Baz Luhrmann is the Romantic counterpart to Quentin Tarantino. Both are cinematic kleptomaniacs. They create art via homage, arranging their favorite bits of pop culture and Hollywood history into something resembling a post-modern narrative. And I often love them for this. Artists whose sole purpose is to create something ex nihilo can be tedious. Tarantino and Luhrmann are anything but.
I enjoyed Luhmann’s Australia, which I saw with my wife on her birthday last week. I did, however, notice one other similarity to Tarantino: both men have recently given up on ironical pastiche and turned to straight homage — Tarantino for his childhood grindhouse cinema, Luhrmann for his native country.
For Luhrmann, I think this presents a few problems. First, his strength has always been more in the spectacular, spectacular than in sheer beauty. Australia works best when Luhrmann’s camera has a mind of its own (and, I might add, when it is not dependent on surprisingly-obvious CGI). The best sequences of Luhrmann’s previous work were jarring, quirky, unpredictable, and comic (think: the bohemian Sound of Music bit in Moulin Rouge and the cross-dressing Mercutio scene in Romeo + Juliet). But Australia the continent is wide open, impressive, forbidding, almost purgatorial. And, honestly, Luhrmann can’t shoot grandeur. I can think of only one scene during the cattle drive in which the camera sits still long enough to capture the amazing red-rocked beauty of the place. I’m not asking Luhrmann to be David Lean, nor do I need him to be as thoughtful about Australian topography as is Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. But if, as he has said, Luhrmann was trying to make Gone With the Wind: Down-Under, he needed some more patience. Australia was paced like an action movie (never dull, but never thoughtful).
Second, I don’t think Luhrmann understands character arc. Romeo + Juliet, of course, didn’t require much original narrative input. And as much as I love Moulin Rouge, the characters are fairly two dimensional. Christian is a naive Romantic at the beginning, and a world-weary Romantic at the end. Satine is the proverbial hooker with the heart of gold. The villains are less than human. And, really, that’s all fine. You don’t need sophisticated character arcs when you have The Elephant Love Song Medley. Luhrmann is a magician: he moves things around so quick you fail to notice how simple the trick actually is. And you love him for it. Australia doesn’t provide the same cover. It’s long. Its plot is laid out with painstaking clarity, despite the syntactical-obscurity of its young narrator. The narrative arc actually repeats itself three times:
- The cattle drive: Lady Ashley is refined, Drover is untamed, they fight, they kiss by the boab tree, Nullah hears the call of the wild, Fletcher tries to harm Nullah, Wild Magic Man saves the day and defeats Fletcher. Lady Ashley becomes a cow-girl, Drover shaves.
- The home front: Lady Ashley is back to wanting domesticity, Drover regrows his beard, they fight, Drover remembers the kiss by the boab tree, Nullah hears the call of the wild, Fletcher threatens to harm Nullah then ships him off, Wild Magic Man escapes from prison, Fletcher’s wife is taken from him and he feels defeated.
- After the attack: Lady Ashley forgets about wanting domesticity when she sees Drover’s handsome physique again, Drover apparently decides he wants to settle down, Fletcher threatens Nullah, Wild Magic Man saves the day and defeats Fletcher, the family of three stops at the boab tree, Nullah hears the call of the wild, he and the naked Wild Magic Man walk into the sunset to the tune of Elgar’s Nimrod Variation.
There just isn’t any creativity to the narrative. Luhrmann has too much that he wants to say — about racism, about the war, about the Australian spirit, about cattle-ranch politics. And he can’t make it fit, so he plots three different stories sequentially so he can.
So in summary, I’m going to hazard this claim: epics are the royalty of cinema, and therefore shouldn’t be derivative; they should be the makers of fashion. This of course spells trouble for Mr. Luhrmann. His every plot element is (consciously, I assume) stolen from previous epics. This tactic works great when you’re making a movie like Moulin Rouge, but fails when you’re making a new Gone With the Wind. Drover is Rhett Butler crossed with John Wayne. Lady Ashley is, well, an amalgamation of every one of John Ford’s female protagonists. Nullah is Spike Lee’s famous super-duper magic negro. Even the soundtrack steals copiously — from Bach and Elgar and Harold Arlen (David Denby notes the irony of using Elgar’s Nimrod for the closing scene). To create an epic, you need to create a new mold.
And to be Romantic, for better or worse, you must have a certain sobriety and patience. To feel deeply is not enough. A teenager can feel deeply, can feel romantic. But most teenagers lack the perspective to be Romantic. So, in the end, I’d like to correct my very first sentence: Baz is romantic, but can’t sit still long enough to be Romantic.
