DVD reviews: Down under done over

Published on Friday 24 April 2009 14:49

Australia (Fox, £22.50)Dean Spanley (Icon, £17.60) Julia (Chelsea Films, £15.65)

BOMBING AT THE BOX-OFFICE – and deservedly so – Australia, Baz Luhrmann's much-hyped hubristic folly, doesn't get any better on a second viewing. Confirming that vacuity may be Luhrmann's default setting, it's a hideous pastiche of the romantic epics of yesteryear, made worse by its fatuous attempt to appropriate the plight of Aborigines as a plot device for a cornball love story that Luhrmann doesn't even have the guts to be sincere about. The result leaves you howling with derisory laughter at moments that are clearly supposed to make you either swoon or leave your eyes brimming with tears.

It's certainly not the new Gone With the Wind (despite marketing efforts). It's not even the new Titanic. No, if you're looking for a comparison, think Michael Bay's Pearl Harbour, with added cheese.

You have to feel sorry for Hugh Jackman here. He looks every inch the romantic hero, but whether his barrel-chested rancher – known only as the Drover – is brawling in bars, riding horses across the Outback, emerging in the moonlight in a white tux, or saving children in the midst of battle, Luhrmann's winking, arch approach to the material makes him a laughing stock. Still, at least you do feel something for him, which is more than can be said for his cold-fish co-star, Nicole Kidman, whose oddly inanimate features make it impossible to buy into the fact that her initially prim and proper character is falling for the Drover. Having directed her in Moulin Rouge! and that overblown Chanel ad, Lurhmann clearly sees Kidman as his muse, but the failure of Australia will hopefully alert him – and the rest of Hollywood – to the illusory nature of her star appeal.

Not that Australia's failures are all hers. Luhrmann's wackier instincts jar with his serious attempts to tell his home continent's story, particularly his efforts to acknowledge the terrible racism inextricably bound up in Australia's colonial history. In the end, his repeated and groaning references to The Wizard of Oz (Oz/Australia – clever, huh?) succeed only in pulling the curtain back on Luhrmann as a peddler of expensive cinematic tricks rather than genuine movie magic.

There's more cinematic folly – albeit on a smaller scale – in Dean Spanley, a stilted slice of whimsy about the dean of a London church (Sam Neill) who has a habit of recounting his previous life as a dog after imbibing a rare dessert wine. Neill, along with Jeremy Northam, Peter O'Toole and Bryan Brown, lend proceedings a perfunctory whiff of class, but this is a film a little too in love with the kookiness of its premise to worry about whether anyone else will care about the story, which, like most alcohol-fuelled after-dinner anecdotes, rambles on for far too long with little discernible point.

And speaking of booze-related rambles, also out this week is Julia, a homage to John Cassavetes' Gloria, in which Tilda Swinton plays an alcoholic LA woman who becomes involved in a disastrous kidnapping plot that forces her to go on the run to Mexico with a frightened child in tow. Though Swinton plays one of those impossibly glamorous addicts you only encounter in the movies, she does enough to make this indulgent and often histrionic film seem credible, particularly as her screw-up of a character faces up to the real danger in which her actions have placed this young boy.