seriousfic

God, this was a weird one. It’s like a blend of high-spirited callback to Hollywood’s Golden Age (although Nicole Kidman’s swing-for-the-bleachers broad acting overshoots the Golden Age and lands squarely in silent film histrionics) and weepy Oscarbait melodrama. In addition to that, it’s like it’s a movie and then its own sequel.

Like, there’s the movie you see in the trailer about Lady Sarah Ashley (played by Nicole Kidman as a prim, proper English madame… guess where that goes…) and the Drover (played by Wolverine… no, I don’t think he has a name. It’s like Mulder; everyone just calls him Drover, even his lover. Like, Fox, you’ve been inside her, I think you’re entitled to call her by her Christian name) making this cattle drive across Australia but before you know it, they’re done. I think the movie spends more time setting up the cattle drive then actually watching it. So halfway through, the leads have gotten together, the day’s been saved, the villain’s been humiliated…

But the movie just. Keeps. Going!

Which can work. Into The Woods had a first half that led to a standard fairy tale happy ending and then went beyond it to deconstruct the genre, but nothing like that happens here. Suddenly the bad guy dusts himself off and nakedly turns into Richard Roxburgh from Moulin Rouge! (the last movie the director did) and the boy and the girl have relationship problems and I know I’m making this sound a little interesting, but you just keep checking your watch and wondering what this has to do with the first half of the movie. They introduce all these new problems and conflicts that were never there in the beginning, so I’m not sure if the movie started too late or too early or ended too late or what.

But the real problem is that I’ve never seen a movie so obnoxiously overblown in its staging. Every scene has something that turns it from heartfelt and sincere to sub-Capra narm, with maudlin music and scenery-chewing acting. I think the blame lies in the decision to cross-breed a light-hearted adventure movie with a huge subplot about racism. Like, some movies would stop at making the Drover a colorblind friend of the disadvantaged who gets into barfights over how non-racist he is, but they just run with it and then it’ll go from “they can’t be serious” staging (the barfight, filled with lights which land just so across a character’s face) to people making mini-speeches against oppression (poor Hugh Jackman gets the brunt in a scene where he insists on his black friend being allowed to drink in a white-only bar, a single perfect tear rolling down his cheek…).

But the worst part has got to be the narration. You may think you know how annoying child actors are, but believe me, you don’t know from annoying until they’re telling the story. The convention is that if a child character is narrating a story, the lines will be read by an adult to imply that the child has grown up and is looking back on his life. Not here. No, we get the kid telling us what we’ve just seen or are about to see in the most unbearable “what you mean ‘we’, white man?” pidgin English imaginable. Is that supposed to be cute?

And speaking of the villain, in the second half/sequel, he starts doing this sneer. I defy anyone to hear his sneer and not immediately think “nnnn, He-Man!” Seriously, He-Man movie folks, call that guy’s agent!