Return to Oz: A History of Australian Cinema (1990-present)

Continued from Part Two (1969-1989)

Part Three: 1990-Present

1. Independent's Day: The Reign of Quirk

Australian cinema in the past twenty years has often looked like a manifestation of a culture constantly trying to second-guess itself. Faced with a narrowed era of multiplexes and blockbusters, moviemaking in Oz has failed, in spite of the occasional spotlights falling upon it, to gain even the kind of effective niche that British or French films had managed to carve in the modern cineaste panorama, and the fact domestic audience could rarely be counted upon to give necessary support stirred the question as to whether that support ought to be given automatically or first earned. On top of this, the always problematic issue of how and what films to sell to the public has become all the more confusing, leading to fractious partisan battles of rhetoric. In the early 2000s, Ray Lawrence's Lantana was seen as a nuanced, grown-up alternative to a small avalanche of modest TV-derived comedies and in-your-face provocation; by the decade's end, further attempts to make grown-up, sober-minded dramas were being blamed in media critiques for dampening the industry's ever-ailing chances in being "depressing."

In the 1990s and the new century, actors and technicians often trained by government-fostered schools gained much respect and increasing employment overseas, and many have repeated the old pattern of talents establishing themselves at home and then heading overseas, perhaps returning if their gambits failed, to confront an ever more competitive field of up-and-comers: in short, the infrastructure to produce people who could make movies set up in '70s had produced strong results, but had finally failed to build a vital local film culture. Meanwhile Hollywood companies set up studios to produce movies more cheaply, with Warner Bros. building a complex near Brisbane and then Fox in the heart of Sydney, giving local technicians and actors easy employment in large-budget productions. Often, this had siphoning effect of local effort and expertise, although it could, more subtly, have done much to promote some of that talent: certainly a strange hybrid like Baz Luhrmann's large-budget, big-hype Australia (2008) could not have been imagined without this cross-pollinating effect.

Aesthetically speaking, too, modern Australian cinema had atomized, as producers searched for sure things, for next big things, for artful movies that have popular appeal, for themes that connected to the zeitgeist, often to arrive belated and bedeviled, without anything like the assurance of the '70s. Attempts to make movies about things that encompassed average suburban existence, petty crime, drug use, gay life, family life, survival, wandering, working and having fun, in a usually, resolutely, contemporary context, became the new norm, but also presented fresh clichés and fads. Take, for instance, 2005's Little Fish and Candy, two decent movies, were both about the impact of drug addiction and demimonde squalor, only ten years too late for the grunge chic craze in independent cinema. The stars of those films, Cate Blanchett in the first case, Heath Ledger in the second, had both been to Hollywood to further their careers and used their clout to help get them made. Meanwhile, the cycles of Australian film's booms and busts have, rather than stabilizing, only sped up.

In the early 1990s, that new philosophy in film production and distribution, independent film, became a variety of secular religion with temples at Sundance and Tribeca and Toronto—especially in Australia, where almost all filmmaking was, to a certain extent, independent. And, indeed, Aussie talent began to contribute to that growing ethos. In any event, some brightening of the pall that descended on the industry was detectable at the turn of the '90s, with a handful of mild box-office surprises popping up like Nadia Tass's The Big Steal (1990), John Ruane's Death in Brunswick (1991), and critical darlings including Jocelyn Moorhouse's Proof (1991), and Leo Berkeley's Holidays on the River Yarra (1991)—the latter two of which screened at Cannes. This disparate selection of movies could nonetheless be defined by their distinctly shrunken horizons, all set in inner urban areas and focusing on hard-luck protagonists in the contemporary environment, drab and ordinary.

Of those films, the artiest by far was Proof, a film with a unique if odd idea revolving around a blind man (Hugo Weaving), obsessed with photography in his attempts to substantiate his existence, and his two companions: a cool housekeeper and potential lover (Genevieve Picot), and a young man he befriends (Russell Crowe). The film was acclaimed at Cannes, and director and writer Moorhouse became a figure to watch in parlaying a small budget into a significant success, and also was the key early movie of two of the most successful Australian actors of recent years, Weaving (1960- ), with his slippery sensuality, and Crowe (1964- ), the gruffly charismatic future Oscar-winner.

Crowe had made his feature debut in Stephen Wallace's Blood Oath (a.k.a. Prisoners of the Sun), released the same year, an attempt to explore the anger of Australians towards the Japanese for poor treatment and homicides inflicted on their captured servicemen in WWII, a touchy subject for both countries and awkwardly handled here. Death in Brunswick was a black comedy about a loser chef (Sam Neill) whose involvement with an accidental killing and a younger waitress revives his sense of purpose, and it perhaps most clearly defined a new variety of "quirky" comedy, riddled with flailing fish out water, naïve fools of fortune, dippy fantasists and willful individualists, which would provide some even bigger successes in the near future.

