求电影《澳大利亚》的英语影评

求电影《澳大利亚》的英语影评
求电影《澳大利亚》的英语影评

求电影《澳大利亚》的英语影评
Australia
Production year:2008
Country:Rest of the world
Cert (UK):12A
Runtime:165 mins
Directors:Baz Luhrmann
Cast:Ben Mendelsohn,Bill Hunter,Bryan Brown,David Gulpilil,David Wenham,Hugh Jackman,Nicole Kidman
The ambitious,not to say hubristic,title Australia brings to mind the blockbuster novels of James A Michener that took a place (Hawaii,Poland,Texas) and gave us its history from the Stone Age to the present,incorporating in the later stages a romantic tale of the struggles of three or four generations.Baz Luhrmann does something vaguely like this by having a 12-year-old Aboriginal boy steeped in the lore of his people narrate the story,though the setting is confined to the Northern Territory and the time frame a mere three years from the outbreak of war in 1939 to the Japanese air raids on Darwin in 1942.But a condensed TV mini-series is nearer the mark.
Australia is populated by faces made familiar by Australian films of the past 40-odd years - Ray Barrett,Jack Thompson,Bryan Brown,Bill Hunter,Tony Barry,David Gulpilil among them - and in a superficial way it revisits the heroic period of Australian cinema in the 1970s and 80s.That was when Peter Weir,Fred Schepisi,Bruce Beresford and others were exploring - in movies like Picnic at Hanging Rock,The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Gallipoli - such pressing issues as the relationship of white Australians to this mysterious new land,guilt over the treatment of dispossessed natives,the burden of cultural inferiority and the shaping of a national identity.The next wave of film-makers turned away from these big subjects,focusing on comedies and small-scale dramas of suburban life.
Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom was a major example of this new antiheroic cinema and his next two movies - a Romeo and Juliet set in Latin America and the musical extravaganza of fin-de-si猫cle Paris,Moulin Rouge - took him into worlds of artifice far removed from everyday life.But Australia isn't really taking up the themes that once made Australian cinema so vital.It's imposing Hollywood styles and forms on the Australian experience and it falls into two distinct parts,the first a western,the second a war movie.
Australian film historian Brian McFarlane coined the term "wallaby western" to describe Outback adventures inspired by the Hollywood horse operas that have been a regular feature of cinema Down Under since the silent days.In Luhrmann's film,Nicole Kidman plays Lady Sarah Ashley,a parodic British aristocrat who flies in September 1939 to Australia,where her errant husband runs a cattle station in the Northern Territory.Meeting her in Darwin to escort her to the farm is "the Drover" (Hugh Jackman),a tough,independent wrangler.
They correspond exactly to the haughty East Coast sophisticate arriving on the American frontier with her fancy city ways and the plainspoken cowboy at home on the range,so often played by Maureen O'Hara and John Wayne.Initially hostile to each other,the pair develop a mutual respect and romance inevitably follows.This occurs when Lady Ashley's husband is found dead (murdered by thugs employed by a rival cattle baron) and to save the station's fortunes,she and the Drover must take a herd hundreds of miles to be shipped out of Darwin.
Two major Wayne westerns are here brought together - Red River and The Cowboys - and in an exciting,melodramatic manner the cattle drive takes place over awesome terrain to music that echoes familiar scores by Dmitri Tiomkin and Elmer Bernstein.A subplot centres on Lady Ashley's protective relationship to the narrator Nullah (affectingly played by Brandon Walters),a half-Aboriginal boy.She attempts to save him from being sent by law to a mission school and raised as a d茅racin茅 white child.This parallels the half-Indians torn between conflicting cultures in the western.
The war movie genre forms the second half of Australia.The escalation of hostilities following Pearl Harbor coincides with the deep-dyed villain conspiring to have Nullah taken into custody.As European children are sent south from Darwin for safety,Nullah and other half-Aboriginal orphans are dispatched to a mission island near Darwin that puts them directly in harm's way.
Fortunately,Lady Ashley,having separated,脿 la Scarlett and Rhett,from the Drover,has left her equivalent of Tara to do her bit for the war effort in Darwin.While they rush around trying to save Nullah,one mini-climax follows another as the Japanese air force attacks the city and their army lands on the orphans' island.At this point,Luhrmann evokes From Here to Eternity,Pearl Harbor,Gone With the Wind (the burning of Atlanta and its aftermath) and wartime anti-Japanese action movies.
It is all absurd,and yet absurdly entertaining,the stylised special effects adding to the weirdly unreal feeling.But you don't go to Baz Luhrmann expecting to find Patrick White,any more than you buy a ticket for South Pacific expecting to experience The Naked and the Dead.Meanwhile,the numinous presence of the Aboriginal shaman,Nullah's grandfather King George (David Gulpilil),and the movie of The Wizard of Oz hover over the picture.Lady Ashley cheers up Nullah on the cattle drive by telling him the story of Dorothy's quest and singing a half-remembered version of Over the Rainbow; later,Nullah sees the movie at an open-air cinema.As Baum's Oz meets Baz's Oz,"dream time" merges into the Hollywood cliche of "living your dream".
The movie ends with Nimrod from Elgar's Enigma Variations accompanying Nullah on walkabout with King George.The world is at war,but Europe and Australia,city and country,past and future are at peace as the Drover and Lady Ashley embrace in their outback paradise.When they marry,will she be called Lady Drover?