Entertainment, Movies - Army Times

Sprawling soap opera

Sweeping in its scope, epic in its grandeur, breathtaking in its expansiveness ...

No, I’m not talking about writer-director Baz Luhrmann’s new film, “Australia,” but rather the forehead of its star, Nicole Kidman, one of Hollywood’s largest remaining open tracts of commercial real estate.

On the other hand, the film — despite Luhrmann’s strenuous efforts — feels much smaller than its setting, the vast nothingness of the Down Under outback.

It hardly helps that Kidman spends the first half-hour going overboard, almost into parody, as highborn Englishwoman Lady Ashley, who as the film opens is flying to 1939 Australia to drag her extant rancher husband out of the Northern Territories.

Fortunately, she soon settles into a less abrasive and more engaging groove, and the story finally can gain some traction.

But figuring out exactly what story Luhrmann wants to tell is tricky. At first, it seems like an old-fashioned range war, as wily King Carney (Bryan Brown) and his toady Neil Fletcher (David Wenham) conspire to corner the beef contracts with the British military in the Pacific and turn the rival Ashley ranch to dust.

With her husband having been murdered by Fletcher and his goons in the opening scenes, Lady Ashley’s only ally is a freelance drover (Hugh Jackman), a livestock herder who “moves the animals from A to B” as the trade winds of commerce demand.

He’s never named, but referred to only as The Drover, because droving is what he does. When he’s not droving, he’s thinking of droving, or talking about droving. And when he sleeps, it’s a safe bet he dreams of droving.

Because he is … The Drover.

But wait — the film is also a politically conscious riff on Australia’s “stolen generations,” the attempted forced assimilation of mixed-race Aboriginal children into Western culture — official government policy until 1973.

The talisman for this theme is the half-caste child Nullah (beguiling Brandon Walters), a “creamie” in the local argot, who has ties to the Ashley ranch. “I not black fella, I not white fella. Me belong no one,” he murmurs.

If Luhrmann had focused on one of these two subjects, he would have had a much tighter film. But he was bent on crafting an “epic,” and so he veers wildly between the two main themes — and many lesser threads as well.

There’s the brewing war in the Pacific, class struggles among the local Aussie upper crust and the peasants, a bunch of Aboriginal shamanistic hoodoo, and some truly syrupy Kidman-Jackman moments, topped by a gratuitous bath scene — in slow motion, yet — that will make you either melt or retch; there is no in-between.

If you like your melodrama thick, this is your film. What else to expect from Luhrmann, who honed his dreamy sensibilities on such films as “Moulin Rouge” and “Romeo + Juliet”?

His whimsy is on full display as he sweats to imbue “Australia” with the old-fashioned innocence of a long-gone era. He hammers on one particular leitmotif — the song “Somewhere over the Rainbow” from the “Wizard of Oz” — with a sugary intensity that almost made my teeth hurt.

And just when the film seems about to wrap, it keeps going — and going, and going, through three codas, stretching out to a cheek-numbing 2¾ hours.

There are many effective moments, none more so than a thrilling cattle stampede along a steep cliff edge in the outback. And wow, is that kid adorable.

But the lingering impression left by “Australia” is of a film trying to do too much — and far more than it needs to.

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Rated PG-13 for violence, sensuality and serial abuse of the word “crikey.” Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.