1992 proved this was no fluke as further high-profile films that couldn't have been more different generated new enthusiasm. Russell Crowe had a truly galvanizing follow-up to the promise of his performance in Proof, as the monstrous skinhead Hando in Geoffrey Wright's Romper Stomper, a ferocious tale of urban intolerance and violence centering on a gang of white supremacists who get the fright of their lives when the Asian immigrants they specialize in terrorizing mass to fight back, leading to the remaining skinheads turning on each-other in a glut of jealousy and self-defeat. Melodramatic, broad, and in many ways anachronistic, evoking a social landscape about a decade out of date, it was nonetheless possibly the most forceful Australian film since Mad Max 2, and as well as promoting Crowe, gave a strong role to Jacqueline Mackenzie as the epileptic upper-class refugee who splits Hando and his mate Davey (Daniel Pollock).

Wright's subsequent career, like too many of the new talents to emerge in the '90s, would however prove erratic: his immediate follow-up, Metal Skin (2004), was an ambitious attempt to fuse certain aspects of Ozploitation—fast cars, devil worship—and visual flash with a gritty, realistic milieu of youthful frustration and incipient madness. After this complete failure, Wright did not make another film in Oz until 2006's Macbeth attempted to transpose Shakespeare's play into the same grungy, violent milieu of his earlier films, with such amusing ideas as portraying Macbeth as an uzi-toting gangster and the Three Witches as gothic schoolgirls, but the film was intolerable.

Gillian Armstrong continued her run of intelligent, muted studies of middle-class femininity with the Last Days of Chez Nous [still not on DVD in the US], featuring Lisa Harrow as a woman whose marriage to a European intellectual (Bruno Ganz) is crumbling, whilst her teenage daughter (Miranda Otto) goes through her own rites-of-passage romance. Technically immaculate, it suggested a new lucidity in approaching adult emotional lives, even if it never entirely dispelled an air of haute-bourgeois exceptionalism, a trait that would occasionally mar Jane Campion's films too. Armstrong went back to Hollywood to make her best film, her serious and vigorous adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott chestnut Little Women (1994).

Oscar and Lucinda (1997) brought Armstrong home with a large budget and a significant project, based as it was on a prize-winning Peter Carey novel, and sporting Ralph Fiennes and a young new discovery, Cate Blanchett, in its cast. Blanchett had begun her career in a big screen version of a TV show, 1994's Police Rescue, and just before Oscar and Lucinda worked on Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road, a middling Australian co-production detailing the plight of an array of multinational nurses imprisoned by the Japanese during WW2. Although Blanchett made her mark in these two films, both were generally ill-focused prestige projects for two once-keen talents. Armstrong employed Blanchett again in 2001, her equally minor version of Sebastian Faulks' WWII-era spy tale, Charlotte Gray.

Mark Joffe, having failed to make an impression with dark thrillers, scored successes with audiences with comedies celebrating stereotyped versions of eccentric Aussie individualism. 1992's Spotswood was partly buoyed by the fortuitous presence of Anthony Hopkins cast just as he found a new level stardom in The Silence of the Lambs, with Hopkins playing a stuffy efficiency expert who is charmed out of his staid limbo by the workers at a shoe factory to the point that he devises methods to save their jobs. Joffe offered the clichéd story with lightness of touch, and his next film, Cosi (1996), repeated the formula, with Ben Mendelsohn, a supporting performer in Spotswood, now the lead, as a young theatre nerd who attempts to direct a production of Mozart's opera "Cosi Fan Tutti" in a mental health institute, using the variously neurotic and eccentric patients as cast members. Good-natured but clumsily constructed, Cosi did middling business, but Joffe had enough attention to see him direct yet another variation on the same story in Ireland, the Janeane Garofalo vehicle The Matchmaker (1997). He returned home for his last film to date, The Man Who Sued God (2001), which united the romantic pairing nobody wanted to see, Scots actor-comedian Bill Connolly and a particularly brittle Judy Davis, in a sluggish screwball comedy.

Undoubtedly the most popular film of 1992, however, was Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom, a slick, unabashedly corny and colorful tribute to Hollywood musicals and stage melodramas flavored with a knowing element of Aussie irony, focusing on ballroom dancers whose lives off the dance-floor are generally far more modest than the glitz of that arena would attest. Young hero Scott Hastings (Paul Mercurio) runs afoul of the rigged game that is the dancing world as his father (Barry Otto) once did, but he presses on with his individualist bent with the aide of blooming ugly duckling Fran (Tara Morice) and her fearsome South American immigrant family. Determinedly populist and strident, it hasn't aged very well, particularly in Mercurio's inexpressive performance, but it was the most restrained stage for Luhrmann's all-too-showy aesthetic, which in many ways extended the camp-infused tradition ofJim Sharman.

Luhrmann quickly departed overseas to make his raucous, gimmicky William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, before returning to film his Moulin Rouge (2001) in Sydney. A grab-bag of frenetically employed pop culture conventions, and recycling many of Ballroom's effects and story elements, Moulin Rouge dazzled enough eyes to receive multiple Oscar nominations and prove a box office triumph. Luhrmann's elephantine follow-up, Australia (2008), saw him riffing this time on the outback mythology that had fallen into almost complete invisibility during the past twenty years, combined once again with borrowed Hollywood tropes employed with little rhyme or reason. Luhrmann's oeuvre has so far sustained a hold on his audience, and even though Australia made little impact in the US, it was hugely popular on Aussie screens and in many other countries.

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Posted by ahillis at March 23, 2010 12:03 PM