 |
Students' Webpage |
Film Review: Australia
by Manuel Carrasco Moñino (2008-09, Intermedio 2B)
The movie directed by Baz Luhrmann and set in Australia just a short while before World War II, stars Nicole Kidman as the aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley and Hugh Jackman who plays the Australian good-looking cowboy Drover.
Lady Sarah is a Londoner's high class wife who travels to Australia where she thinks her husband is cheating on her. When she arrives at their cattle ranch, she finds that her husband has been killed. Nevertheless everybody thinks he was murdered by an aboriginal witch doctor, she soon realises that there is much more going on, and she decides to go ahead with her husband's project of driving their cows to the market. It's the act of firing her foreman due to his cruelty to natives, that she has to hire the rude and handsome Drover to help her to lead the cattle through the wilderness and to sell them off to the military.
In the meanwhile Sara falls in love with Drover, and develops a special bond with a part-aboriginal orphan boy, who she treats as he were her son. But the racial government policies disallow adopting mixed race children, and the authorities catch and carry him to a religious orphanage in order to give him an adequate education. Here begins the odyssey of Sara trying to get back her boy while the Japanese bomb Darvin and destroy the orphanage.
Despite the fact it is a marathon which lasts more than two and a half hours, the movie makes you pay attention all the time because of the plot, the action, the photography and the impressive beauty of the Australian landscapes. It shows, in a splendid manner, the horror of the war, the the cruelty of the English society to the aborigines, the inequality of social classes and the the hard life in remote terrains, in an elegant mixture of comedy, romance, drama, and action.
Hugh Jackman plays a mediocre part in the film, Nicole Kidman performs quite well, although I prefer her previous work with this director (Moulin Rouge), but it's Brandon Walters playing the mixed race boy, that really steals the show.
(353 words)