Australia, round 2.

"An unwieldy stab at an old-fashioned movie epic, Baz Luhrmann's Australia is corny, implausible, well intentioned and even somewhat enjoyable in its own way, at least for a while," writes Dan Callahan in Slant.

"Australia is a deliberate throwback to David Lean-esque historical romantic epics, replete with classic Hollywood's favorite bigoted trope: the mystical dark-skinned native," writes Nick Schager. Nullah [Brandon Walters] is an insufferable and offensively racist creation, and his presence - as well as repeated Wizard of Oz references employed because, well, Australia is known as Oz, and there's some underlying theme about home and, um, Oz ends in z just like Baz? - inevitably, irrevocably reduces Australia to grade-A old-tyme claptrap."

Updated through 12/1.

"To truly appreciate the disappointment of Baz Luhrmann's Australia is to also appreciate how terrific his previous three films are," argues Eugene Hernandez.

New York's David Edelstein: "It's several types of primitive melodrama - cattle-drive Western, war picture, anti- racist message movie—whirred together, burnished with state-of-the-art CGI, and blessed with dialogue that defies parody."

Earlier: Round 1.

Update, 11/25: The New Republic's Christopher Orr writes an open letter to Luhrmann: "You have a problem, and the first step toward solving it is recognizing it: Despite your manifest gifts as a filmmaker, you can't do tragedy. And you need to stop trying."

Dana Stevens in Slate:

It's a mystery to me how Baz Luhrmann continues to be regarded as a director worth following. A long time has passed since I've regarded his lush, loud, defiantly unsubtle output with anything but dread. In Australia, his new romantic-epic-Western-protest-war drama, Luhrmann's dedication to cliché has become so absolute, it starts to verge on a kind of genius. There's not a single music cue that isn't obvious (swelling strings to indicate heartbreak, wailing didgeridoo to signal aboriginal nobility). Nary a line of dialogue is spoken that hasn't been boiled down, like condensed milk, from a huge vat of earlier Hollywood films (Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Out of Africa, and various John Ford cattle-drive pictures being the most obvious referents). But to marvel at the purity of Australia's corniness isn't to imply that the movie functions as so-bad-it's-good camp, or guilty pleasure, or anything else involving aesthetic enjoyment. Audiences without a vast appetite for racial condescension, CGI cattle, and backlit smooches will sit through Australia with all the enthusiasm of the British convicts who were shipped to that continent against their will in the late 18th century.

"Moviegoers who respond well to oversized theatrics, visual style and breathless promises of great stories to come will already be in love with the movie, five minutes in," writes Nathaniel R. "I know because I do and I was."

Updates, 11/26: Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "A pastiche of genres and references wrapped up - though, more often than not, whipped up - into one demented and generally diverting horse-galloping, cattle-stampeding, camera-swooping, music-swelling, mood-altering widescreen package, this creation story about modern Australia is a testament to movie love at its most devout, cinematic spectacle at its most extreme, and kitsch as an act of aesthetic communion."

"Luhrmann's magpie hunting and pecking from the Hollywood spectaculars that fed his imagination through a childhood in rural Australia is invigorating and fun," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "But there are simply too many of them crammed into Australia, and the result is mostly a woodenly derivative melding of 40s maternal melodramas, oaters, and World War II actioners."

"Luhrmann - the good-crazy Luhrmann - has a taste for lavish spectacles, and he places an elaborate set piece smack in the middle of Australia that, as I watched it, made me believe the movie had completely recovered from its wobbly beginning and would only get better," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "Boy, was I wrong: The second half of Australia, Luhrmann's attempt to pull off a wartime weeper, is so aggressively sentimental that it begins to feel more like punishment than pleasure. I left Australia feeling drained and weakened, as if I'd suffered a gradual poisoning at the hands of a mad scientist."

"[T]his is his Epic Movie," writes Henry Stewart in the L Magazine.

