Australia
Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Written by Stuart Beattie, Baz Luhrmann, Ronald Harwood, and Richard Flanagan. With Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Bryan Brown, David Wenham, and Brandon Walters. (PG-13)
Baz Luhrmann is a man from another time. He was born in the '60s, but the films he makes hark back in style to a filmmaking era before his birth. Unabashedly glamorous, sweepingly melodramatic, his are the sort of films where a damsel in distress may find herself tied to the railroad track, but only with the light just so, and only in a stunning evening gown.
It's probably not fair to poke fun at his style—it is, after all, basically the same style that gave us dozens of classic movies—but with Australia, Luhrmann has arranged an odd marriage of style and subject. What worked so well in his musical confection Moulin Rouge—where his glossy, surface-obsessed direction mirrored and complemented so much of the story—is discordant in a historical epic dealing with, among other things, World War II and the forced slavery of mixed-race children.
Set in the country of Luhrmann's birth, Australia is a story of too many things. It is the tale of unlikely love between the cattleman Drover and the aristocratic Sarah Ashley. It is the tale of Nullah, a mixed-race boy torn between the worlds of whites and Aborigines. It is a war story, with Japanese Zeroes strafing the streets and bombing the harbors. It is a tale of revenge, of redemption, of resiliency. It is also almost three hours long.
If he had simply settled on the first of those stories, Luhrmann could have gotten away with an enjoyable Down Under romance. As "the Drover," Hugh Jackman gets dusty, and Nicole Kidman, as Lady Sarah Ashley, starts out prim but comes around to dusty. He's the cattle driver for Faraway Downs, her husband's ranch; she comes from England to sell it, but stays on when she arrives to find her husband murdered by rivals.
At first the pair are oil and water, as her English sense of propriety is at odds with the rough men and rough talk of the outback. Other sides of the back country—such as the half-naked Drover lathering up his bronzed and muscled torso during a fireside bath—she finds more agreeable. Here is where the film is at its best, where it retains the gleam of camp; Jackman's bath scene is shot with such golden tones that he looks for all the world like a perfectly roasted chicken. Luhrmann wants us to tuck in.
At that point, the film is still mostly a comedy, and a sparkling mix of old-fashioned and modern, like a champagne cocktail. Jackman and Kidman get to exchange barbed banter like an austral Fred and Ginger, and we get to wonder when they'll kiss. Kidman has never seemed a natural comedienne, and doesn't here either, but Jackman is enough of a ham to carry both of them over a few rocky patches.
Sadly, that sense of lighthearted fun is lost whenever the focus shifts to the rest of the ranch's crew. When Luhrmann turns to the mixed-race Nullah (Brandon Walters) or the Chinese cook, the characterizations often come far too close to stereotype—Nullah calls Sarah "Mrs. Boss," speaks in a sort of sing-song patois, and is imbued with an air of mysticism, due to his Aboriginal roots. It calls to mind the cheap exoticism that voodoo often brings to films, but those films tend to be on television at 3 a.m., and it feels out of place here, if it ever had a place. It's the dark side to the old-fashioned bent: there may be much we love about a "golden age" of cinema, but there's almost certainly just as much of which to despair. At one point in Australia, Luhrmann gives a nod to Gone With the Wind; it's sad that while he was obviously referring to the fiery destruction of Scarlett O'Hara's home Tara, I was immediately reminded of an infamous scene in which the slave Prissy exclaims that she "don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies!"
I should point out that it's obvious Luhrmann is striving to make an earnest film. Australia is bookended with titles that describe the fate of the "Stolen Generation" of mixed-race children in that country, explaining that they were often taken by the government and forcibly trained to work as servants to white families through 1973. But this film is almost certainly not their story.
For all that, Australia offers a lot for movie lovers, and I've only described the first half of the film—this is one of those rare movies in which a world war is little more than a second-act afterthought. Visually, it's an often stunning piece of work, and Luhrmann uses all the cinematic devices at his disposal to make the time fly: newspaper headlines that fly off the screen, aerial shots of a cliffside cattle stampede, the shocking, elemental beauty of the outback itself.
