Gattaca would have been a great idea for Code Week, non? But since you’ve seen it at least once, and I’m in the mood for lighter fare, you get Hugh Jackman instead of Ethan Hawke. Questions like “Where is our world headed and why am I sad all the time?” are replaced by questions like “Where does Hugh Jackman’s chin go when he shaves his beard?” Hang on, kids, we’re going to Australia – but before we take off, there is some important safety information you should know.
I watched it in three installments. I recommend you do too, because let’s face it: no matter how engaging a movie is, ain’t no one can watch a three-hour movie in one sitting these days. Also, I watched the second and third installments right after the best yoga nidra of my life so far, so my blissed-out state might have affected my perception. And despite the WWII element, I’m pretty sure that it’s a girl movie. Not a chick flick, by any means, but:
(a) it’s a brightly-colored period film
(b) directed by Baz Luhrmann
(c) with a rugged Hugh Jackman as hero, so…
We might as well call things by their proper names.
This took four screenwriters, and ended up more or less resembling a fluffy Australian version of Out of Africa, which, if you think about it, is somewhat surprising. Why would you need four screenwriters to accomplish that? And one screenwriter may not be able to come up with better lines than: “In the end, the only thing you really own is your story” – but surely, four should be able to. They weren’t. I love this movie.
So we’re in Africa – sorry, Australia – and an aboriginal child, Nullah, with a fantastic accent is narrating. He describes Nicole Kidman as “the strangest woman I ever seen,” which is the most accurate description of Nicole Kidman a person could give without having read Freud’s “The Uncanny.” I’ve never seen The Stepford Wives, mind you, but I have this theory that she is the thirteenth Cylon. In any case, Nicole Kidman, in a passable imitation of Blair Waldorf, flounces around wearing a posh English accent and looking for her husband. He is not Hugh Jackman, so he dies within the first three minutes, leaving prissy Nicole to face the horrors of owning a cattle ranch alone. She fires the violent, prejudiced cattle hands for abusing the aborigines and hires Hugh, and they set off on a supposedly epic cattle drive. It’s all been done before, but it’s Baz, so it’s pretty. When they’ve completed their task, the northern city of Darwin gets bombed by the Japanese. It’s supposed to be very serious, but instead of the big picture we get personal stories. It’s a love story between a barren woman and a child, or a love story between a woman and a man, depending on how you come at it. It’s sweet, either way. It could have been a stronger story about breaking cultural codes, but instead, it’s about love and magic and colors. Baz isn’t going to change.
This movie is politically correct and loving in just about every way, which I find very relieving. I’m sure literary criticism could ferret out a reason to be offended by something about it, but that’s one of my least favorite games to play. The best part of all is the inter-title that appears at the beginning of the film: “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers should exercise caution when watching this film as it may contain images and voices of deceased persons.” I laughed when I read that, because the person responsible for that statement seemed unsure – and all films definitely will, eventually, contain images and voices of the dead – but by the end, I was sold. Australia shows things the way they ought to be, but never are. Have a laugh and see it.
Image credit: 20th Century Fox
I am sorry Carine, but you cannot make me watch this movie again. Hugh Jackman’s charms are lost on me.
Your post was many orders of magnitude more entertaining than the film.
I wonder how many aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders walked out of the theater and demanded their money back.