Australia

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Movie Details

• Genre: Action/Adventure, Romance, Suspense/Thriller
• Release Date: 2008-11-26 Nationwide
• Running Time: 165 min.
• Director: Baz Luhrmann
• Cast: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, Jack Thompson, Bryan Brown
• Producer: Baz Luhrmann
• Writer: Stuart Beattie, Baz Luhrmann, Ronald Harwood, Richard Flanagan
• Distributor: 20th Century Fox
• Official Site: Australia Official Site

Tightly wound and corseted posh English stiff (Nicole Kidman, channeling Leslie Howard) parked in dusty corner of scenic colony trembling on the brink of global military conflict, takes pre-erotic dislike to reassuringly Anglo diamond in the rough (Hugh Jackman) who shows her how to love the land and its brown-skinned natives and let her hair down every which way. Baz Luhrmann’s overstuffed but likable 165-minute epic tells a boilerplate tale deeply embedded in the narratives of many a guilty imperial aggressor and its former victims. Refreshingly, though, it’s told from the viewpoint of an indigenous boy (enchantingly played by newcomer Brandon Walters) caught between conquerors and conquered. More pretty than sexy, Kidman and Jackman’s love affair rarely rises from the dusty soil in which it’s meant to take root, and there are far too many movies crammed into Australia—a woodenly derivative melding of ’40s maternal melodramas, musicals, oaters and World War II actioners—as the transformed lovers herd a cobbled-together multi-culti family and lots of cattle across the Outback to a town bracing itself for Japanese invasion. Blink and you’ll miss the tongue-in-cheek in Lurmann’s travelogue vision of down under—however beautifully lit by cinematographer Mandy Walker—as the land of kangaroos, billabongs, and “Waltzing Matilda.” But you’d need a heart of stone to resist the dark-eyed boy who drives the movie’s magical-realist subtext and its generously forgiving vision.