Movie Review: Australia

A friend agreed to see the new Baz Lurhmann epic, Australia, with me even though she’d seen it once already. “Is it a good movie? No. Is it enjoyable? Yes,” she said. I considered her point. What makes bad movies enjoyable? What makes a movie good or bad, and which kind have I enjoyed most?

I thought back to lunchroom conversations about favorite movies. There are two ways you can go in these situations. The first strategy is to choose a well-crafted, respectable “good” film. If you choose this option, then you’re opening yourself up to the judgment of the group. Are you sitting with film noir aficionados or Tarantino fans or Scorsese snobs? Are you with a bunch of men who have annual Godfather fests? When I take the serious tack, I either go with The Wizard of Oz (it’s old enough and groundbreaking enough for its time that people usually excuse the sad truth that I’m just kind of obsessed with Dorothy’s breathy innocence) or His Girl Friday (people respect its age and its Gilmoreish banter. Plus, it lets me show off the Women Gender Studies Film Theory Fusion class I took in college, and then I seem smart). This is option one; I usually take it when I’m with people whom I assume underestimate me because of the fabulously cut top I’m wearing.

Your second option is to choose a movie that says, “My worldliness and education and wit about film give me license to go lowbrow even though we both know I can’t possible be serious because we’re both such brilliant film buffs that we ought to know better, but isn’t being childish fun on occasion?” This is kind of like a philosophy professor using a poop joke to illustrate utilitarianism. We both know better, so we wink at each other. An imaginary wink; we don’t want any of them to see.

When I choose a movie like this, I have to either smirk self-deprecatingly or describe it with grotesque enthusiasm. Legally Blonde, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Pippi Longstocking (the charmingly hideous Swedish dubbed 1969 version), The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (a made-for-TV movie starring Diane Lane as the young wife of Donald Sutherland’s sweetly deranged Confederate veteran), The Wedding Planner (I went through an inexplicable phase in high school when I watched this one every day after school while doing my French homework), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (my friends and I never tire of saying, “It’s meeeeeeeeeee”)…

The dirty secret of this category of movies that are “so bad, they’re good” is that everyone, even the most pedestrian, shimmerless personality, can play. We all know that Pippi isn’t going to win any awards, so we can all feel comfortable in our superiority over it. The even dirtier secret is that these are the films that I own on dvd and watch when I feel homesick for them. Something about their brightness and wit stays with me and needs to be relived every few years. I quote them to my best friends, and we giggle and feel safe. I don’t know of any “good” movies that do this. It’s always the movies of ill repute, the prostitute movies, confined to the chick flick ghetto. (Sorry, the Women Gender Studies Film Fusion had to come out somewhere.)

So, where does Australia fit in? Was it good? No. The opening of the film, as Nullah, an Aboriginal/White boy, narrates Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman)'s transition from England to Australia, shows some of Luhrmann’s signature cartoonish spark. Her outfits are fabulous, and her Britishness is comically over-the-top (she actually says “poppycock”). The interplay between Lady Ashley and Drover (Hugh Jackman) could be sprightly, but it quickly devolves into “look how girly the girl is” and “wow, isn’t he a typical man?” They first meet in a pub brawl, him whacking his opponent with her suitcases while she squeals and tries to collect her dusty undergarments. Then, on the way to her Outback ranch, she gushes over a leaping kangaroo, while he snickers when it’s suddenly shot before her eyes, mid-coo. I have to say that I was as horrified as Lady Ashley by this shot.

Such silliness is charming in other Luhrmann films. It’s appropriate for the burlesque theater folk of Moulin Rouge and even works as a modern day equivalent of Shakespeare’s bawdy humor in Romeo + Juliet. In Romeo+Juliet, the silliness twists into beauty when Mercutio curses Romeo on the beach with his dying breath, a storm rolling quickly in. The transition is flawless, and I don’t know any teenage girl who didn’t cry when she listened to “I’m Kissing You” on her Discman. But Australia never makes it close to the soul of its audience. We’re supposed to take the love story seriously, but there’s not enough meat to it. OK, I know they’re in love, but I don’t really believe that they are -- not even when the lovers, seemingly separated forever, see each other through gun smoke and mist.

OK, so it’s not good. It is so bad, it’s good? Well, no. The villain, a captain of the beef industry, practically cackles from his tower as he surveys his corporate kingdom, but the film doesn’t give us enough room to really bask in his evilness. There’s too much seriousish stuff distracting us. There’s the racist oppression of Nullah, his mother, and other Aboriginal people, there’s alcoholism, and there’s Lady Ashley’s spunky resistance against a monopolized Outback beef industry. There’s pretty scenery that could be breathtaking with the right camera work. And then, there’s WWII. Despite a reminder in the opening credits that Australia got hit worse than Pearl Harbor, the war, when it arrives, feels like a convenient cap to a story that plays like a Disney Channel movie where the heroine (maybe an Olsen Twin) isn’t going to let the bad guy get away with being a bad guy.

