They just don’t make movies like Australia anymore. And we are all the better for it. Confusing schmaltz for genuine emotion and aesthetics for legitimate art, Australia is what you get when the film projector overheats and the only thing that comes out is pure corn syrup.

Australia is set against the scenic backdrop of pre-World War II Down Under. Nicole Kidman plays Lady Sarah Ashley, an English aristocrat who inherits a sprawling cattle ranch after her entrepreneurial husband is killed. Not knowing the first thing about how to run the massive enterprise, she makes a pact with a rough-and-tumble cattleman (Hugh Jackman) to protect her new property from a takeover by greedy cattle barons (including David Wenham who, if he had a long enough mustache, would certainly spend the film twirling it).

Lady Ashley’s beefcake drover’s (an Aussie term for cattle-driver) expertise is especially helpful when she must drive 2,000 head of cattle across hundreds of miles of the unforgiving Australian outback. It isn’t long before the new widow finds her heart stirred by the hired help.

While acclimating to her new, feral home, Lady Ashley comes face to face with the Australian government’s barbaric practice of kidnapping aboriginal children for the purpose of “breeding the black out of them.” She looks on one such child, Nullah (Brandon Walters), as her own son. (The film is more of a love story between a mother and a child than a man and a woman.) But dodging the law turns to dodging bombs when Japanese forces, which just a few months earlier launched a devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, raze the city of Darwin.

Australia was one of my most anticipated films of the year. I find director Baz Luhrmann’s movies to be phantasmagoric masterpieces. Strictly Ballroom was a cheeky delight, Romeo + Juliet a frenetic roller coaster, and the Oscar-nominated Moulin Rouge a hyperkinetic orgasm of sound and color. But Luhrmann’s lack of cinematic restraint, the very thing that makes his films so powerful and memorable, is also the very thing that sinks his latest work.

Australia is a melodramatic soap opera, a sweeping, old-fashioned, unabashedly romantic, anachronistic throwback to yesteryear with in-your-face modern, liberal sensibilities. Luhrmann’s camera soars over the breathtaking countryside like an IMAX spectacular, and composes stunning dreamlike sequences. Every single image is crafted to make Jackman look heroic and Kidman angelic. But it’s all too pretty. Interested in controlling every aspect of his sugary aesthetic, Luhrmann shoots each frame in a glowing soft light and paints over reality, enhancing something that’s already beautiful — be they people or landscapes — with CGI.

All this might be forgiven if his corny, formulaic story was remotely compelling or believable. Luhrmann does not populate his film with characters, but rather broad, wildly overacting, cartoon stereotypes. And he leads with so much comedy in the beginning that we cannot possibly take him seriously later on. He spends so much of the film with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek that when he goes to get it out, he discovers it is stuck there.

Billed as another Gone with the Wind, Australia is instead a gaudy, overlong mess. Patterned after outdated cinematic conventions, it’s far too campy to be taken seriously and tacks on righteous indignation about racism that rings false and is somehow meant to distract you from Luhrmann’s over-indulgent hubris.

© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.