’t experience this connection with King George or Nullah. Further, in his attempt to stylize the environment to allude to the great American epics like Gone with the Wind, Lurhmann has removed any possibility for the audience to experience the Outback of Australia in any new or authentic way.

David Gulpilil as King George in 'Australia'

There is a grotesque amount of historical repositioning here. White English aristocracy caring for half-indigenous boys is so far removed from the reality of the experience of the Stolen Generation it borders on offensive. In preparing for this post I did a little reading, picking my way through the countless reviews of the film. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, I strongly suggest Germaine Greer’s scathing review featured in The Guardian, Tuesday 16^th December 2008, in which she describes the film as “a  fraudulent and misleading fantasy”.

 

Fantasy it may be, but within all Lurhmann’s 21^st Century political correctness smeared across a plethora of historical incorrectness, is an indisputable truth about Australian culture. If Jackman’s Drover and Kidman’s Lady Sarah could have produced a child, they probably would have done so after the war. And that child would have been, like my parents, a Baby Boomer. And they have about as much cultural heritage as would be plausible for the offspring of these fictional characters: Drover, a rough and questionable character with no apparent past and Lady Sarah, an immigrant who brought with her nothing of her culture but tea. And that is the cultural experience of a half a nation spanning a whole continent. Onlookers might be curious as to why so little of the Aboriginal culture actually managed to find it’s way into the film. Don’t be, because European settlers destroyed it, and my generation as taught by the vast majority of those who represent the offspring of Drover and Lady Sarah, know absolutely nothing about it. And since white Australia failed to manifest their own mythology connecting them to this harsh, ancient and shape-shifting land, or to preserve anything substantial of their own ancestral culture, we simply lack the empathetic response to an authentic mythology or cultural experience. Moreover, in the years since 1939, whole generations of white Australia have been forced to live entirely devoid of either and there is an underlying sense of resentment within the discourse regarding the preservation of indigenous myth and culture. The 1939 white cultural imperialism that is still so evident in Lurhmann’s Australia increasingly contrasts the disenfranchised and dissatisfied white youth.

 

Emerging generations, which, if they could stay the three hours to the end of the film, might have, like me, experienced something like jealousy as they watch Nullah and his grandfather walk away to go walkabout. Realizing that, should we desire to go walkabout ourselves, there is no longer a guide, and finally begin to understand what horrible conditions we have enforced upon our indigenous fellows.

It is in this way that Australia does some small service. In it’s utter failure to demonstrate an authentic mythical experience, in the complete cultural void of the film we are given a most accurate picture of the underlying issues regarding Reconciliation. We can not go forward as a whole nation together until we recognize our shared impoverishment and until white Australia embraces the fundamental importance of authentic mythology intrinsically linked to environment to cultural growth.

Hugh Jackman & Nicole Kidman in 'Australia' 2