Is Australia a good movie? No. Is it so bad, it’s good? No. Is it enjoyable? Well… kind of. I left the theater inspired to incorporate ties, vests, and tweed into my work wardrobe. I was charmed by Nullah’s fragility; there’s something about a 10-year-old’s shoulder blades that tugs at the old heartstrings. His phrasing was sweet when he told Lady Ashley that he would “sing her to him,” even if his accent when he sang did make it sound like he was singing “mango, mango” instead of whatever whimsical word it was supposed to be. I’ve never been to Australia, and it looks like a beautiful place. As always, it’s a pleasure to watch Hugh Jackman for 2 hours. He’s cute. All in all, if someone invites me to see it again, I think I’d rather go to Brooks Brothers and buy some ties.

The Knotty Pine

The entrance to The Knotty Pine evades. You must search for it, having found the other bar in town to be closed. The Knotty Pine is nobody’s first choice. It’s an orange sign pasted onto another sign on a peeling wall on the side of a weary building. Beaten down Harleys wait outside for their masters. As you approach the threshold, you hang back and let the rest of the group go in first. Ahead, you hear a smoker’s voice merrily counting the women as they enter. One, two, three, four! Look at that, boys! On a Tuesday night!

You glance back across the road at the strip of woods leading back to the camp, wondering whether to risk a walk back alone. You decide not. As it turns out, your fear of the dark is stronger than your offended sensibility. You go in and creep to the end of the bar, by the mirror that somebody hung to expand the room. You hunch your shoulders and crouch down into the mess of students around you. Invisible, you talk to a square blonde girl while keeping track of the grizzled men at the far end of the bar. You order a water.

Exploding Sheep

Sheep explode at the drop of a hat. I know. I was skeptical too, but it’s very true. Last week, I rode a bus through the Scottish highlands with a bunch of Presbyterians from Ohio.

As you approach the Scottish border from England, the sheep grow more densely by the side of the road. They're like jellyfish -- brainless instinct plants them as close as possible to people. They slosh up to the motorway side of the field and stare droolingly at passers-by. Except that their eyes don't really focus on any particular thing. So they kind of stand vaguely facing the motorway, drooling on their own hooves and the shirts that their mothers laundered only this morning. It must be frustrating to be a sheep mother. At the moment when the sheep-to-fence ratio reaches saturation, our guide plays a rousing bagpipe version of "Pride of Scotland" on a boom box. He holds it up while the Ohio Presbyterians sing along.

In the highlands proper, we pay extra to be invited to visit real live sheep farm. We have been promised puppy cuddles! a chance to pet lambs! Babe the Gallant Pig!! Instead, we are treated to a view of the sinister side of sheep-kind.

The shepherd is a flannel-shirt-wearing-thirty-year-old-Scot-with-incomprehensible-accent. In America, he'd probably be a West Virginia redneck, but puppies and accents make everything more attractive. I can't understand his introduction of himself, so I decide to call him Angus. Scowling, Angus waves for the Presbyterians to gather around. Each dog has its own whistle, he tells us in a tone he would use with a kindergarten class. Not only that, but each dog has a different whistle for each sheep-herding move. You can tell who the dense ones are when Angus's whistle elicits no response. He whistles again. "Oh, for Christ sake." Growling, Angus runs toward the sheep and starts herding them himself, glaring at a slack-off dog who is determinedly not meeting his eye. I watch Angus nudge a stubborn Ewe while his dog daydreams about a day at the beach. I wonder whether it’s the dog who is dense.

Next, Angus teaches us how to sheer sheep. He disappears into a pen and emerges dragging a bundle of sewagey wool with a face. The giant clump of used Charmin walks on matchstick legs in a slanting drunkwalk as she tries to avoid the dogs. Angus flips the sheep onto her back and wrings her spine as far as it will twist. Her gut hangs, her legs splayed. You see where people get Scottish shepherd jokes. Her face looks like a separate Lego piece that’s been popped onto a too-big body by a maniacal seven-year-old. Angus explains, if you pick up a sheep around the neck and wrestle it into such a position, an exploding stomach is just a hiccough away. The Presbyterians watch him adjust his grip, all horrified concern for the sheep’s stomach.

Now, we will feed the lambs, which means I’ll get to live out my childhood dream of being Heidi and living in the Alps and having a crippled friend who gets a new lease on life and learning how to milk Swanly and Bearly. (They were goats, but who’s counting?)