Tellingly, much of the action here is set in 1939, the year The Wizard of Oz was released. That film quite literally changed the way we looked at movies, and Luhrmann—whose directorial style owes a direct debt to it and movies like it—hammers home the Oz/Australia theme with frequent allusions to the classic film and more overt uses of its central musical number. The trouble is only that so much of the wonder of Oz rested in its otherworldliness; here, Luhrmann doesn't have the luxury of fantasy.
A Christmas Tale
Directed by Arnaud Desplechin. Written by Emmanuel Bourdieu and Arnaud Desplechin. With Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric, Chiara Mastroianni, Anne Consigny, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Melvil Poupaud, and Laurent Capelluto. (NR)
The effect of A Christmas Tale is neatly summed up in its disarmingly simple, one-size-fits-all title. Part of the magic of the Christmas season is in how it draws families together, and even if your family includes a few distant relations you only see over eggnog, it still feels somehow nourishing. Maybe you don't exchange gifts, and maybe you need help sorting out the names of all the nieces and nephews, but when the last bit of wrapping paper is swept up and the final car pulls out of the driveway, it still feels as if something special has happened. This film does exactly that.
What draws the extended Vuillard family to their childhood home in the north of France isn't just the holiday, however. Junon, the matriarch (played by Catherine Deneuve, who might well be considered the mother of modern French cinema itself), has been diagnosed with cancer. To even have a chance of surviving it, she needs a bone marrow transplant, and of her children, only the outcast Henri (Mathieu Amalric) is a match. And he is literally an outcast: early in the film, his playwright sister Elizabeth (Anne Consigny) saves him from prison and their father from ruin by using her wealth to settle his debts. In return, she orders Henri shut out of the family's affairs.
The roots of her loathing for Henri run deep. In her childhood, another brother was diagnosed with the same genetic condition as Junon; when neither mother nor daughter proved a donor match, Henri was conceived partly in hopes of saving Joseph. It didn't work, and Elizabeth seems to have blamed Henri for the death of their brother. With his mother ill, Henri is brought back into the fold and given the chance to redeem himself in his sister's eyes. At the same time, it's discovered that her troubled son Paul is also a match, and she must decide if saving him from a painful operation is more important than forgiving Henri.
Amalric and Consigny find their roles somewhat reversed here after working together in The Diving Bell and The Butterfly. In that film, Amalric was a paralyzed victim, and Consigny his therapist. As Henri, Amalric is constantly in motion, reaching for another glass of wine, lashing out, making excuses; Consigny's Elizabeth is a prisoner of her own distastes, trapped in her own mind, unable to enjoy the love of her own family. Amalric's is the flashier role, and he's wonderful as the charming but wounded scoundrel, especially in a scene where he addresses the camera. As he reads a letter aloud, we slowly close in, until the actor's eyes—his are magnetic—fill the screen, imploring us to understand.
As his opposite, Consigny gives an inscrutable performance that leaves us wondering just why she hates Henri so violently. And indeed, she doesn't seem to know herself; though by most measures a grand success, she is plagued by a constant depression. It's as though she's in mourning, she says, but she can't figure out for whom. Her dead brother? Henri, another kind of dead brother? Herself? The fact that we're never fully made to understand is one of the film's strengths.
But any film about a family is almost by definition an ensemble effort, and so it is here, with the central pair surrounded by good performances. Jean-Paul Roussillon is the warm heart of the film as Abel, the elderly father who still flirts with his wife as if they had just begun dating. And in an inspired bit of casting, Chiara Mastroianni plays the daughter-in-law of the pair. I say inspired because Mastroianni is the daughter of none other than Catherine Deneuve, and strongly resembles her well-known mother. Whether meant as a cinematic in-joke or a nod to the supposed masculine tendency to seek out women who resemble one's mother, it works, and the subplot she's involved in helps keep the film from being too death-obsessed.
One final note: A Christmas Tale is sure to scare some people off with its running time, which is somewhere in the two and a half to three-hour range, depending on your tolerance for trailers and credits. But, like visiting family, it's the sort of thing meant to be experienced over time. As the hours go by, old photos are passed around, everyone has a few drinks, and by some strange alchemy what should be boredom becomes the most comfortable place in the world.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
