In this photo released by 20th Century Fox, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman are shown in a scene from, "Australia."
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Australia (PG-13) **
Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald
Australia is being marketed as the kind of old-fashioned romantic epic Hollywood rarely makes anymore, and after you've sat through it, you'll be thankful they don't.
It's not that the movie lacks ambition or showmanship: Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet), who co-wrote and directed the film, couldn't make a boring movie if he tried. Australia has no shortage of spectacular things to watch, be it a cattle drive in which the runaway herds are stampeding toward a cliff, the Japanese bombing of Darwin (which made Pearl Harbor look like a brush fire), or the impossibly blue eyes of Nicole Kidman, who is clearly a magical being, since she manages to look even more beautiful with every movie she makes.
It's the whole of Australia itself that is the problem: This is a cockeyed, daft picture that aims to ground its Harlequin-ish romance between Sarah (Kidman), an upper-class Englishwoman, and Drover (Hugh Jackman), a rough-and-tumble cowboy, in a historical background detailing the country's racist assimilation policies, which included sequestering young Aborigines of mixed descent and teaching them the ''proper'' ways of the white world.
One such boy, Nullah (Brandon Walters), plays a key role in the on-again, off-again affair between Sarah and Drover, who become his surrogate parents after his mother is killed (in one of the film's few genuinely moving moments). The elements are all there for a stirring, passionate adventure, right down to a moustache-twirling baddie (David Wenham) who is so cartoonishly evil it is downright shocking to discover that not only is he married, but that his wife is a good, noble woman instead of a Satan worshiper.
But the script, which Luhrmann co-wrote with Stuart Beattie (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl) and Ronald Harwood (The Pianist), fails at giving the expansive story the proper shape and pace. Australia moves in fits and starts -- the film's middle third brings the story to a veritable standstill -- and Luhrmann never finds a proper tone for his expansive (and expensive) epic.
At times, Australia plays like a comedy (a humorous high-point: Sarah's first glimpse of a kangaroo, which quickly devolves from delight to horror); in other moments, it comes off as a satire of bodice rippers (''I mix with dingos, not duchesses,'' Drover snarls at the thought of shacking up with the dainty Sarah). There is also a recurring motif based on The Wizard of Oz that was presumably intended to add a touch of whimsy to the film.
Instead, it just makes Australia feel longer than it already is. The film does succeed at exploring a period of the country's history that may not familiar to Western audiences, and Luhrmann once again proves he is incapable of framing an uninteresting image. But you know something's amiss when you're in the middle of a picture that runs under three hours and you're tempted to whip out your cellphone and send friends a text message that reads ''Send food.''
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Brandon Walters, David Wenham, Bryan Brown, David Gulpilil
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Screenwriters: Baz Luhrmann, Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood
Producers: Baz Luhrmann, G. Mac Brown
A 20th Century Fox release. Running time: 165 minutes. Vulgar language, violence.
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