Baz Luhrmann musters an outback epic

AUSTRALIA is no masterpiece but it looks magnificent.

Australia 3½ stars Opens nationally November 26 BAZ Luhrmann's operatic approach to narrative is equally at home on the stage as it is on the screen.

But the deliberate world of artifice and exaggerated reality that was a trademark of his earlier films, especially Moulin Rouge, doesn't work as successfully when transposed from an interior setting - a dance hall, a nightclub - to the spectacular reality of Australia's outback.

Initially, this gets the director's long-awaited epic, Australia, off to a shaky start. As the characters are introduced, there's a forced jocularity and a theatricality with which some of the actors visibly struggle. Fortunately, at about the 20-minute mark, the film settles down into what it should have been from the start: a romantic melodrama set in 1939-41 against breathtaking backdrops and a homage to the golden age of Hollywood.

The director's aims aren't entirely frivolous, however; there's a serious agenda, as revealed in the opening titles, which describe in frankly superficial terms, presumably with an eye to an uninitiated overseas audience, the meaning of the Stolen Generations.

Nicole Kidman, who worked well with Luhrmann on Moulin Rouge, plays the haughty Lady Sarah Ashley, an English aristocrat whose wayward husband, Maitland, owns a small cattle station, Faraway Downs, in the Northern Territory. Suspecting that the only reason Maitland lingers down under is because he's involved with Aboriginal women, Sarah makes the long journey to the territory to discover that Maitland has been murdered, apparently by King George (David Gulpilil), a tribal magician who wanders the district.

She also discovers that Maitland's untrustworthy station manager Fletcher (David Wenham) is in league with the territory's all-powerful cattle baron, King Carney (Bryan Brown) to steal the cattle from Faraway Downs and ensure the property is for sale at a rock-bottom price. Determined to thwart these machinations, Sarah enlists the help of the station's drunken accountant, Kipling Flynn (Jack Thompson) and a rollicking character known only as Drover (Hugh Jackman) to help her drive the cattle to Darwin where the armed forces, preparing for imminent war, have urgent need of meat.

Matters are complicated by the presence on Faraway Downs of 10-year-old Nullah (played by an impressive child discovery, Brandon Walters). The boy is King George's grandson, but he's of mixed race and (as we're reminded more than once in a sometimes repetitive screenplay) belongs nowhere. As Sarah becomes more and more motherly towards the child, his fate seems to lie with the authorities, who want to place him in the care of a white family, or with his grandfather, who wants him to go walkabout.

With considerable help from computer-generated material, Luhrmann creates a genuinely spectacular saga with this often impressive film; a cattle stampede towards a precipice and a Japanese bombing attack on Darwin are among the highlights. Still, given the status of his distinguished collaborators on the film's screenplay -- Ronald Harwood, Richard Flanagan and Stuart Beattie -- it's surprising so many cliches have found their way into the story. Given Luhrmann's fondness for old movies and popular songs, it's not surprising he manages to make frequent reference to The Wizard of Oz (which was released in 1939) and its famous song, Over the Rainbow, unlikely as this channelling may seem at first.

Given the considerable budget supplied by 20th Century Fox, it's no real surprise that all too often Australia seems aimed not at Australian audiences but at international, especially American, ones. Native flora and fauna are used in ways that once used to bring a chuckle or two in local cinemas and Australian slang is employed rather too insistently. The character of the all-powerful cattle baron, well played by a rascally Brown, is straight from any number of Hollywood westerns and the romance between the fish-out-of-water heroine and her dashing employee is also familiar from movie classics of the past.

Yet for all its flaws -- and Australia is not the masterpiece we hoped it might be -- the film is easy to take. This is partly because it looks so magnificent, partly because Luhrmann's vision is so stimulating and partly because the actors are, for the most part, so engaging in their roles.

The supporting cast is a rollcall of Australian acting talent, though some of them appear in blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos: among them Max Cullen as a drunken denizen of the Territory Pub, Bruce Spence as a conservative doctor and Arthur Dignam as a missionary. Barry Otto, as Carney's gofer, Ben Mendelsohn as an army officer, Ray Barrett as Sarah's old retainer and Tony Barry as an outback policeman have somewhat more substantial parts. Particularly good is David Ngoombujarra as Drover's loyal stockman.

There has been a great deal of speculation about the ending and whether it would be happy or sad. More curious is the extremely perfunctory, and barely explained, elimination of one of the film's key characters and, in the process, the abrupt termination of one of its most engaging performers.

Despite the behind-the-scenes pressures, and they were probably considerable, the result is clearly Luhrmann's vision. And though the film is, perhaps inevitably, uneven, the good news is that Australia soars more often that it plummets.