Angus holds a baby bottle aloft, and speaks very slowly. “Now, you’ve got to be very careful when you feed a lamb. Once the lamb’s got through the milk, you’d better pull out the bottle. If the lamb sucks air, the air’ll wait in the stomach until later. Then, it’ll explode out and take the stomach with it. Lost 4 lambs after the last tour.” He watches us like a driver’s ed instructor who has just shown the prom night crash dummy death video. “Who’s first?” The Presbyterians glance at each other. Nobody wants an exploded lamb on her conscience, but nobody can resist a baby animal either.

Each of us cautiously takes a bottle, and Angus unleashes a mass of lambs. They’re just as sewagey as the shearing sheep was. But where she had an indolent drooling expression, each of their eyes has a homicidal gleam. They chest slam our knees and stab our feet with their hooves. One tries to eat my camera.

An old lady named Ruth is so taken aback that she doesn’t seem to hear Angus screaming at her, “THAT LAMB’S SUCKING AIR!!” The rest of us throw our bottles as far as we can and dive at Ruth. “The lamb! The lamb!” we shriek, intent on saving the murderous living dread lock. Someone snatches the bottle from Ruth, who responds by patting her hair back into place and floating calmly away from Angus.

We buy all of the souvenirs that Angus sells and then hold our breath as we re-board the bus. As we pull out onto the motorway, I watch the farm recede through the back window. At the edge of the lamb pen, amid the carnage of baby bottles, while Angus attends to scolding a lazy dog, an almost imperceptible explosion sends a flotsam of mud and wool flying into the air.

Lace Caps

I like to think of myself as a social person. 73% of the time, I refrain from telling stupid people that they're stupid or pointing out acne on the faces of stringy teenage boys. It's rare that I scowl at babies or snicker at the sweating man with a mullet whose hip is gradually laying claim to what is clearly my part of the bench on the subway.

In the car, I sometimes admire my own magnanimity while I watch Cambridge people walk by. I try to follow Atticus Finch's advice an put myself in their places. I step into their shoes to walk around in them. I imagine waking up in the morning and deciding that it would be a twinkling, sparkling stroke of brilliance to garb myself in purple burlap hammerpants for which I have paid $365 at an obscure boutique in the South of Italy where I summer. If I dress in drab enough fabrics of obscure enough origin and droopy enough drape, I might be able to conceal the fact that I grew up in a suburb of Toledo. I imagine taking the bus from Belmont to Harvard Square at 11:30 on a Wednesday morning. When the office secretary flipped my forged note onto her stack with pursed lips, and I realized with surprise that I had gotten away with it. What glory! To flip through records in the clammy basement of In Your Ear at 11:30 instead of at 3:45 while an aging, balding Clash fan glares at me from behind his counter. The light is cleaner now, and the secrets of the adult world are open to me. I wear girls' cigarette black jeans and a fedora that I wear ironically. I think.

I decide to share my depth of insight with my husband. "Don't you just love people?" I muse, leaning back and watching an embittered nanny trying to fold a blonde whining mess into a Bugaboo stroller. Smiling, my husband reminds me that I don't in fact like people. "Remember last night at the movies when you said 'I hate people?'" Yes, but that was because the 8-year-old behind me insisted on using my seat as a foot-drum while her mother chronically cleared her throat and then kept uncrossing and re-crossing her legs. Hardly a fair example.

"OK. What about that woman in your section?"

What woman? Oh yes. When Fred Buechner came to speak to our literature class about landscape and spiritual thin places, he agreed to take ten minutes of questions. Most of us sat stunned when he'd finished speaking. We were still riding on the rhythm of his language. Except for Sandy, who was always seeing immediate connections to her own life. She raised her hand. "Mr. Buechner, you talked about placed where you can see through the veil into the divine. From my work in New Orleans last year after Katrina, what do you think about when the veil is not just thinned and drawn aside, but it's actually torn?"

"I'm sorry. I don't understand," Buechner scanned the crowd for another raised hand.

"What about when the veil is not only drawn aside but torn?" Sandy persisted.

"I just don't know what you mean."

Undeterred, she sat and told the young man sitting beside her a story about her son's new baby who apparently shows signs of being quite talented.

I turn back to my husband. "I know what you mean. I try to think of her as a character out of Jane Austen. Think of the wonderful characters whom you'd hate if you met them walking around at the mall. I'm going to put a lace cap on Sandy."

"Hm. Good luck. We'll see how long that lasts. What about that guy?" He points to a 55-year-old man pulling his brand new Sebring convertible into our parking spot. The man backs out and re-aligns until it's perfect. He gets out, careful not to slam the door too hard.

"Definitely a lace cap candidate." Aren't we all sometimes?