"Have you seen everything Australia has on offer a dozen times before?" asks Richard Schickel in Time. "Sure you have. It's a movie less created by director and co-writer Baz Luhrmann than assembled, Dr Frankenstein-style, from the leftover body parts of earlier movies. Which leaves us asking this question: How come it is so damnably entertaining?"

"Australia is clearly a labor of love, and a matter of national pride. It is also a bit of a mess," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "I must confess that I might have been harder on Mr Luhrmann's film if I had not remained entranced by Ms Kidman ever since I first saw her in Phillip Noyce's Dead Calm in 1989; in my opinion, she has lost none of her luster in the 20 years since."

"Many people have wondered why Luhrmann didn't just make another musical, given that Hugh Jackman has proven a fine stage performer and has yet to sing on film?" notes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical. "The material is already heightened and artificial; it would have been a perfect match. My guess is that Luhrmann had his eyes on the prize, rather than on the film."

"Australia hurries to get nowhere, finding and losing momentum amidst the jutting cliffs and endless plains," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "Only one sequence, a long cattle drive through harsh terrain, works on its own terms. The rest alternates earnest grappling with Australia's troubled racial history, half-earned mysticism, and a surprisingly perfunctory romance between Jackman - charming as an Outback-sculpted man in his element - and Kidman, who never quite loses the cartoon Katharine Hepburn veneer of her character's first appearance."

"A wildly ambitious, luridly indulgent spectacle of romance, action, melodrama and revisionism, Australia is windy, overblown, utterly preposterous and insanely entertaining," finds the Washington Post's Ann Hornaday.

"Luhrmann is a certified magician - see Romeo + Juliet or Moulin Rouge," writes the Oregonian's Shawn Levy. "But here he seems stymied or cowed by the task of encapsulating his nation's character into a narrative, and his inventions are repeatedly subordinated to mechanical plotting. It feels like an old-fashioned movie epic, yes, but never a top-shelf one."

At SF360, Dennis Harvey presents a "tourist's guide to Australia on screen."

Updates, 11/28: "Luhrman's absurd, cliché-ridden filmmaking ought to be a jailable offense," argues Armond White in the New York Press.

"With one running thread recalling The Wizard of Oz, Luhrmann seems to suggest that the story's more outlandish elements - the cartoonish performances, simplistic good vs evil characterizations, wide-eyed mysticism - are interpreted through a child's eyes," writes Shaun Brady in the Philadelphia City Paper. "But the director's ADHD-addled approach doesn't allow for one single perspective, fracturing the POV into a fly's-eye-view prism. The insect similarities are apt - the experience of watching the film is akin to staring at an ant farm, a maze of ceaseless, but ultimately fruitless, activity."

Updates, 12/1: "Australia is a valentine not only to the nation itself but to its cinema, with the presence of old hands like [Bryan] Brown, [David] Gulpilil and Jack Thompson and shout-outs to classics like My Brilliant Career and We of the Never Never," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "It's as big and bold and unabashedly old-fashioned as anything since Titanic, and as with that film, you'll forgive its excesses and revel in its sweep."

"I felt finally sickened by Australia, a film which tries far, far too hard, and proves that rather than having an ironic glint in its eye and a magician's touch to its spectacle, it's pure, unadorned, interminable, elephantine kitsch," writes Roderick Heath. "Good moments peer occasionally through a morass of the insensible."

"Silence and a steady camera, I think, could have produced in moviegoers an awe comparable to that which David Lean evoked with Lawrence of Arabia," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "But Luhrmann imposes his own restlessness on the unyielding terrain."

Australia "suffers, as Luhrmann's works do, from preconceived expectations and wild shifts in tone and mood," writes Gabriel Shanks. "But for any true fan of movies, Australia is a wildly enjoyable experience, reconstituting some of the great traditions of the art form in engaging, unexpected ways."

Posted by dwhudson at November 24, 2008 1:35 PM